That internship was life-changing for me, and I'll always be grateful to him for taking a wild bet on a literally a kid.
Doug was a brilliant computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. Though I was very junior at Cycorp, it was a small company so I sat in many meetings with him. It was obvious that he understood every detail of how the technology worked, and was extremely smart.
Cycorp was 30 years ahead of its time and never actually worked. For those who don't know, it was essentially the first OpenAI - the first large-scale commercial effort to create general artificial intelligence.
I learned a lot from Doug about how to be incredibly ambitious, and how to not give up. Doug worked on Cycorp for multiple decades. It never really took off, but he managed to keep funding it and keep hiring great people so he could keep plugging away at the problem. I know very few people who have stuck with an idea for so long.
Also - what exactly did you do in the internship as a 17 year old - what skills did you have?