Here we feature prominent researchers, leaders, and innovators in the field of artificial intelligence. We also have a special section for Women in AI.
John McCarthy
John McCarthy was a pioneering computer scientist who coined the term artificial intelligence and created LISP, shaping the foundations of modern AI research.
Jakub Pachocki
Jakub Pachocki is a key voice in today’s AI landscape, shaping breakthroughs in deep learning and steering research that influences how modern AI systems are built.
Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman is an AI researcher and podcaster known for thoughtful conversations on science, technology, and the human side of artificial intelligence.
Yannic Kilcher
A sharp voice in the AI world, Yannic Kilcher is known for breaking down complex research and sparking debate across the machine learning community.
Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom is a leading philosopher of AI and existential risk, exploring how advanced intelligence may influence humanity’s long term future.
Diederik Kingma
Diederik Kingma is a pioneer in generative AI, known for co creating the VAE and shaping core techniques that underpin today’s most advanced models.
Pamela Vagata
A leader in scalable deep learning systems, known for driving breakthroughs in training efficiency and shaping the future of modern AI.
Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy is a pioneer in deep learning, known for making complex neural network ideas accessible and shaping the modern AI ecosystem.
Vicki Cheung
Vicki Cheung is known for her work in distributed computing and AI systems engineering, driving reliable large scale training while advocating for inclusive and ethical tech.
Trevor Blackwell
Trevor Blackwell is a roboticist and entrepreneur whose engineering work helped shape modern startups and the early foundations of OpenAI.
John Schulman
A leading researcher behind PPO and key advances in reinforcement learning, known for shaping modern AI training methods and driving progress at OpenAI.
Wojciech Zaremba
Wojciech Zaremba is a cofounder of OpenAI known for breakthroughs in reinforcement learning and robotics that push machine intelligence forward.
Alex Krizhevsky
A key force behind the deep learning boom, best known for co creating AlexNet and demonstrating the power of neural networks at scale.
Geoffrey Hinton
Pioneering figure in neural networks and deep learning, whose research transformed modern AI and inspired a new generation of scientists.
Tim Salimans
A leading researcher known for pushing generative models forward, with influential work on GANs, evaluation metrics, and high fidelity synthesis across images, text, and audio.
Sam Altman
A central figure in modern AI, known for driving rapid progress while pushing for responsible development and global access to powerful models.
Douglas Lenat
Douglas Lenat spent his life pursuing machines that could reason about the world through rich symbolic knowledge. His Cyc project became one of the most ambitious efforts to encode common sense into AI, influencing decades of research.
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking reshaped modern cosmology with his insights into black holes, quantum physics, and the origins of the universe, leaving a legacy of curiosity and wonder.
We welcome suggestions to prioritize additions to this collection of great people.
We use the following prompt to create the basic outline for the profiles listed here (we use ChatGPT Atlas, supplemented with Perplexity information in recent news): Write a post about this person with an introduction paragraph, followed by details about this person, followed by a bullet list of key achievements. Do not include links in the copy. Insert a 1-sentence TL;DR at the beginning.
This is the current Sora prompt we use to create the profile images: Create a well-lit, well-composed color portrait photo of this person wearing a dark blue suit with a black cinema curtain background.
We also use NotebookLM for experimental infographics with the following prompt: Use #111111 as the background color, white as the main color, and #4d87ff as the accent color.