The Most Powerful A.I. Leaders Behind the Top A.I. Companies & Trends

The most powerful people in A.I. wield unparalleled influence over the future of the industry for one simple reason: money drives innovation. Unlike other sectors where progress can be piecemeal or self-sustaining, A.I. requires massive financial investment for research, computing power and the assembly of top-tier talent. This capital doesn’t just fund ideas—it dictates which ideas get to exist in the first place.

These power brokers—venture capitalists, tech titans, institutional investors and policymakers—decide which A.I. projects get the resources to move from a garage experiment to a world-changing product. They determine who has the financial runway to attract the best minds, access the latest hardware and afford the astronomical costs of scaling models that can gobble up millions of dollars in GPU hours just to train. Their decisions shape which innovations become mainstream and which remain stuck in the lab, no matter how groundbreaking they might be.

Even more crucially, controlling capital means setting the priorities and ethics of the field. Investors aren’t just picking winners and losers; they’re defining what “winning” looks like. By choosing to fund certain projects over others, they implicitly endorse particular applications, risks and philosophies about what A.I. should—and shouldn’t—do. When the industry’s most prominent backers pour billions into autonomous weapons, mass surveillance or unregulated A.I. models, they signal to the world that these are the avenues worth pursuing. Conversely, if they back startups focused on human-centric, ethical A.I. or technologies that enhance rather than replace human labor, they set a very different precedent for what the future holds.

The stakes are monumental because the flow of capital influences not only what products get built but also the rules governing them. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, and even the VC arms of companies like Microsoft and Google have a vested interest in ensuring favorable regulatory conditions, meaning they can shape policy debates and public perceptions just as effectively as any lobbyist. The result is an industry roadmap that’s dictated less by technical feasibility and more by financial might.

In short, the people steering capital don’t just grease the wheels of A.I. innovation—they hold the keys to the car, the map and even the road itself. They’re deciding which risks to take, which ethical dilemmas to confront or ignore, and which futures are worth pursuing, making them the ultimate gatekeepers of A.I.’s trajectory.

A.I. Power List: Criteria Breakdown

The criteria defined below (risk, impact, speed and growth) are not just boxes to tick; they are the lens through which we view the tectonic shifts in A.I. over the last two years—a period marked by unprecedented investments, headline-grabbing acquisitions and bold, sometimes controversial, moves that will define the landscape for years to come.

RISK

Risk-takers are the ones who change the game. At Google, Eric Schmidt instituted a policy allowing employees to devote 20 percent of their time to any project they’d like. It was a risky move in the name of innovation that more narrow-minded leaders might dismiss as wasteful of resources or low ROI. But, as Schmidt tells Observer, “This helped foster a culture of creative thinking and interdisciplinarity at the company, generating some of our most successful initiatives. In the age of A.I., innovation will similarly come from taking risks and experimenting with bold, new ideas.”

Whether it’s a venture capitalist betting the farm on an unproven A.I. startup or a CEO pivoting an entire company’s strategy towards A.I., these individuals have made bold moves that could pay off spectacularly or lead to colossal failure. But it’s precisely this willingness to gamble that sets them apart from the cautious majority. Take, for instance, Tesla’s audacious push to integrate A.I. into autonomous driving, a move that could revolutionize transportation—or violently implode. The jury’s still out, but the risk is undeniable.

IMPACT

The individuals on this list have had a measurable influence on how A.I. is developed, deployed and regulated—impacting the future of policy, culture and the flow of capital across borders and industries. Think of the billions of dollars funneled into A.I. research and development. Consider the mergers and acquisitions that have shifted the balance of power in the tech industry. When Microsoft backed OpenAI with a multi-billion-dollar investment, it wasn’t just a vote of confidence in A.I.—it was a strategic move to dominate the next frontier of technology. Of course, these ideas and actions create titans of tech. More importantly, they define the next generation of leaders in culture and policy.

From the start, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke has championed the need for inclusive and equitable A.I. policies that benefit all communities, particularly those historically marginalized. She’s tirelessly pushed for comprehensive legislation that addresses the social and economic impacts of A.I. to ensure that such advancements do not exacerbate existing inequalities.

“The only way ahead is to establish comprehensive policies prioritizing the rights and privacy rights of all Americans,” Clarke tells Observer. “Digital environments do not take away our civil liberties, and substantial regulation is necessary to ensure they never do. Moving forward, all discussions on A.I. must focus on pursuing responsible advancement.”

SPEED

In A.I., speed is everything. The pace at which these leaders move—whether by starting earlier than their competitors or accelerating faster than the rest—sets them apart. Well before ChatGPT became a punchline for late-adopters, traditionalists and critics, Jeff McMillan tapped OpenAI to create a personal assistant for Morgan Stanley’s advisors to chat with, tapping into a large portion of its collective knowledge. Under McMillan’s leadership, the investment bank is leveraging data and organizational AGI to create a massive competitive advantage.

