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AI industry humans42 people

The people shaping the field

Lab leaders, researchers, and the figures controlling compute and capital. Roles and affiliations move quickly; this is a snapshot, not a census.

Data compiled as of July 2026. Corrections by pull request are welcome.

42

Lab leadership14

  • Sam Altman

    CEO · OpenAI

    Steered OpenAI from research lab to the most valuable private company; filed confidentially in June 2026 for an IPO he wants valued above $1T.

  • Greg Brockman

    Co-founder & President · OpenAI

    Runs OpenAI’s engineering and infrastructure buildout; took over product leadership in mid-2026 after Fidji Simo stepped back.

  • Dario Amodei

    Co-founder & CEO · Anthropic

    Left OpenAI in 2021 to found Anthropic around safety-focused scaling; author of “Machines of Loving Grace.”

  • Daniela Amodei

    Co-founder & President · Anthropic

    Runs Anthropic’s operations, policy, and commercial organization.

  • Demis Hassabis

    CEO · Google DeepMind

    Founded DeepMind in 2010; 2024 chemistry Nobel laureate for AlphaFold; in July 2026 proposed a US-led body to test frontier models.

  • Ilya Sutskever

    Co-founder & CEO · Safe Superintelligence

    OpenAI’s former chief scientist; took a $5B NVIDIA investment in July 2026 to scale SSI’s still product-free superintelligence research.

  • Mira Murati

    Founder & CEO · Thinking Machines Lab

    Former OpenAI CTO; after a record ~$2B seed round, shipped the lab’s first open-weight models and Tinker fine-tuning platform.

  • Elon Musk

    Founder · SpaceX (xAI) / Tesla

    OpenAI co-founder turned litigant; folded xAI into SpaceX in 2026 as the ~555,000-GPU Colossus 2 cluster came online.

  • Liang Wenfeng

    Founder · DeepSeek

    Hedge-fund founder (High-Flyer) whose lab’s V3, R1, and 2026’s V4 reset assumptions about training costs.

  • Yang Zhilin

    Co-founder & CEO · Moonshot AI

    CMU-trained researcher whose open-weight Kimi models — K3 in July 2026 — repeatedly set the frontier for open releases.

  • Zhang Peng

    CEO · Z.ai (Zhipu AI)

    Leads the Tsinghua-born GLM lab that became the world’s first listed LLM company with its January 2026 Hong Kong IPO.

  • Arthur Mensch

    Co-founder & CEO · Mistral AI

    Former DeepMind researcher leading Europe’s flagship AI lab, in 2026 raising at a roughly €20B valuation.

  • Mustafa Suleyman

    CEO, Microsoft AI · Microsoft

    DeepMind co-founder; now leads Microsoft’s in-house MAI models and its superintelligence team after the OpenAI pact was loosened.

  • Aravind Srinivas

    Co-founder & CEO · Perplexity

    Former OpenAI researcher whose answer engine became the leading AI-native challenger to Google search.

Research13

  • Geoffrey Hinton

    Professor emeritus · University of Toronto

    “Godfather of deep learning”; left Google in 2023 to warn about AI risk; 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics.

  • Yoshua Bengio

    Professor; founder, LawZero · Mila

    Turing Award winner now focused on AI safety; chaired the International AI Safety Report.

  • Yann LeCun

    Co-founder · AMI Labs

    Turing Award winner and LLM skeptic; left Meta in late 2025 and raised $1.03B in March 2026 to build JEPA world models.

  • Andrej Karpathy

    Research lead · Anthropic

    OpenAI founding member and former Tesla AI lead; joined Anthropic in May 2026 to lead a pre-training team, pausing Eureka Labs.

  • Jakub Pachocki

    Chief Scientist · OpenAI

    Succeeded Sutskever in 2024; directs the research agenda behind OpenAI’s reasoning models.

  • Mark Chen

    Chief Research Officer · OpenAI

    Shares OpenAI’s research leadership with Pachocki; longtime head of its frontier-model teams.

