The AGI Times 100

#002

Demis Hassabis

CEO of Google DeepMind; Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024, AlphaFold lineage)

DeepMind leadership

#003

Yann LeCun

Chief AI Scientist at Meta; Turing Award laureate

Convolutional networks lineage

#004

Yoshua Bengio

Deep learning pioneer; Turing Award; Mila scientific director

Montreal deep learning school

#005

Sam Altman

CEO of OpenAI; central public figure of the generative AI boom

ChatGPT-era distribution

#006

Dario Amodei

CEO and co-founder of Anthropic; constitutional AI research leader

Anthropic founding

#007

Ilya Sutskever

Co-founder of Safe Superintelligence; former OpenAI chief scientist

AlexNet co-author

#008

Jensen Huang

CEO of NVIDIA; architect of the GPU-as-AI-compute era

CUDA ecosystem

▣ Hardware & compute

#009

Fei-Fei Li

Human-centered AI researcher; ImageNet leader; Stanford professor

ImageNet

#010

Andrew Ng

AI educator and entrepreneur; Coursera co-founder; Landing AI

Machine Learning course at global scale

#011

Satya Nadella

CEO of Microsoft; enterprise AI distribution via OpenAI partnership & Copilot

Microsoft AI platform strategy

#012

Elon Musk

xAI founder; public AI critic and builder; Tesla Autopilot / Optimus AI narratives

xAI / Grok public brand

#013

John Jumper

AlphaFold lead; Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024)

AlphaFold structure prediction

#014

Andrej Karpathy

AI educator and engineer; formerly Tesla AI / OpenAI

Neural networks from scratch teaching

#015

Mira Murati

Founder of Thinking Machines Lab; former OpenAI CTO

OpenAI CTO era product leadership

#016

Greg Brockman

President / co-founder of OpenAI; infrastructure-to-product bridge

OpenAI co-founder

#017

Daniela Amodei

President of Anthropic; co-founder

Anthropic co-founder/president

#018

Shane Legg

Co-founder of DeepMind; AGI research leadership

DeepMind co-founder

#019

Oriol Vinyals

DeepMind research leader; sequence models & AlphaStar lineage

Seq2seq era contributions

#020

Noam Brown

OpenAI researcher; multi-agent / reasoning systems (o-series public narrative)

Poker AI (Libratus/Pluribus) lineage

#021

David Silver

Reinforcement learning leader; AlphaGo principal research scientist era

AlphaGo / AlphaZero lineage

#022

Raia Hadsell

Robotics and autonomous systems research leader at Google DeepMind

Robot learning research

#023

Mark Zuckerberg

CEO of Meta; open-weight Llama strategy sponsor

Llama open-weight strategy

#024

Sundar Pichai

CEO of Google and Alphabet; Gemini / DeepMind integration steward

Google AI product distribution

#025

Jürgen Schmidhuber

LSTM co-inventor; long-horizon AI vision researcher

LSTM lineage

#026

Judea Pearl

Causal inference pioneer; Turing Award

Do-calculus

#027

Stuart Russell

AI textbook co-author; beneficial AI advocate

AIMA textbook

#028

Percy Liang

Stanford NLP / foundation model evaluation leader; CRFM

Center for Research on Foundation Models

#029

Chelsea Finn

Robot learning / meta-learning researcher

Model-agnostic meta-learning lineage

#030

Pieter Abbeel

Robot learning pioneer; Covariant co-founder

Deep RL for robotics

#031

Christopher Manning

NLP leader; Stanford NLP Group

Statistical / neural NLP textbooks and courses

#032

Daphne Koller

ML researcher; Coursera co-founder; insitro founder

Probabilistic graphical models

#033

Sebastian Thrun

Robotics / autonomous driving pioneer; Udacity founder

Stanley DARPA Grand Challenge

#034

Alex Krizhevsky

AlexNet co-author; deep learning vision inflection engineer

AlexNet implementation & training

#035

Thomas Wolf

Co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face; open ML ecosystem builder

Transformers library leadership

#036

Clément Delangue

CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face

HF company building

#037

Arthur Mensch

CEO of Mistral AI; large open-weight European lab leader

Mistral open-weight models

#038

Guillaume Lample

Scientist co-founder of Mistral AI; former Meta FAIR

Large language model research

#039

Soumith Chintala

PyTorch co-creator; Meta AI engineering leader

PyTorch

#040

Tri Dao

FlashAttention author; efficient transformer systems researcher

FlashAttention

#041

Jim Fan

NVIDIA AI / embodied agent researcher; public science communicator

Embodied agents research

#042

Lilian Weng

Applied research leader; famous ‘Lil’Log’ technical essays

Lil’Log explainers

#043

Paul Christiano

Alignment researcher; influential iterated amplification ideas

Iterated amplification

#044

Max Tegmark

Physicist; FLI co-founder; public AI risk communicator

Life 3.0

#045

Timnit Gebru

AI ethics researcher; DAIR founder; algorithmic bias scholar

Gender Shades lineage collaboration era

#046

Margaret Mitchell

AI ethics / responsible AI researcher; Hugging Face ethics lead era

Model cards advocacy

#047

Connor Leahy

AI safety engineer; Conjecture / EleutherAI public figure

EleutherAI open models era

#048

Helen Toner

AI policy researcher; former OpenAI board member (public record)