“A.I. innovation requires a deep curiosity about the world and how it works and the creativity to imagine new possibilities and solutions,” McMillan tells Observer. “Being open-minded is crucial. This means being receptive to new ideas, perspectives and techniques.”

Technology is defined by its breakneck pace; today’s innovation is tomorrow’s standard. Like McMillan, the leaders on our list have consistently been ahead of the curve, setting trends rather than following them. Consider the recent wave of AI-driven startups that have secured record-breaking funding in mere weeks, capitalizing on the frenzy of investor interest in machine learning and automation. Mistral AI, not two years old, has soared to a $6 billion valuation. These leaders are moving so fast that they’re not just keeping up with the future but creating it.

GROWTH

The people on this list aren’t just influential now—they’re poised to continue their ascent. Multiple indicators indicate that these individuals are likely to keep pushing the envelope, advancing their industries and driving the A.I. narrative forward.

“I was inspired by the idea that there could be a few simple principles, like the laws of physics, that would explain our intelligence and allow us to build intelligent machines,” Yoshua Bengio, one of the most widely cited scientists in the world, tells Observer. Looking ahead, he adds, “I hope we will have solved the riddle of how to design A.I. that is safe from catastrophic misuse and loss of control.”

From the steady stream of innovations emerging from their labs to their growing influence over policy, culture and public perception, these Power Listers are far from reaching their peak. The recent surge in A.I. patents, the increasing number of A.I.-driven products hitting the market, and the escalating arms race for A.I. talent all point to a future where their influence will only grow.

Over the last two years, A.I. has evolved from a buzzword to a transformative force in nearly every sector. The people on this list aren’t just participants in the revolution—they lead it. They’re strategists, risk-takers and visionaries. These people are shaping the future, one bold move at a time. And in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of A.I., there’s no prize for second place.

The Most Important Players in A.I.

Brett Adcock, Figure AI

The Most Ambitious Roboticist

Brett Adcock wants robots to do the jobs nobody human wants to do. The 38-year-old is the CEO and founder of Figure AI, a company he started in 2021 to develop so-called humanoids that can automate labor. Its goal is to reduce the number of workers doing unsafe jobs in industries like manufacturing, logistics and warehousing—and investors want in. As of February 2024, the startup raised $845 million and saw its valuation soar to $2.6 billion, according to Pitchbook data, thanks to Adcock’s knack for scoring multi-million dollar deals. Earlier this year, Figure A.I. raised $675 million in a Series B funding round led by high-profile investors, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions and other venture capital firms. Adcock is no stranger to starting ambitious companies. Before Figure AI, the serial entrepreneur founded Archer, a developer of flying taxis, and Vettery, an online talent marketplace that matches employers with skilled workers.

Sam Altman, OpenAI

The Visionary Advocate

Sam Altman is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest names in the age of generative A.I. Since co-founding OpenAI in 2015, the tech mogul—whose personal net worth is estimated at $2 billion—has transformed the company from a non-profit to a tech titan valued at $157 billion as of October 2024. That’s, in part, because of the advent of ChatGPT, a powerful conversational A.I. chatbot that can answer user queries in human-like ways. The A.I. giant has scored colossal funding rounds from major individual investors like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel and corporate investors including Microsoft, Khosla Ventures and Infosys. Yet, OpenAI’s growth has been mired in controversy. In November 2023, OpenAI fired Altman after the board accused him of being unfit to lead the company before bringing him back to the helm days later. Staffers at the time also criticized Altman for prioritizing the rapid advancement of A.I. over the potential safety risks of the technology. Still, Altman remains the poster child for ambitious tech leaders and is closely watched by the biggest investors across industries.

Beena Ammanath, Deloitte

The Ethical Guardian

Beena Ammanath is a powerhouse at the intersection of A.I. research, business strategy and ethical tech leadership. As the executive director of the Deloitte AI Institute, she’s driving the agenda for one of the world’s leading A.I. think tanks, ensuring the consulting giant’s clients are ahead of the curve—not chasing it. Under her command, the Institute produces high-impact research on everything from deploying generative A.I. to transforming workforces and navigating the ethical minefield of A.I. adoption. Her insights are more than just buzzwords; they’re blueprints that businesses and even governments use to sharpen strategies, streamline services and fuel economic growth. Beyond Deloitte, Ammanath is a tireless advocate for diversity in tech. She founded Humans for AI, a nonprofit that partners with universities across California, Texas and Washington to bring underrepresented talent into the A.I. pipeline through resume clinics, symposiums and hands-on career-building workshops.

