AI
47 objects
Research pioneers / Turing-Nobel tier
Geoffrey Hinton
Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto (Nobel Physics 2024, Turing 2018)
Backprop/deep learning lineage; now primarily an AI-risk public voice
Yoshua Bengio
Professor, Université de Montréal / Mila; founder, LawZero (2025)
Turing 2018; Chair, International AI Safety Report — the central academic voice in AI safety governance
Richard Sutton
Professor, University of Alberta; Keen Technologies
Turing 2024 (with Barto); RL foundations; "The Bitter Lesson"
Fei-Fei Li
Professor, Stanford (HAI co-director); co-founder/CEO, World Labs
ImageNet; spatial intelligence / world models (Marble product) — LeCun's direct competitor in that category
General
Yann LeCun
Executive Chairman & co-founder, AMI Labs
Turing 2018; CNNs; JEPA/world-model paradigm — now betting it at AMI Labs
Liang Wenfeng 梁文锋
Founder, DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1/V-series — reshaped global cost assumptions for frontier AI
Sergey Levine
Professor, UC Berkeley
π-series VLA models — most cited living robot-learning researcher
OpenAI
Frontier lab — GPT/o-series lineage
Frontier lab — GPT/o-series lineage
Anthropic
Frontier lab — Claude; scaling-era research and policy voice
Frontier lab — Claude; scaling-era research and policy voice
Google DeepMind
Frontier lab — Gemini; AlphaFold; Gemini Robotics
Frontier lab — Gemini; AlphaFold; Gemini Robotics
DeepSeek 深度求索
Efficiency-focused open-weight frontier lab funded by High-Flyer
Efficiency-focused open-weight frontier lab funded by High-Flyer
Physical Intelligence
The reference robot-foundation-model startup (π-series VLAs)
The reference robot-foundation-model startup (π-series VLAs)
UC Berkeley
The deep-RL-for-robotics lineage (Levine, Abbeel); Russell's AI-control work
The deep-RL-for-robotics lineage (Levine, Abbeel); Russell's AI-control work
AMI Labs
LeCun's world-model lab — $1.03B seed (largest in European history); Singapore office
LeCun's world-model lab — $1.03B seed (largest in European history); Singapore office
New York University
LeCun's academic home; CILVR lab lineage
LeCun's academic home; CILVR lab lineage
Meta (Superintelligence Labs)
Post-Scale-AI-deal restructuring under Alexandr Wang; Llama lineage
Post-Scale-AI-deal restructuring under Alexandr Wang; Llama lineage
Frontier lab leadership
Sam Altman
CEO, OpenAI
—
Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist, OpenAI
Technical direction post-Sutskever
Greg Brockman
President, OpenAI
—
Demis Hassabis
CEO, Google DeepMind (Nobel Chemistry 2024)
AlphaFold; Gemini programme
Koray Kavukcuoglu
CTO / Gemini co-lead, Google DeepMind
Gemini technical leadership
Oriol Vinyals
CTO / Gemini co-lead, Google DeepMind
Gemini technical leadership
Jeff Dean
Chief Scientist, Google
Infrastructure and research lineage
Dario Amodei
CEO & co-founder, Anthropic
Scaling-era research lineage; policy voice (essays, testimony)
Daniela Amodei
President & co-founder, Anthropic
—
Jared Kaplan
Chief Science Officer, Anthropic
Scaling laws
Chris Olah
Anthropic
Mechanistic interpretability — the reference figure in that subfield
Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder & CEO, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
No product by design; watched for research direction signal
Mira Murati
Founder & CEO, Thinking Machines Lab
$2B seed (2025); ex-OpenAI CTO
Alexandr Wang
Chief AI Officer, Meta (Meta Superintelligence Labs)
Post-Scale-AI-deal restructuring of Meta AI; Shengjia Zhao chief scientist
Elon Musk
xAI (merged with X)
Grok; Colossus compute buildout
Arthur Mensch
Co-founder & CEO, Mistral AI
Leading European open-weight lab (pre-AMI)
Aidan Gomez
Co-founder & CEO, Cohere
Enterprise models; "Attention Is All You Need" co-author
Humanoids — US/Europe
China
Yang Zhilin
Founder, Moonshot AI
Kimi models; strong open-weight reasoning line
Tang Jie
Professor, Tsinghua; Zhipu AI (chief scientist lineage)
GLM series; Zhipu is the listed/IPO-track Chinese lab
Zhou Jingren
CTO, Alibaba Cloud
Qwen series — most adopted open-weight family globally
Wu Yonghui
ByteDance Seed (research lead)
Doubao/Seed models; ByteDance's compute scale
Kai-Fu Lee
Founder, 01.AI; Sinovation
Commentator/investor bridging US-China AI
Academia / evaluation / safety
Percy Liang
Professor, Stanford; CRFM
HELM benchmarks; open evaluation infrastructure
Stuart Russell
Professor, UC Berkeley
AI control problem; policy influence
Dan Hendrycks
Director, Center for AI Safety (CAIS); advisor xAI/Scale
Benchmarks (MMLU, HLE); safety advocacy
Max Tegmark
Professor, MIT; President, Future of Life Institute
AI pause/governance advocacy
Andrej Karpathy
Founder, Eureka Labs
Highest-signal independent technical educator/commentator
François Chollet
Co-founder, Ndea; ARC Prize
Program-synthesis/AGI-definition counterpoint to scaling orthodoxy
Andrew Ng
Stanford; DeepLearning.AI; AI Fund
Enterprise/education influence