Artificial intelligence is a set of arguments carried by people — the ones who named it, the ones who make it, the ones who teach it, and the ones who ask whether we should. Each page collects their books, channels, accounts, every role they have held, and who taught whom.

58 Founders & executivesWho runs the labs and ships the models

Sam Altmanb. 1985🇺🇸United StatesCEO of OpenAI; the public face of the commercial frontier.Dario Amodeib. 1983🇺🇸United StatesCEO of Anthropic; wrote the scaling-laws work that shaped the era.DADaniela Amodei🇺🇸United StatesPresident of Anthropic; built the company's operating side.Demis Hassabisb. 1976🇬🇧United KingdomCEO of Google DeepMind; Nobel laureate for AlphaFold.Elon Muskb. 1971🇺🇸United StatesFounder of xAI; co-founded and then left OpenAI.Jensen Huangb. 1963🇺🇸United StatesCEO of NVIDIA; supplies the compute the whole field runs on.Ilya Sutskeverb. 1986🇺🇸United StatesCo-founder of Safe Superintelligence; formerly chief scientist at OpenAI.Mira Muratib. 1988🇺🇸United StatesFounder of Thinking Machines Lab; former CTO of OpenAI.Greg Brockmanb. 1987🇺🇸United StatesPresident and co-founder of OpenAI.Mustafa Suleymanb. 1984🇺🇸United StatesCEO of Microsoft AI; co-founded DeepMind and Inflection.1 bookArthur Menschb. 1992🇫🇷FranceCEO of Mistral AI; Europe's open-weight champion.CDClément Delangue🇫🇷FranceCEO of Hugging Face; built the field's commons.ASAravind Srinivas🇺🇸United StatesCEO of Perplexity; pushed AI search into the mainstream.LWLiang Wenfengb. 1985🇨🇳ChinaFounder of DeepSeek; made frontier-class open weights cheap.Alexandr Wangb. 1997🇺🇸United StatesFounded Scale AI; built the data layer behind most frontier training.Emad Mostaqueb. 1983🇺🇸United StatesFounded Stability AI; put image generation in everyone's hands.Sundar Pichaib. 1972🇺🇸United StatesCEO of Alphabet; steers Google's AI-first pivot.Satya Nadellab. 1967🇺🇸United StatesCEO of Microsoft; made the OpenAI bet that reshaped the industry.1 bookYZYang Zhilinb. 1992🇨🇳China杨植麟Founder of Moonshot AI, the lab behind Kimi.Robin Lib. 1968🇨🇳China李彦宏Co-founder and CEO of Baidu; built China's first search engine and its Ernie models.EWEddie Wub. 1975🇨🇳China吴泳铭CEO of Alibaba; refounded the company around AI and cloud.WJWang Jianb. 1962🇨🇳China王坚Founded Alibaba Cloud; built the infrastructure the Qwen models run on.Jack Mab. 1964🇨🇳China马云Founded Alibaba, and backed the cloud bet that made its AI possible.Zhang Yimingb. 1983🇨🇳China张一鸣Founded ByteDance; recommendation at a scale nobody had attempted.LRLiang Rubob. 1983🇨🇳China梁汝波CEO of ByteDance; runs Doubao and the Seed lab.Pony Mab. 1971🇨🇳China马化腾Co-founder and CEO of Tencent; ships the Hunyuan models.ZPZhang Peng🇨🇳China张鹏CEO of Zhipu AI, the lab behind GLM.WXWang Xiaochuanb. 