A respected author and thought leader, she’s penned multiple books, including Trustworthy A.I., a must-read guide for companies looking to leverage A.I. while keeping risk—and public trust—in check. With a foot in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, Ammanath is shaping an A.I. landscape that’s not just smarter, but fairer.

"In the next few years, I hope we see A.I. having as much of an impact in the social sector as we are seeing in the business world. This will just need a concerted effort to research and invest equally for social impact and business impact,” Ammanath tells Observer.

Beena Ammanath. Courtesy of Beena Ammanath

Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic

The Safety Architects

Dario and Daniela Amodei, siblings who co-founded Anthropic, are paving the way toward the ethical development of A.I. Under the former OpenAI employees’ leadership, Anthropic has been at the forefront of A.I. safety research and the development of A.I. alignment techniques to ensure the technology doesn’t act out of line with human intent. Since the company was founded in 2021, Anthropic has released its family of A.I. chatbots it calls Claude, and investors are betting big on the company’s success. Anthropic’s valuation now exceeds $19 billion after securing major deals with companies like Amazon and Alphabet. In July, Anthropic announced its partnership with Menlo Ventures, a prominent VC firm, to start a $100 million fund to invest in A.I. startups focused on tools that maximize societal benefits, enhance A.I. safety and provide new applications to A.I. across healthcare, financial services and other industries. Both siblings are actively shaping A.I. policy and governance by advocating for federal legislation to mitigate the misuse of A.I.

Dario and Daniela Amodei. Courtesy of Anthropic

Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm

The Edge Intelligence Evangelist

Cristiano Amon is on a mission to bring generative A.I. into smartphones, computers and automobiles. Since taking the reins of semiconductor giant Qualcomm in 2021, the Brazilian businessman has continued to push technology leadership in its Snapdragon chips that go into smartphones, PCs, cars, XR devices. With its ability to power A.I. workloads like conversational chatbots on personal devices to reduce their dependence on the cloud, Amon has high hopes for Snapdragon. Specifically for PC, he predicts that Snapdragon X will comprise 50 percent of the Windows PC market by 2029. So far, Snapdragon X has been integrated into the latest A.I. PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP and other major computer makers.

In the smartphone market, OEMs like Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola and OnePlus are set to use Snapdragon in their smartphones to bring generative A.I. experiences to the Android ecosystem. Qualcomm shipped $48.3 million units of Snapdragon in the second quarter, making up 26.5 percent of the 5G smartphone market share, according to research firm Omdia. Qualcomm has also expanded its A.I. capabilities into the automotive sector to power the LLMs behind advanced driver assistance systems. So far, all these A.I. investments seem to be paying off. As of late August, Qualcomm’s market cap has jumped more than 53 percent to $191.44 billion year-over-year, growth more significant than rivals like Samsung and AMD, which saw their caps increase by around 10 percent and 43 percent, respectively, during the same time period.

Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz

The Venture Vanguard

Marc Andreessen, who famously remarked that A.I. will be “the most important thing humanity has ever done,” has almost single-handedly rewritten the rulebook for tech investing. Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Andreessen didn’t just spot A.I.'s potential; he leaped into the fray years before it was cool. In 2014, while most were still debating whether A.I. was a fad or the next big thing, Andreessen was busy pouring $50 million into the fledgling A.I. company Oculus VR, which Facebook later swooped in to snap up for $2 billion. He didn't stop there—by 2017, a16z had invested in DeepMind, the Google-owned A.I. darling, giving it a leg up before anyone else even knew what it was doing. Over the last ten years, a16z has invested in over 20 startups within the generative A.I. value chain, according to data from Pitchbook.

In April 2023, a16z participated in OpenAI’s $300 million funding round, supporting the development of advanced A.I. models like GPT. In late 2023, the firm led a $415 million Series A round for Mistral AI, an open-source large language model creator valued at $2 billion today. Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for Character.AI, which specializes in generative A.I. chatbot services. It invested $100 million in Inceptive, focusing on A.I. drug discovery, and led a $100 million Series B round for Pinecone, a vector database startup. Andreessen’s firm is also an investor in Anthropic, a company developing generative A.I. technologies similar to OpenAI.

Marc Andreessen. Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs

The Architect of A.I.-Driven Finance

As Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs, Marco Argenti is redefining what a financial services firm can do when armed with cutting-edge technology. A rare hybrid of technologist and strategist, Argenti has fostered a culture of experimentation at the famously buttoned-up bank, pushing his team to break new ground with the GS AI Platform. The platform, which he spearheaded, allows developers across the firm to tap into an array of advanced language models with built-in controls and security—an infrastructure feat that’s already bearing fruit. Its most prominent use to date? A game-changing coding assistant that’s empowering Goldman’s developers to move faster and smarter. But Argenti isn’t just building cool tools; he’s setting a new standard for how Wall Street can harness generative A.I. responsibly, ensuring that every leap forward is tempered by strong guardrails and meticulous oversight.

