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People who shaped AI. Public professional records only.
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- Alan TuringAlan Turing (1912–1954) was a British mathematician whose 1936 paper defined computation with an abstract machine. His 1950 paper proposed the imitation game, now called the Turing test, and he is counted among the founders of artificial intelligence.
- Allen NewellAmerican computer scientist and psychologist who, with Herbert A. Simon and J. C. Shaw, built the first list-processing language and the earliest heuristic problem-solving programs, treating thought as computation.
- Andrew Chi-Chih YaoAndrew Chi-Chih Yao is a computer scientist born in Shanghai who won the 2000 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, and later founded Tsinghua University's Yao Class and IIIS.
- Barret ZophAI researcher who was first author of the 2016 paper introducing neural architecture search and a co-author of Switch Transformers; his X profile lists him as CTO and co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab and VP Research at Google DeepMind.
- Bowen ZhouAI researcher and research administrator who worked at IBM's Watson Group and at JD.com, and has been director and chief scientist of the Shanghai AI Laboratory since April 2024.
- Cao XudongCao Xudong, a former Microsoft researcher, founded Momenta, a physical AI company, in 2016 and leads it as chief executive; he took it public in Hong Kong in 2026 and now points it toward robots.
- Cheng YixiaoCheng Yixiao is a Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded Kuaishou, served as its chief product officer, and has been its chief executive officer since 2021 and chairman since 2023.
- David SilverBritish computer scientist born in 1976 who specialises in reinforcement learning. He led DeepMind's AlphaGo project, co-authored the 2013 deep Q-network paper and later founded Ineffable Intelligence.
- Dowson TongSenior executive at Tencent: Senior Executive Vice President and head of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group since October 2018, previously president of the Social Network Group responsible for QQ, and chairman of Tencent Music Entertainment Group.
- Eddie WuEddie Wu is a co-founder of Alibaba Group who has been its chief executive officer and a director since September 2023, after more than two decades in technical and business roles across Alipay, Alimama and Taobao.
- Harry ShumHarry Shum is a computer scientist who spent most of his career at Microsoft, helping found Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing and later leading the company's AI and Research group. He is an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow recognised for computer vision and graphics.
- Herbert A. SimonHerbert A. Simon (1916–2001) was a political scientist, psychologist and computer scientist who, with Allen Newell and J. C. Shaw, built the first successful AI program and later received the Nobel Prize in Economics.
- Jakub PachockiJakub Pachocki is OpenAI's chief scientist. He joined the company in 2017, led work on GPT-4 and OpenAI Five, and helped refocus its research on scaling deep learning systems.
- Jason WeiJason Wei is an AI researcher and first author of papers on chain-of-thought prompting and emergent abilities in large language models; he has worked at Google Brain, OpenAI and Meta Superintelligence Labs.
- Jiang DaxinJiang Daxin is founder and CEO of the Chinese AI company StepFun and a former Microsoft global vice president. He argues that scaling laws set the ceiling on model intelligence and that unifying multimodal understanding and generation is the path to AGI.
- Jingren ZhouJingren Zhou is a computer scientist at Alibaba, where he is chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, leads the Tongyi AI lab and joined the Alibaba Partnership in 2025; he was named a 2024 ACM Fellow.
- John McCarthyJohn McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist. His 1955 proposal is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence”, he organised the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, and he created the LISP programming language.
- John SchulmanAmerican AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI, led its reinforcement-learning team and helped develop the training methods behind ChatGPT; he later moved to Anthropic and then became chief scientist of Thinking Machines Lab.
- Joseph TsaiJoseph Tsai is co-founder and chairman of Alibaba Group. A lawyer by training, he has served on the company's board since its founding in 1999 and has previously held the roles of chief financial officer and head of strategic investments.
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is a computer scientist and statistician who invented Bayesian networks and their main inference algorithms, and later built a mathematical framework for causal inference from data. He received the 2011 ACM Turing Award.