1978🇨🇳China王小川Founded Baichuan AI after fifteen years running Sogou.YJYan Junjieb. 1987🇨🇳China闫俊杰Founded MiniMax; built China's strongest multimodal and video stack.JDJiang Daxin🇨🇳China姜大昕Founded StepFun after two decades at Microsoft Research.XLXu Lib. 1982🇨🇳China徐立CEO of SenseTime.YQYin Qib. 1988🇨🇳China印奇Founded Megvii out of Tsinghua's Yao Class.Lu Qib. 1961🇨🇳China陆奇Ran engineering at Yahoo, Microsoft and Baidu; now funds Chinese founders.KYKai Yub. 1976🇨🇳China余凯Founded Baidu's deep learning lab, then Horizon Robotics.Ren Zhengfeib. 1944🇨🇳China任正非Founded Huawei; Ascend is China's answer to being cut off from NVIDIA.CTChen Tianshib. 1985🇨🇳China陈天石Founded Cambricon; China's first dedicated AI chip company.Lei Junb. 1969🇨🇳China雷军Founded Xiaomi; now building its own foundation models.WXWang Xingxingb. 1990🇨🇳China王兴兴Founded Unitree; made legged robots cheap.VRVivek Raghavan🇮🇳IndiaCo-founded Sarvam AI; previously chief architect of Aadhaar.PKPratyush Kumar🇮🇳IndiaCo-founded Sarvam AI and AI4Bharat.BABhavish Aggarwalb. 1985🇮🇳IndiaFounded Krutrim, India's first billion-dollar AI startup.Arvind Krishnab. 1962🇺🇸United StatesCEO of IBM; bet the company on enterprise AI and Granite.Masayoshi Sonb. 1957🇯🇵JapanFounded SoftBank; the single largest financial bet on AI.SKSung Kim🇰🇷South KoreaFounded Upstage; Solar put a Korean model on the global leaderboards.MSMati Staniszewskib. 1993🇬🇧United KingdomCo-founded ElevenLabs; made synthetic voice indistinguishable.PDPiotr Dąbkowski🇬🇧United KingdomCo-founded ElevenLabs; its chief technologist.Aidan Gomezb. 1995🇨🇦CanadaCo-authored the Transformer at 20; now runs Cohere.NFNick Frosst🇨🇦CanadaHinton's first Toronto hire; co-founded Cohere.JAJonas Andrulis🇩🇪GermanyFounded Aleph Alpha; Europe's sovereign-AI argument in company form.VRVictor Riparbelli🇬🇧United KingdomFounded Synthesia; synthetic presenters at enterprise scale.Arkady Volozhb. 1964🇳🇱NetherlandsFounded Yandex, then rebuilt as Nebius — a European GPU cloud.Yoav Shohamb. 1956🇮🇱IsraelStanford professor turned founder; co-founded AI21 Labs.1 bookOGOri Goshen🇮🇱IsraelCo-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs.Amnon Shashuab. 1960🇮🇱IsraelFounded Mobileye; put computer vision in a hundred million cars.PXPeng Xiao🇦🇪United Arab EmiratesCEO of G42; Abu Dhabi's compute and model arm.PMPelonomi Moiloa🇿🇦South AfricaCEO of Lelapa AI; builds models for African languages first.Lisa Sub. 1969🇺🇸United StatesCEO of AMD; the only real competition NVIDIA has.Mark Zuckerbergb. 1984🇺🇸United StatesFounded Meta; chose to give the weights away.