Argenti is also a prominent thought leader on the subject, unflinching in his belief that A.I.’s potential is matched only by the need for caution. As he wrote in Forbes, responsible A.I. at Goldman Sachs means ensuring the technology is used in "a careful and controlled manner.” Before joining Goldman in 2019, Argenti built his tech pedigree as Vice President at Amazon Web Services, where he pioneered key initiatives in mobile, IoT and virtual reality, transforming AWS into the backbone of modern enterprise computing. His career also includes a stint as Senior Vice President and Global Head of Developer Experience at Nokia, making him the rare leader who’s left a mark on both the tech and finance worlds. With Argenti at the helm, Goldman isn’t just adopting A.I.—it’s setting the pace.

Yoshua Bengio, University of Montreal

The Founding Father of Deep Learning

Yoshua Bengio’s breakthroughs in natural language processing in the 2000s helped lay the groundwork for generative A.I. The Canadian computer scientist and professor founded the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, a world leader in academic research on deep learning that has raised more than $300 million from the Canadian government and partnerships with Google, Microsoft and Meta. Bengio has played a pivotal role in pushing the A.I. revolution forward. His research in deep learning and neural networks won him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, known as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside leading A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, which came with a $1 million cash prize. A year later, Bengio received the Killam Prize, one of Canada’s most prestigious research awards, and was recognized as one of the most widely cited scientists in the world. He now offers his expertise as a member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board and serves as an A.I. chair for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. But Bengio’s contributions go beyond technological breakthroughs. He’s vocal about A.I.’s potential for social harm and has advocated for making A.I. safe and ethical for all. Bengio was also involved in the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence and is a chair of the United Kingdom’s “International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced A.I.”

Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University

The Bias Breaker

Ruha Benjamin’s research takes a critical look at how A.I. intersects with race and social justice. Benjamin is a sociologist and professor at Princeton University’s African American Studies Department, where she studies and teaches courses on the social implications of emerging technology. Benjamin has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles on those topics and is the author of four books, including Imagination: A Manifesto, released earlier this year. Her most notable book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, examines how A.I. and technology reinforce systemic racial inequities and has been cited more than 4,000 times in academic research papers, according to Google Scholar. She has spoken at dozens of talks across the U.S., Europe and Africa, and has 20 awards ranging from fellowships and grants for her sociological research as of March 2024. Her Ted talk on how technology can be deployed to improve the lives of ordinary people amassed over 63,000 views on YouTube.

Ruha Benjamin. Craig Barritt/Getty Images

Joy Buolamwini, Algorithmic Justice League

The Accountability Activist

Joy Buolamwini is a prominent computer scientist, digital activist and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization dedicated to combating bias in A.I. systems. She is known for her groundbreaking work in highlighting and addressing the ethical implications of A.I., particularly how the technology can perpetuate and amplify social biases. Buolamwini gained widespread attention through her work on facial recognition technologies. Her MIT thesis methodology uncovered large racial and gender bias in A.I. services from companies like Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. Buolamwini's research has been covered in over 40 countries and inspired the Emmy-nominated documentary Coded Bias and her national best-selling book, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. Her TED Talk on algorithmic bias has had over 1 million views. As a renowned international speaker, she has championed the need for algorithmic justice at the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

In addition to her academic work, Buolamwini's advocacy extends to the public and policy spheres. She has testified before legislative bodies and engaged with tech companies to push for more equitable A.I. development practices. She serves on the Global Tech Panel convened by the vice president of the European Commission to advise world leaders and technology executives on ways to reduce the harms of A.I.

Joy Buolamwini. Courtesy of Joy Buolamwini

Julien Chaumond and Clément Delangue, Hugging Face

The Champions of Open-Source Collaboration

Hugging Face’s co-founders, Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond, have been instrumental in the democratization of A.I. Since starting Hugging Face in 2016, CEO Delangue and CTO Chaumond have transformed what began as a quirky chatbot project into a leading open-source platform for large language models. Based in New York and Paris, Hugging Face, worth $4.5 billion as of August 2023, is now an indispensable resource for A.I. researchers and developers. Last week, Delangue announced that the company now hosts over one million public A.I. models, including GPT and text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, and is used by more than 50,000 organizations to build their projects. Under Delangue’s and Chaumond’s leadership, Hugging Face has established critical partnerships with tech giants like Google, Amazon through Amazon Web Services and Nvidia—companies that participated in a $235 million Series D fundraising round in August 2023. Salesforce, AMD, IBM and Qualcomm also participated in that multi-million dollar investment, bringing Hugging Face’s total fundraising to $394.7 million as of April 2024, according to Pitchbook.

