Reasoning People

Alan 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.

John 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.

Herbert 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.

American 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.

Judea 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.

British 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.