Important people in the AI world

Runs the company behind ChatGPT, and the most recognisable face of the AI boom.

Left OpenAI to start Anthropic, makers of Claude. Wrote the optimistic essay Machines of Loving Grace.

Co-founded Anthropic with her brother and runs the business side.

Chess prodigy turned Nobel laureate for AlphaFold. Leads Google’s Gemini effort.

Grok, the Colossus supercomputers and now Starmind orbital datacentres, since SpaceX absorbed xAI.

Champion of open-weight Llama models; spending enormous sums on a superintelligence lab.

DeepMind co-founder now building Microsoft’s own frontier models and Copilot.

OpenAI’s former chief scientist and co-creator of the deep-learning revolution, now building “safe superintelligence” in near-total secrecy.

Former OpenAI CTO who raised a record-breaking seed round for her own lab.

Hedge-fund founder whose cheap, open DeepSeek models rattled Silicon Valley and markets in 2025.

Europe’s best-known AI founder, building open models out of Paris.

Turing Award winner who left Meta to bet on “world models” instead of LLMs.

Co-founder and famously relentless builder; now also runs OpenAI’s product business.

Leads OpenAI’s research direction, including its reasoning models.

Runs OpenAI’s research organisation day to day.

Physicist behind the “scaling laws” that showed bigger models predictably get better.

Leads policy at Anthropic and writes the influential Import AI newsletter.

Pioneer of interpretability: working out what’s actually going on inside neural networks.

Left OpenAI saying safety had taken a back seat, and now leads alignment work at Anthropic.

Instagram co-founder, now building experimental products at Anthropic.

Scaling reinforcement learning, and one of the clearest explainers of where frontier AI is heading.

OpenAI co-founder and a key architect of ChatGPT’s training.

Co-author of the 2017 Transformer paper that started all of this.

Legendary engineer behind much of Google’s infrastructure and AI.

Scale AI founder hired in a $14bn deal to lead Meta’s superintelligence push.

Former GitHub CEO and prolific AI investor, now building at Meta.

Investor and SSI co-founder who joined Meta’s AI push.

Pseudonymous OpenAI employee whose posts on X are required reading for the AI-obsessed.

His GPUs power almost every AI model; Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company.

Turned AMD around and is Nvidia’s main rival in AI chips.

Bet early on OpenAI; Copilot and Azure put AI into every office.

Oversees Gemini, DeepMind and the TPUs that train them.

Co-financier of the giant Stargate datacentre project.

Oracle’s cloud became a major home for AI training through Stargate.

Venture capitalist and loud voice for building fast (“techno-optimism”).

Early OpenAI backer; Palantir brings AI to governments and defence.

Building AI-powered defence systems, after founding Oculus.

Runs the home of open-source AI (and the target of a notorious agent break-in).

Built the AI answer engine taking on Google search.

Making it possible for anyone to build apps by chatting with an AI.

Building humanoid robots driven by AI models.

China’s search giant and its ERNIE models.

Veteran AI investor and author of AI Superpowers on the US–China race.

Shapes US AI policy, broadly pro-building and anti-regulation.

Nobel laureate who left Google to warn about the risks of the technology he helped create.

Turing Award winner turned leading voice on AI safety.

Created ImageNet, the dataset that kick-started modern computer vision.

Has taught more people machine learning than anyone alive.

Ex-OpenAI and Tesla AI lead, brilliant teacher, and coiner of “vibe coding”.

His 2014 book Superintelligence put AI risk on the map.

The original AI doomer: thinks building superintelligence ends badly by default.

Co-wrote the AI textbook and Human Compatible, on keeping AI under control.

Physicist behind the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI training runs.

Former OpenAI alignment lead who helped invent RLHF.

Ex-OpenAI researcher whose essay on the race to AGI became a manifesto (and a fund).

AI’s most persistent sceptic; argues LLMs alone won’t get us there.

Writes One Useful Thing, the best practical guide to AI at work.

Writes on how AI will (and won’t) change the economy at Marginal Revolution.

Long, deeply prepared interviews with the people building AI.

Hours-long conversations with nearly everyone on this list.