Yvette D. Clarke, U.S. House of Representatives

The Legislative Luminary

Yvette Clarke, the sharp-witted and resolute U.S. Representative for New York’s 9th district, has become one of Congress's most formidable voices on the cutting-edge front of technology policy. A fierce advocate for ethically guided A.I. regulation, she’s known for her no-nonsense stance on keeping Silicon Valley in check and ensuring artificial intelligence doesn’t perpetuate the ugly biases of its creators.

"Our democracy is at stake," Clarke tells Observer. "In my district, we have seen individuals denied entry into their homes due to an overreliance on inequitable and biased algorithms. As we watch these technologies evolve and A.I. impact Americans’ livelihoods, it has become clear that action is necessary. This is why I don’t hold my selection to Congress’s bipartisan A.I. task force lightly."

Clarke’s fingerprints are all over A.I.-related legislation that demands transparency, fairness and accountability from tech giants used to having their way. As a key member of the Congressional Black Caucus, she’s turned the spotlight on the insidious ways A.I. can deepen systemic inequities, pushing for bold policies that center marginalized communities often left on the losing end of innovation. Clarke isn’t just regulating; she’s shaping a digital future where everyone has a shot—insisting that tech's evolution uplifts rather than exploits.

Representative Yvette D. Clarke. Courtesy Representative Yvette D. Clarke

Chris Cox, Meta

The Master of User Experience

Chris Cox, chief product officer at Meta, has been at the forefront of A.I. since Facebook launched its personalized news feed algorithm in 2006. Since joining Facebook as one of its first software engineers, Cox has climbed the ranks over the years to the C-suite, where he now leads Meta’s A.I. efforts. Cox is leading Meta’s Fundamental A.I. Research, an initiative to develop artificial general intelligence, along with leading A.I. researchers like Yann LeCun and Joelle Pineau. He oversees the integration of A.I. across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger—a family of apps with four billion active monthly users globally. That includes A.I. chatbots, which Cox says will create new ways for users to interact with social platforms and be a valuable tool for advertisers, as well as algorithms that recommend content, personalize user feeds and detect and remove harmful content like hate speech. He has also touted the Metaverse’s innovative potential and has spoken openly about the importance of data centers and open-source models to power and transparently advance A.I. Under Cox’s leadership, Meta claims it regularly meets with US policymakers to discuss ways to instill safe guardrails and protections around its A.I. models like Llama.

Chris Cox. Christophe Morin/Getty Images

Larry Ellison, Oracle

The Oracle of A.I. Transformation

Larry Ellison doesn’t build companies—he builds empires. As the co-founder, former CEO and current chairman of Oracle, Ellison has spent more than four decades turning the once-niche database company into a $300 billion behemoth that dominates enterprise software and cloud computing. Known for his larger-than-life personality and ruthless competitive streak, Ellison has never shied away from a high-stakes battle, whether it’s outmaneuvering rivals like IBM and SAP or going head-to-head with tech giants like Amazon in the cloud wars. His influence extends far beyond Oracle’s boardroom: Ellison is also a major investor in Tesla and owns Lanai, a Hawaiian island where he’s piloting ambitious sustainability projects. But it’s his ongoing contributions to A.I. that are now taking center stage—spearheading Oracle’s integration of A.I.-driven analytics into everything from finance to healthcare. With Ellison at the helm, Oracle is positioning itself not just as a data powerhouse but as a formidable player in the race to define A.I.’s role in enterprise tech. It’s a reminder that, even after four decades, Ellison isn’t just in the game—he’s still shaping it.

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla

The Mastermind of Autonomous Driving

As Tesla’s Director of Autopilot Software, Ashok Elluswamy has made the automobile giant a pioneer in self-driving cars. Praised by CEO Elon Musk, Elluswamy joined Tesla in 2014 as the company’s first software engineer on the A.I. team, later rising the ranks into a managerial role leading Tesla’s Autopilot software team. Under Elluswamy's leadership, Tesla developed an in-house computer vision system, created custom hardware to run neural networks, and focused on building out its A.I. to solve issues around autonomous driving. Since integrating Elluswamy’s Autopilot software into its vehicles in late 2015, Tesla has sold millions of cars with the system—including the Model S, X, 3 and Y—that enables features like lane keeping assist, adaptive cruise control, automatic steering and automatic braking. The release made Tesla one of the first automakers to commercialize self-driving systems, followed by General Motors, Google’s Waymo, Mercedes Benz and other companies. Years later, Tesla rolled out its Full Self-Driving software—the most advanced version of Autopilot to date—which equips its cars with capabilities like self-parking, auto lane changes and traffic and stop sign control. So far, 500,000 Tesla owners have used their vehicles’ full self-driving system on public roads. With Elluswamy leading the automaker’s autonomous efforts, Tesla has generated more than $95 billion in revenue as of June 2024 and reached a market cap of $684 billion as of September 2024, according to Pitchbook.