41 Research leadersWho invented what everything else is built on

Yann LeCunb. 1960🇺🇸United StatesTuring laureate; convolutional networks; longtime Meta chief AI scientist.Geoffrey Hintonb. 1947🇨🇦CanadaThe godfather of deep learning; Turing and Nobel laureate.Yoshua Bengiob. 1964🇨🇦CanadaTuring laureate; the most cited computer scientist alive.1 bookAndrej Karpathyb. 1986🇺🇸United StatesTeaches the field to build from scratch; coined 'vibe coding'.Fei-Fei Lib. 1976🇺🇸United StatesCreated ImageNet; the benchmark that started the deep-learning era.1 bookJeff Deanb. 1968🇺🇸United StatesChief Scientist at Google; built the infrastructure era of computing.AVAshish Vaswani🇺🇸United StatesLead author of 'Attention Is All You Need'.NSNoam Shazeerb. 1976🇺🇸United StatesCo-author of the Transformer; co-founded Character.AI.Ian Goodfellowb. 1987🇺🇸United StatesInvented generative adversarial networks.1 bookPieter Abbeelb. 1977🇺🇸United StatesBerkeley robotics and RL; supervised a generation of the field.Chelsea Finnb. 1992🇺🇸United StatesMeta-learning and robot learning at Stanford.SLSergey Levine🇺🇸United StatesDeep reinforcement learning for robotics at Berkeley.TDTri Dao🇺🇸United StatesFlashAttention and Mamba; made long context practical.AGAlbert Gu🇺🇸United StatesState-space models; co-created Mamba.OVOriol Vinyalsb. 1982🇺🇸United StatesCo-lead of Gemini; led AlphaStar.Jared Kaplan🇺🇸United StatesChief Science Officer at Anthropic; theoretical physicist turned scaling-law author.JFJim Fan🇺🇸United StatesEmbodied AI at NVIDIA; a prolific explainer on X.WHWang Haifeng🇨🇳China王海峰CTO of Baidu; the architect behind Ernie.ZJZhou Jingren🇨🇳China周靖人CTO of Alibaba Cloud; leads the Qwen family.TJTang Jieb. 1977🇨🇳China唐杰Tsinghua professor and Zhipu's chief scientist; built GLM.Tang Xiao'ou1968–2023🇨🇳China汤晓鸥Founded SenseTime and trained most of Chinese computer vision.KHKaiming Heb. 1984🇺🇸United States何恺明Wrote ResNet — the most cited paper of the century.JSJian Sun1976–2022🇨🇳China孙剑Co-authored ResNet; chief scientist of Megvii.HSHarry Shumb. 1966🇨🇳China沈向洋Built Microsoft Research Asia, the training ground for Chinese AI.LFLuo Fulib. 1995🇨🇳China罗福莉Key contributor to DeepSeek's mixture-of-experts work.ZJZhu Jun🇨🇳China朱军Tsinghua professor behind Vidu, China's answer to Sora.LZLiu Zhiyuanb. 1984🇨🇳China刘知远Tsinghua NLP; built MiniCPM to run frontier-ish models on a phone.MKMitesh Khapra🇮🇳IndiaCo-founded AI4Bharat; built the Indian-language datasets everyone uses.DHDavid Ha🇯🇵JapanCo-founded Sakana AI; brought evolutionary thinking to model building.LJLlion Jones🇯🇵JapanCo-author of the Transformer; co-founded Sakana AI.YMYutaka Matsuob. 1975🇯🇵JapanUniversity of Tokyo; the public face of Japan's AI strategy.Kyunghyun Chob. 1984🇺🇸United StatesCo-invented the GRU and the attention mechanism that led to the Transformer.GLGuillaume Lampleb. 1989🇫🇷FranceLed Llama at Meta, then co-founded Mistral.TWThomas Wolf🇫🇷FranceCo-founded Hugging Face; wrote the Transformers library.RRRobin Rombach🇩🇪GermanyLead author of Stable Diffusion; co-founded Black Forest Labs.Eric Xing🇦🇪United Arab EmiratesPresident of MBZUAI; the Gulf's bet on home-grown research.SMShakir Mohamed🇿🇦South AfricaDeepMind researcher; co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba.VMVukosi Marivate🇿🇦South AfricaBuilt African-language NLP into a real research field.ÁSÁlvaro Soto🇨🇱ChileLeads Latam-GPT, a model built by and for Latin America.LTLeslie Teo🇸🇬SingaporeLeads SEA-LION, the open model built for South East Asian languages.HBHung Bui🇻🇳VietnamDirects VinAI; Vietnam's most serious research lab.

11 Educators & communicatorsWho taught the field to everyone else

Andrew Ngb. 1976🇺🇸United StatesTaught machine learning to millions; founded Google Brain and Coursera.Jeremy Howardb. 1973🇨🇦CanadaFounded fast.ai; made deep learning accessible top-down.1 bookLex Fridmanb. 1983🇺🇸United StatesLong-form interviews that put AI researchers in front of millions.Simon Willison🇺🇸United StatesThe most reliable running commentary on what LLMs can actually do.SWShawn Wang (swyx)🇺🇸United StatesLatent Space; chronicles the AI engineer as a discipline.NLNathan Lambert🇺🇸United StatesInterconnects; the clearest writing on post-training and open models.1 bookEMEthan Mollick🇺🇸United StatesOne Useful Thing; the bridge between AI and everyone who isn't technical.1 bookCHChip Huyen🇺🇸United StatesWrites the reference texts on shipping ML systems.2 booksSRSebastian Raschka🇺🇸United StatesBuild-an-LLM-from-scratch; meticulous technical teaching.2 booksYKYannic Kilcher🇨🇭SwitzerlandPaper explainers that made research legible on YouTube.KZKároly Zsolnai-Fehér🇭🇺HungaryTwo Minute Papers; 'What a time to be alive!'