  • Noam Shazeer

    Researcher · OpenAI

    Transformer co-author; quit as Gemini co-lead for OpenAI in June 2026, two years after Google’s ~$2.7B Character.AI deal brought him back.

  • Jeff Dean

    Chief Scientist · Google

    Built Google’s foundational systems (MapReduce, TensorFlow); co-leads the Gemini models with Oriol Vinyals.

  • Jared Kaplan

    Co-founder & Chief Science Officer · Anthropic

    Physicist who formalized neural scaling laws — the empirical basis of the scaling era.

  • John Schulman

    Chief Scientist · Thinking Machines Lab

    Invented PPO, the workhorse algorithm of RLHF; co-created ChatGPT at OpenAI.

  • Chris Olah

    Co-founder · Anthropic

    Pioneer of mechanistic interpretability — reverse-engineering what happens inside neural networks.

  • Shengjia Zhao

    Chief Scientist · Meta Superintelligence Labs

    GPT-4 and o1 co-creator recruited from OpenAI in 2025 to set the scientific agenda of Meta’s superintelligence effort.

  • Fei-Fei Li

    Co-founder & CEO, World Labs; Professor · Stanford

    Created ImageNet, the dataset that launched the deep-learning era; World Labs shipped its Marble world-model product in 2026.

Safety & governance6

  • Jan Leike

    Alignment lead · Anthropic

    Left OpenAI in 2024 warning that “safety culture has taken a backseat”; leads alignment science research at Anthropic.

  • Jack Clark

    Co-founder & Head of Public Benefit · Anthropic

    Led Anthropic policy from its founding until 2026, when he launched the Anthropic Institute think tank; writes Import AI.

  • Dan Hendrycks

    Executive Director · Center for AI Safety

    Organized the 2023 extinction-risk statement; CAIS added a national-security-focused Frontier Security Institute in 2026.

  • Paul Christiano

    Head of AI Safety · US Center for AI Standards and Innovation

    Invented RLHF at OpenAI and founded the Alignment Research Center; now runs frontier-model safety testing inside NIST.

  • Michael Kratsios

    Director · White House OSTP

    Architect of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan and its light-touch, buildout-first regulatory posture.

  • David Sacks

    Co-chair, PCAST · White House

    The first White House AI and crypto czar; stepped down in early 2026 to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Compute & capital9

  • Jensen Huang

    Founder & CEO · NVIDIA

    Bet the company on accelerated computing two decades early; NVIDIA became the world’s most valuable company on AI demand.

  • Lisa Su

    Chair & CEO · AMD

    Rebuilt AMD into the credible second source for AI accelerators with the Instinct MI series.

  • Satya Nadella

    Chairman & CEO · Microsoft

    The decisive early OpenAI investment; repositioned Microsoft around Copilot and Azure AI.

  • Sundar Pichai

    CEO · Alphabet

    Merged Brain and DeepMind and drove the Gemini counteroffensive after ChatGPT.

  • Mark Zuckerberg

    Founder & CEO · Meta

    Bankrolled the open-weight Llama line, then pivoted to a closed superintelligence lab with nine-figure hiring offers.

  • Alexandr Wang

    Chief AI Officer · Meta

    Scale AI founder recruited to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs in the 2025 talent wars; shipped its first frontier model in 2026.

  • Masayoshi Son

    Chairman & CEO · SoftBank

    The largest single financier of the buildout — OpenAI’s mega-rounds and the Stargate datacenter venture, which he chairs.

  • Larry Ellison

    Chairman & CTO · Oracle

    Oracle’s $300B compute contract with OpenAI anchors the Stargate buildout, from Abilene onward.

  • Jonathan Ross

    Chief Software Architect · NVIDIA

    Created Google’s original TPU and founded Groq; joined NVIDIA after it licensed Groq’s inference technology in a ~$20B deal.