David Ferrucci, Elemental Cognition

The Cognitive Architect

David Ferrucci, who launched and led IBM's Watson in its early years, has been spreading the message of A.I.’s potential since first making headlines with the machine's "Jeopardy!" win in 2011. Now, he’s the founder and CEO of Elemental Cognition, a platform that focuses on filling the reasoning gap in large language models. Founded in 2015, Ferrucci’s company completed a Series B funding round in 2023 worth $60 million. Backers include Bridgewater Associates, Breyer Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Redpoint Ventures’ Geoff Yang. Ferrucci’s innovations have amassed him more than 100 patents and publications on topics like advanced natural language processing and contextual understanding. His ability to transform theoretical research into commercially viable technologies has solidified his status as a key figure in the A.I. landscape. Meanwhile, Ferrucci maintains his role as a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and an Adjunct Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

David Ferrucci. Courtesy of David Ferrucci

Timnit Gebru, Distributed AI Research Institute

A.I.'s Ethical Conscience

Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research organization positioned as a counterweight to the often unchecked technological progress of Silicon Valley’s behemoths. In 2020, Gebru was fired from Google’s Ethical A.I. research team “for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace”—a departure that brought international attention to issues of diversity, inclusion and ethical practices within the tech industry. Undeterred, her work on the ethical implications of large language models has continued. Rooted in research on algorithmic bias and the environmental impacts of A.I., DAIR (founded in 2021) has secured substantial funding via grants from prominent sources like the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations and The Rockefeller Foundation. Gebru has co-authored multiple influential research papers, one of which critiques overly large language models. Her contributions to A.I. ethics and advocacy for more inclusive, responsible A.I. research have propelled the field of ethical A.I.

Timnit Gebru. Kimberly White/Getty Images

John Giannandrea, Apple

The Master of Seamless A.I. Integration

John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and A.I. strategy, is actively reshaping the way the world sees and uses A.I. Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 from Google, where he headed up A.I. and search. In the time between his positions at Google and Apple, he was considered “the most sought-after free agent in Silicon Valley.” Under his stewardship, Apple’s A.I. strategy has evolved from experimental to well-oiled. He’s been at the helm for the development of Core ML and Siri technologies, which have made recent models of the iPhone and Mac a smarter and more seamless user experience. Earlier on in his career, Giannandrea co-founded two technology companies, Metaweb, a semantic search company that Google bought in 2010, and Tellme Networks, a voice recognition software company that Microsoft acquired in 2007 for a reported $800 million. With experience as both an entrepreneur and organizational leader, Giannandrea has found multiple avenues to push A.I., and consumer-facing technology at large, forward.

John Giannandrea. Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang, Cohere

The Champions of A.I. Language Democratization

Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang are on a mission to help companies adopt A.I. with ease—and their contributions to the acceleration of generative A.I. development and the deployment of A.I. for language understanding cannot be overstated. Their company, Cohere, hit a valuation of $5.5 billion in July 2024, thanks in part to partnerships with giants like Microsoft Azure, Accenture and AWS and around $940 million in backing from industry leaders, including Nvidia and Salesforces Ventures. Cohere is “building the future of language A.I.” at the forefront of A.I. and machine learning research, and its latest funding round attracted investors like Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco and Oracle (also a customer). Cohere tailors machine learning models to enterprises. With it, companies can quickly integrate A.I. capabilities like chatbots and virtual assistants into their operations without needing in-house technical expertise to build them from scratch, saving time and money. Clients across industries have used Cohere’s tools to construct A.I.-powered assistants for employee support, improved search and virtual shopping.

As CTO of Cohere, Zhang has published research on compressing neural networks and inferring underlying cipher mapping. Much like tech legends Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, Zhang is a college dropout. Under Gomez’s leadership as CEO, Cohere has contributed to the open-source community by releasing its tools and models to spur innovation in the A.I. ecosystem. Before starting Cohere, Gomez interned at Google, where he helped invent the transformer, a deep learning model that enables A.I. tools like ChatGPT to understand, interpret and generate text faster.

Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang. Courtesy of Cohere

Daniel Gross, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

The Vanguard of A.I. Safety

Daniel Gross brings a wealth of expertise in addressing A.I.’s existential risks. Gross is the co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence, a company whose goal is to develop robust A.I. systems with safety at their core. In this joint venture with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy, Gross brings years of entrepreneurial experience to Safe Superintelligence. Gross also co-founded Pioneer.app, a startup accelerator program, and Cue, a search engine acquired by Apple in 2013, where he ran several machine learning and search projects. When Gross isn’t launching companies, he’s investing in them. He was previously a partner at Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that helped over 200 generative A.I. companies get off the ground. While there, Gross launched a program to fund and mentor A.I. startups, raising hundreds of millions across 79 investment rounds for companies like Magic, Suno, EvolutionaryScale, Character.ai and Weights and Biases.

Rene Haas, Arm

The Mastermind of A.I. Infrastructure

Rene Haas, CEO of Arm, has cemented his status as a trailblazer in A.I. hardware. Under Haas’ leadership, the British semiconductor company has enhanced the development and deployment of A.I. chip designs like the Arm Cortex and Neoverse platforms. These designs are optimized for A.I. and machine learning workloads, providing high performance to A.I. applications running on the cloud and directly on devices like smartphones. Arm, Haas says, is on track to make over 100 billion devices ready for A.I. by 2025, with strategic partners like Google, Amazon and Nvidia to make their systems equipped to handle A.I. Haas’s business acumen doesn’t stop there. After SoftBank acquired a majority stake in his company, the CEO played a crucial role in Arm’s initial public offering to raise capital to fuel further innovation and expansion in A.I. and machine learning. Arm now has a market cap of more than $135 billion as of August 22, according to Pitchbook.

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind

The Architect of Artificial General Intelligence

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, has been a major force in some of A.I.’s most groundbreaking achievements. After launching the London-based A.I. lab in 2010, Hassabis led the development of AlphaGo, the first A.I. to defeat a world champion in the game of Go, setting a new standard for A.I.'s capabilities. Hassabis oversaw the creation of AlphaFold—solving the protein folding problem that had puzzled scientists for decades—and expanded DeepMind’s A.I. applications into healthcare with systems that predict acute kidney injury and enhance patient care. On top of that, the company has made strides in neuroscience, climate modeling and robotics. DeepMind’s achievements in A.I. caught the attention of Google in 2014 when the search giant acquired DeepMind for more than $500 million to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), or A.I. that’s smarter than humans in a way that benefits humanity. Hassabis was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry, alongside DeepMind's John M. Jumper and the University of Washington's David Baker, for their breakthrough research in predicting and designing novel proteins using A.I. and computer software.

Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto

The Godfather of A.I.

Best known for his pioneering research on neural networks and backpropagation algorithms, Geoffrey Hinton’s work underpins the majority of today’s machine learning technology—earning him the title “Godfather of A.I.” Since his seminal 2012 paper on neural networks turned the A.I. world on its head, Hinton’s been at the epicenter of a research revolution that he believes must “take inspiration from biology rather than logic” in order to be successful.

“I wanted to know how the brain worked,” Hinton, who has a background in cognitive psychology, tells Observer. “Computer simulations of learning algorithms for neural nets was a new way of attacking this problem (50 years ago) that complemented the approaches taken by psychologists and neuroscientists.”

The deep learning expert has also been one of the first and most vocal proponents cautioning against the rapid development of A.I. After a decade of advancing A.I. at Google, Hinton quit in 2023, reasoning that A.I. technologies pose “profound risks to society and humanity.” Despite that, his contributions have proved monetarily valuable for Big Tech (Google parent Alphabet saw profits jump 29 percent during Q2 this year due to A.I. success). With accolades like the Turing Award and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, Hinton's reputation is solidified as a colossus in A.I. despite a recent transformation in view.

“One mindset that has proved very fruitful is the belief that neural nets can be made to work much better by just making them much bigger and training them on much more data,” Hinton tells Observer. “Many symbolic A.I. researchers thought this was a really dumb idea, and they were wrong.”

Geoffrey Hinton. Courtesy of Geoffrey Hinton

Reid Hoffman, Greylock

The Network Navigator

Reid Hoffman’s influence in A.I. extends across various domains, emphasizing both the advancement of A.I. technologies and the ethical considerations surrounding its development and use. Hoffman is a co-founder of LinkedIn, a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, and a key figure in funding the growth of some of the world’s most innovative and successful A.I. startups. In December 2023, under Hoffman’s leadership, Greylock led seed funding for Braintrust, an A.I. software developer with a valuation estimated to be north of $400 million. The firm also invested in Abnormal Security, an A.I.-native data security platform valued at just over $5 billion.