22 PioneersWho built the foundations, often before the hardware existed

Alan Turing1912–1954🇬🇧United KingdomAsked whether machines can think, and defined how we'd know.1 bookJohn McCarthy1927–2011🇺🇸United StatesCoined 'artificial intelligence' and created Lisp.Marvin Minsky1927–2016🇺🇸United StatesCo-founded the MIT AI Lab; theorised the mind as a society of agents.3 booksClaude Shannon1916–2001🇺🇸United StatesFounded information theory; the bit is his.1 bookHerbert A. Simon1916–2001🇺🇸United StatesNobel laureate; co-built the first AI program.2 booksAllen Newell1927–1992🇺🇸United StatesCo-built Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver.Frank Rosenblatt1928–1971🇺🇸United StatesBuilt the perceptron — the first trainable neural network.1 bookASArthur Samuel1901–1990🇺🇸United StatesCoined 'machine learning'; built a checkers program that improved itself.Norbert Wiener1894–1964🇺🇸United StatesFounded cybernetics; warned about automation before anyone else.2 booksWMWarren McCulloch1898–1969🇺🇸United StatesCo-authored the first mathematical model of a neuron.Walter Pitts1923–1969🇺🇸United StatesSelf-taught logician; co-created the artificial neuron.Joseph Weizenbaum1923–2008🇺🇸United StatesWrote ELIZA, then spent his life warning about it.1 bookSeymour Papert1928–2016🇺🇸United StatesConstructionism and Logo; co-authored Perceptrons.2 booksDonald Michie1923–2007🇬🇧United KingdomBletchley codebreaker who founded British machine intelligence.Judea Pearlb. 1936🇺🇸United StatesBayesian networks and the formal language of causality.2 booksDavid Rumelhart1942–2011🇺🇸United StatesCo-authored the backpropagation paper that made deep learning possible.1 bookJürgen Schmidhuberb. 1963🇩🇪GermanyCo-invented LSTM; insists the field keeps rediscovering his lab's work.Sepp Hochreiterb. 1967🇩🇪GermanyIdentified the vanishing gradient problem and co-invented LSTM.KFKunihiko Fukushimab. 1936🇯🇵JapanBuilt the Neocognitron — the convolutional network before convolutional networks.Richard Suttonb. 1957🇺🇸United StatesFather of reinforcement learning; wrote The Bitter Lesson.1 bookABAndrew Bartob. 1948🇺🇸United StatesCo-founded reinforcement learning; Sutton's doctoral advisor.1 bookAndrew Chi-Chih Yaob. 1946🇨🇳China姚期智Turing laureate; founded the Yao Class that trained China's AI generation.

8 Safety, policy & criticsWho asks whether we should

Stuart Russellb. 1962🇺🇸United StatesWrote the standard AI textbook, then the standard warning.2 booksPCPaul Christiano🇺🇸United StatesInvented RLHF — the technique that made models usable.JLJan Leike🇺🇸United StatesAlignment lead; left OpenAI publicly over safety priorities.Timnit Gebrub. 1983🇺🇸United StatesFounded DAIR; her firing from Google became a turning point.Margaret Mitchell🇺🇸United StatesModel Cards; chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face.Gary Marcusb. 1970🇺🇸United StatesThe field's most persistent sceptic of scaling.2 booksEmily M. Benderb. 1973🇺🇸United StatesCo-authored Stochastic Parrots; coined the framing of LLMs as pattern-matchers.1 bookOmar Sultan Al Olamab. 1990🇦🇪United Arab EmiratesThe world's first government minister for artificial intelligence.

