Large language models People

Canadian computer scientist whose work on sequence models, word embeddings and attention helped lay foundations for modern language models. He shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

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.

Israeli-Canadian computer scientist born in 1986 who co-built AlexNet, co-founded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist, and later founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Taiwan-born computer scientist and executive who built research labs at Microsoft and Google in China, co-founded Sinovation Ventures, wrote widely read books on AI, and founded the foundation-model company 01.AI.

Satya Nadella is the chief executive of Microsoft, who has led the company since 2014 and pushed it toward cloud computing and AI partnerships, including the 2019 deal with OpenAI.

Robin Li (李彦宏) is a Chinese technologist and businessman who co-founded Baidu in 2000 and has been its chief executive since 2004. He is best known for the company's search business and its ERNIE AI models.

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who led SpaceX and Tesla, co-founded PayPal's predecessors and OpenAI, and founded xAI, the company behind the Grok models.

Czech computer scientist and lead author of word2vec, the 2013 methods that learn word vectors from text. His later work includes the fastText library and research on mathematical models that grow in complexity.

Mark Zuckerberg is the chairman and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook. He recruited the founding researchers of Facebook AI Research in 2013 and announced Meta Superintelligence Labs in 2025.

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.

Liang Wenfeng is a Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and founded the AI company DeepSeek in 2023. He is the corresponding author of the DeepSeek-R1 paper published in Nature in 2025.

AI researcher and educator, born in Bratislava and raised partly in Toronto, who co-founded OpenAI, led AI at Tesla, taught Stanford's CS231n course, and later joined Anthropic's pre-training team.

Daniela Amodei is an American entrepreneur and co-founder of Anthropic, where she serves as President and leads teams focused on AI safety and alignment. She previously worked at Stripe and OpenAI.

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.

American 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.

Albanian-American engineer who served as OpenAI's chief technology officer, briefly as its interim CEO in November 2023, and later founded and leads Thinking Machines Lab.

Arthur Mensch is a French AI researcher who worked at DeepMind before co-founding Mistral AI in 2023, where he serves as chief executive. He is a co-author of the Chinchilla scaling paper and the Mistral 7B paper.

Aidan Gomez is a Canadian computer scientist, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, and one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.

Fidji Simo is a technology executive who led Instacart and became OpenAI's chief executive of Applications in 2025; in July 2026 she stepped down for health reasons and moved into a part-time advisory role.

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.

Christopher Manning is a Stanford professor of linguistics and computer science, former SAIL director, and former ACL president, recognized with fellowships and academy memberships.

Noam Brown is an AI researcher at OpenAI, listed on his homepage as working on reasoning, reinforcement learning, self-play and multi-agent AI. He is known for the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and for work on CICERO and reasoning models such as OpenAI o1.

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.

Noam Shazeer is an AI researcher who co-wrote the Transformer paper and was first author of the paper on sparsely gated mixture-of-experts layers. He co-founded Character.AI, returned to Google in 2024, and announced a move to OpenAI in 2026.

Ashish Vaswani is a computer scientist best known as the first-listed author of “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. He also co-founded the AI companies Adept and Essential AI.

Jan Leike is an AI alignment researcher who joined Anthropic in May 2024 after leaving OpenAI, where he had co-led the superalignment project with Ilya Sutskever.

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.

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.”

Yoav Shoham is an Israeli-American computer scientist, professor emeritus at Stanford and co-founder and chairman of AI21 Labs. He initiated the AI Index and has worked on AI, game theory and multi-agent systems.

Liu Qingfeng is the president and chairman of iFlytek, the company he founded in 1999 while a Ph.D. student at USTC. He unveiled the Spark large model in May 2023.

Chinese computer scientist and entrepreneur who built Sogou Search and the Sogou input method, led Sogou as CEO through its New York listing, and later founded the AI company Baichuan.

Spanish computer scientist (born 1983) who co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning, led DeepMind's AlphaStar research group, and became a technical lead on Gemini before leaving to start Discovery Loop.

Canadian machine-learning researcher who was one of Geoffrey Hinton's earliest hires at Google Brain's Toronto office, co-founded the natural language processing company Cohere in Toronto in 2019, and is lead vocalist of the indie rock band Good Kid.

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.

Timothée Lacroix is a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Mistral AI, and a co-author of the LLaMA paper and the Mistral 7B paper.

Guillaume Lample is a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Mistral AI. He was the last of 14 authors on the LLaMA paper and co-authored the Mistral 7B paper.

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.

Lilian Weng is an AI researcher whose main public writing is her blog Lil'Log, which has carried her learning notes since 2017. Chinese-language coverage describes her as a Peking University alumna and reports on her years at OpenAI and her later moves.

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.

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.

Jingren 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.

Yan Junjie is a co-founder and chief executive officer of the Chinese AI company MiniMax, which he led to a Hong Kong listing on 9 January 2026; he was previously an executive at SenseTime.

Chinese AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded Moonshot AI in Beijing in 2023 and runs it as CEO; the company released the Kimi assistant and the open-weight Kimi K2 and K3 models.

Sam McCandlish is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Anthropic, a co-author of influential work on scaling laws and GPT-3, and the company's first Responsible Scaling Officer.

AI 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.

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.

Mike Krieger, co-founder and CTO of Instagram, joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer on 15 May 2024, taking charge of product engineering, product management and product design.

Brad Lightcap is an OpenAI executive who served as chief financial officer and then chief operating officer, later overseeing business strategy, partnerships, infrastructure and global deployment before leaving the company in 2026.

AI researcher and entrepreneur who held research positions at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind before co-founding the AI search company Perplexity in 2022, where he serves as CEO.

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.

Zhang Peng is chief executive officer of Zhipu AI (Z.ai). He led the company through its Hong Kong listing on 8 January 2026, described as the first by a major Chinese LLM company, and through the GLM-4.5 to GLM-5.3 model releases.

Tang Jie is a Chinese computer scientist listed as a founder of Zhipu AI and its chief scientist, and a Tsinghua professor who created the AMiner academic database and co-authored the GLM pretraining work behind Zhipu's models.

Jacob Devlin is a research scientist and first author of BERT, a language model Google introduced in 2018 that reads text in both directions. He earlier worked on neural machine translation at Microsoft Research.

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.

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.

Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, where he has led policy and later public-benefit work and, from March 2026, the Anthropic Institute. He is also a co-author of the GPT-3 paper.

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.

Connor Leahy is a German-American AI researcher and AI-safety advocate. He co-founded EleutherAI in 2020, co-founded the AI-safety company Conjecture, and in 2026 became US Director of the advocacy group ControlAI.

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.