Foundation models People

Dario Amodei is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. He previously worked at OpenAI, where he was Vice President of Research and co-authored the GPT-2 paper and led the research for GPT-3.

Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. He ran the startup Loopt, was president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019, and was removed as OpenAI’s CEO in 2023 before returning days later.

American computer scientist known for Google's core infrastructure — MapReduce, Bigtable and Spanner — and for leading work on Google Brain, TensorFlow and, from 2023, the role of Google's chief scientist.

Mustafa Suleyman is a British AI entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI, and in 2024 became chief executive of Microsoft AI, leading its Copilot and in-house model work.

Greg Brockman is a co-founder of OpenAI. He led early projects such as OpenAI Gym and OpenAI Five, later became president, and took over the product organisation in April 2026.

Jakub 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.

Jared Kaplan is a physicist turned AI researcher who co-founded Anthropic and serves as its Chief Science Officer. He was first author of the 2020 paper “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.”

Alec Radford is a machine learning researcher who worked at OpenAI from 2016 to 2024. He was first author of the GPT-2, CLIP and Whisper papers, and lead author of the 2018 paper that introduced the GPT approach.

Koray Kavukcuoglu is a DeepMind computer scientist who co-authored the first deep Q-network paper and later, as Google DeepMind's CTO and Google's chief AI architect, fronted successive Gemini model launches.

Jason 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.

Stanford computer science professor who directs the Center for Research on Foundation Models and works on making language models more open and more rigorously benchmarked.

American entrepreneur born in 1997 who co-founded Scale AI, a data-labelling and model-evaluation company, and became Meta's chief AI officer and leader of Meta Superintelligence Labs in 2025.

Wu Yonghui is an AI researcher who spent nearly two decades at Google, worked on Google Brain and became a vice president of research at Google DeepMind, before joining ByteDance's Seed large-model team in 2025.

AI 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.

Ori Goshen is an Israeli entrepreneur who co-founded AI21 Labs in November 2017 with Yoav Shoham and Amnon Shashua and serves as its chief executive.

Jiang 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.

Wang Haifeng is Baidu's chief technology officer, an ACL and IEEE Fellow, and the first-listed author of the ERNIE technical reports behind the company's foundation models.

Tom Brown is an AI researcher listed among the co-founders of Anthropic and the first author of the 2020 paper that introduced GPT-3, one of the most widely cited demonstrations of few-shot learning in large language models.

Kevin Scott is Microsoft's chief technology officer, appointed on 24 January 2017 after engineering leadership roles at LinkedIn, Google and AdMob. In March 2024 Microsoft said he continued as CTO and EVP of AI, responsible for all-up AI strategy.

Daniel Gross co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy and served as its chief executive until early July 2025, when he moved to Meta's newly launched Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Mark Chen is an OpenAI researcher who led the team behind DALL·E 2 and worked on Codex; in March 2025 he moved into an expanded Chief Research Officer role.

Zhiyuan Liu is a tenured associate professor at Tsinghua University and co-founder and chief scientist of Beijing ModelBest, a company working to run capable large models on local devices.