21 Public intellectuals & authorsWho shapes how the world understands AI

Yuval Noah Hararib. 1976🇮🇱IsraelHistorian whose books frame AI for heads of state.4 booksMax Tegmarkb. 1967🇸🇪SwedenPhysicist; founded the Future of Life Institute and drove the pause letter.2 booksNick Bostromb. 1973🇬🇧United KingdomSuperintelligence put existential risk on the agenda.2 booksRay Kurzweilb. 1948🇺🇸United StatesInventor and futurist; the singularity's chief proponent.3 booksDouglas Hofstadterb. 1945🇺🇸United StatesGödel, Escher, Bach drew a generation into the question of mind.3 booksMelanie Mitchellb. 1969🇺🇸United StatesThe clearest-eyed writer on what AI does and doesn't understand.2 booksDaron Acemoglub. 1967🇺🇸United StatesNobel economist arguing technology's gains are a political choice.2 booksErik Brynjolfssonb. 1962🇺🇸United StatesMeasures what AI actually does to work and productivity.2 booksKai-Fu Leeb. 1961🇨🇳ChinaExplained China's AI ascent to the West, and built inside it.2 booksShoshana Zuboffb. 1951🇺🇸United StatesNamed surveillance capitalism and gave the critique its vocabulary.2 booksEric Schmidtb. 1955🇺🇸United StatesFormer Google CEO, now shaping AI and national-security policy.2 booksKate Crawford🇺🇸United StatesAtlas of AI traced the material cost of intelligence.1 bookCathy O'Neilb. 1972🇺🇸United StatesWeapons of Math Destruction made algorithmic harm legible.2 booksBrian Christianb. 1984🇺🇸United StatesThe Alignment Problem is the best popular account of the field's hardest question.3 booksJaron Lanierb. 1960🇺🇸United StatesVR pioneer turned humanist critic of the platforms.2 booksMeredith Whittakerb. 1979🇺🇸United StatesPresident of Signal; led the Google walkout.Toby Ordb. 1979🇬🇧United KingdomThe Precipice made existential risk a serious academic subject.1 bookReid Hoffmanb. 1967🇺🇸United StatesLinkedIn founder; investor and evangelist for AI as amplifier.3 booksDaniel Kahneman1934–2024🇺🇸United StatesSystem 1 and System 2 underpin half the alignment literature.2 booksHenry Kissinger1923–2023🇺🇸United StatesSpent his final years arguing AI would reorder geopolitics.2 booksNandan Nilekanib. 1955🇮🇳IndiaBuilt India's digital public infrastructure; now argues AI should be built the same way.3 books

5 Journalists & chroniclersWho reported it as it happened

Karen Hao🇺🇸United StatesEmpire of AI; the definitive reported account of OpenAI.1 bookCMCade Metz🇺🇸United StatesGenius Makers told the story of the deep-learning revolution.1 bookPOParmy Olson🇬🇧United KingdomSupremacy won the FT Business Book of the Year.2 booksKevin Rooseb. 1987🇺🇸United StatesNYT columnist; his Sydney transcript became a cultural moment.1 bookCasey Newton🇺🇸United StatesPlatformer; the sharpest daily read on AI and platform power.

6 The fiction that shaped itWho imagined it first

Isaac Asimov1920–1992🇺🇸United StatesWrote the Three Laws — still the reference point for machine ethics.3 booksArthur C. Clarke1917–2008🇬🇧United KingdomHAL 9000 remains the template for the machine that turns.2 booksVernor Vinge1944–2024🇺🇸United StatesCoined the technological singularity.2 booksTed Chiangb. 1967🇺🇸United States'ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web' — the essay everyone quotes.2 booksStanisław Lem1921–2006🇵🇱PolandWrote about machine minds decades before the hardware existed.3 booksNeal Stephensonb. 1959🇺🇸United StatesCoined 'metaverse'; The Diamond Age imagined the AI tutor.2 books

Portraits come from Wikimedia Commons and remain the property of their photographers, credited on each page. Where no freely licensed portrait exists, a monogram is shown rather than a guess. Historical facts — dates, degrees, published books — are stable; current roles are the part most likely to drift, and are dated where known.