AI policy research

#049

Richard Sutton

Father of modern reinforcement learning; Alberta & DeepMind links

RL textbook with Barto

#050

Doina Precup

RL research leader; DeepMind Montreal / McGill

Reinforcement learning research

#051

Raquel Urtasun

Autonomous driving ML leader; Waabi founder; formerly Uber ATG

Self-driving ML leadership

#052

Sanja Fidler

3D / vision research leader; NVIDIA AI lab & UofT

Computer vision & 3D generative research

#053

Jimmy Ba

Optimizer / deep learning researcher; UofT; Layer 6 / industry links

Adam optimizer co-authorship lineage

#054

David Duvenaud

Probabilistic deep learning researcher; UofT; inversion of control for gen models

Neural ODEs co-authorship era

#055

Aidan Gomez

CEO of Cohere; Transformer paper co-author

Attention Is All You Need co-author

#056

Nick Frosst

Co-founder of Cohere; formerly Google Brain

Cohere co-founding

#057

Noam Shazeer

Transformer co-author; Character.AI co-founder; MoE systems innovator

Attention Is All You Need

#058

Ashish Vaswani

Transformer co-author; foundational modern NLP architecture

Attention Is All You Need lead author credit

#059

Illia Polosukhin

Transformer co-author; Near Protocol co-founder

Attention Is All You Need co-author

#060

Lukasz Kaiser

Transformer co-author; sequence modeling researcher

Attention Is All You Need co-author

#061

Niki Parmar

Transformer co-author; industry research engineer

Attention Is All You Need co-author

#062

Jakob Uszkoreit

Transformer co-author; Inceptive co-founder

Attention Is All You Need co-author

#063

Llion Jones

Transformer co-author; Sakana AI co-founder

Attention Is All You Need co-author

#064

Alec Radford

GPT lineage researcher; CLIP co-creator; OpenAI scientist

GPT-1/2 era research leadership

#065

Jared Kaplan

Anthropic co-founder; scaling laws co-author

Scaling laws paper influence

#066

Sam McCandlish

Anthropic co-founder; scaling & alignment research

Scaling laws co-authorship

#067

Jack Clark

Anthropic co-founder; Import AI newsletter; policy-savvy communicator

Import AI

#068

Chris Olah

Interpretability researcher; Circuits / Distill culture

Circuits thread

#069

Jan Leike

Alignment researcher; formerly OpenAI / DeepMind; Anthropic roles evolve

RLHF research leadership public narrative

#070

Wojciech Zaremba

OpenAI co-founder; robotics and research leadership

OpenAI co-founder

#071

Jeff Dean

Google Senior Fellow; Google Brain / Gemini-era research leadership

Large-scale distributed ML systems

#072

Quoc Le

Google Brain researcher; sequence models & AutoML contributions

Sequence models research

#073

Ian Goodfellow

GAN inventor; adversarial ML researcher

Generative Adversarial Networks

#074

Mustafa Suleyman

CEO of Microsoft AI; DeepMind co-founder; Inflection founder

DeepMind co-founder

#075

Kevin Scott

CTO of Microsoft; technical steward of Microsoft AI platform

Microsoft CTO

#076

Emad Mostaque

Stability AI founder era; open image model popularizer

Stable Diffusion popularization era

#077

Alexander Wang

Founder/CEO of Scale AI; data infrastructure for frontier models

Scale AI data platform

#078

Lisa Su

CEO of AMD; AI accelerator competitor to NVIDIA narrative

AMD AI GPU roadmap

▣ Hardware & compute

#079

Jim Keller

Legendary chip architect; AI hardware design influence

CPU/GPU architecture career

▣ Hardware & compute

#080

George Hotz

Comma.ai founder; public compute / tinygrad / AI tinkerer

Openpilot autonomy

#081

François Chollet

Keras creator; ARC benchmark; AI reasoning critic-builder

Keras

#082

Jeremy Howard

fast.ai co-founder; practical deep learning educator

Practical Deep Learning for Coders

#083

Georgi Gerganov

llama.cpp creator; on-device LLM engineering icon

llama.cpp

#084

Awni Hannun

MLX lead energy at Apple; efficient on-device ML

MLX framework public research

#085

Tom Brown

GPT-3 paper co-author; language model scaling engineer-scientist

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners co-author

#086

Long Ouyang

RLHF / InstructGPT research co-author lineage

InstructGPT / RLHF public research

#087

Amanda Askell

Anthropic researcher; constitutional AI & character training public voice

Constitutional AI contributions

#088

Joelle Pineau

RL / dialogue researcher; Meta AI / McGill; Canadian AI leader

Dialogue systems research

#089

Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Deep learning researcher; Apple ML research / CMU

Deep Boltzmann machines era

#090

Zoubin Ghahramani

Probabilistic ML leader; formerly Uber AI / Google DeepMind roles

Gaussian processes & Bayesian ML

#091

Sepp Hochreiter

LSTM co-inventor; European deep learning leader

LSTM with Schmidhuber

#092

David Ha

Creative AI / Sakana AI co-founder; formerly Google Brain

World Models blog era

#093

Robin Rombach

Stable Diffusion research co-author; generative image systems

Latent diffusion / Stable Diffusion research

#094

Stella Biderman

EleutherAI executive director era; open science LLM researcher

Pythia / open LLM research

#095

Sid Black

EleutherAI GPT-Neo/J engineer; open LLM pioneer

GPT-Neo / GPT-J open models

#096

Grace Hopper

Computing pioneer; compiler & COBOL lineage (historical AI compute foundation)

First compilers narrative

#097

Alan Turing

Foundational computer scientist; Turing Test; wartime computing

Turing machine

#098

John McCarthy

Coined ‘artificial intelligence’; Lisp creator

Dartmouth conference 1956

#099

Marvin Minsky

MIT AI Lab co-founder; cognitive AI pioneer

MIT AI Lab

#100

Andrew Barto

RL co-author with Sutton; foundations of modern agents

Sutton & Barto RL textbook