Hoffman is a founding investor of OpenAI and served on its board from 2018 to 2022, reflecting his belief in A.I.’s potential to transform industries and improve societal outcomes. Hoffman also co-founded Inflection AI, which raised $1.3 billion in 2023 to build “more personal A.I.” Five months later, its lead investor, Microsoft, hired away most of Inflection’s founders and staff—but Hoffman stayed behind, ready to rebuild with its new CEO Sean White.

An advocate for ethical A.I., Hoffman actively participates in discussions about A.I.'s societal impacts, stressing the importance of responsible A.I. deployment. He has written and spoken extensively about the need for ethical frameworks and policies to guide A.I. development, ensuring that these technologies are used to address global challenges and enhance human welfare.

Reid Hoffman. Kimberly White/Getty Images

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA

The Commander of Hardware Renaissance

As co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang is fueling the global A.I. revolution one chip at a time. Since founding the company in 1993, Huang has transformed Nvidia from a niche graphics card maker into a titan of A.I. hardware. That’s thanks to the GPU: a powerful chip Nvidia invented in 1999 that has become the de facto standard for A.I. infrastructure. Microsoft, Meta and other cloud providers use Nvidia’s GPUs to supply the computing power needed to run energy-hungry A.I. workloads, and companies are scrambling to get their hands on them amid a global chip shortage. With the demand for its chips soaring, Nvidia has reached a more than $3 trillion valuation, an 184 percent jump year-over-year as of August 16, according to Pitchbook. Huang is now worth $109 billion, making him the 12th richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. Huang has received numerous accolades, including the Semiconductor Industry Association’s Robert N. Noyce Award and the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, showcasing Huang’s dominant force in the chip sector.

Andrej Karpathy, Eureka Labs

The Prodigy of Deep Learning Innovation

Andrew Karpathy has been a leading force at some of the most powerful A.I. companies in the world. The Slovakian-born Canadian was a founding member of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, where he worked as a research scientist back when tech billionaires pledged a total of $1 billion in funds to the firm. Two years later, Karpathy left OpenAI to join Tesla as its senior director of A.I., leading the computer vision team behind Tesla Autopilot, the driver assistance software now built into millions of Tesla cars. After five years at Tesla, Karpathy went back to OpenAI in 2023 and built a team to improve GPT-4, the large language model powering ChatGPT. OpenAI’s total valuation could soon hit $150 billion if it closes a $6.5 billion raise from investors.

On top of his technical expertise, Karpathy is a passionate tech educator. In February 2024, he quit OpenAI for a second time to start Eureka Labs, an A.I. education company where he’s developing an undergraduate A.I. course that will be taught by an A.I. assistant. On the side, Karpathy runs a YouTube channel with more than 544,000 subscribers featuring videos teaching millions of viewers how to build A.I. models.

Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

The Futurist Financier

Vinod Khosla is widely recognized as one of the most vocal supporters of using technology to address global challenges like climate change and access to quality healthcare. In 1982, the Indian-born entrepreneur and venture capitalist co-founded Sun Microsystems, the tech company that introduced the world to Java programming and was ultimately acquired by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion. After leaving Sun in 1985, Khosla spent 18 years at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he played a crucial role in growing the semiconductor company Nexgen and built a reputation as one of the most important investors in semiconductors, software, networking and gaming.

In 2004, he founded Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm with over $15 billion in assets under management, mostly focused on early-stage companies that bring transformative innovation to A.I., healthcare, climate, sustainability, clean tech and more. Khosla believes deeply in A.I.’s potential to address global challenges like climate change and access to quality healthcare, reflected in the firm’s investments in companies like A.I.-powered weather balloon maker WindBorne, and Symbolica, which is tapping algebra to improve LLMs. Khosla was an early investor in OpenAI and scored exits with the 2020 SPAC listings of QuantumScape and OpenDoor, where he turned a $40 million investment into $1.4 billion.

Youngjip Kim, Samsung

The Global A.I. Innovator

Youngjip Kim is a driving force behind Samsung’s A.I. strategy. As head and executive vice president of the electronic titan’s A.I. team, the South Korean native has spearheaded efforts to integrate A.I. across Samsung’s diverse product lines, from smartphones to home appliances. Kim’s team is responsible for the Galaxy A.I., an A.I. assistant built into Samsung’s Galaxy S24 smartphone, enabling features like circle-to-search, text summarization and live translation. Kim also leads efforts to develop advanced A.I. algorithms that power its Bixby voice assistant, enhance camera capabilities, and optimize device performance across Samsung’s products. He has also helped push Samsung’s A.I. into the IoT (Internet of Things) space, making everyday devices smarter by enabling them to interact with one another. Beyond product development, Kim has led research and development groups for Samsung Pay and the mobile security platform Knox.

Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample and Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI

The Trailblazers of Parisian Ingenuity

When it comes to democratizing A.I., Mistral AI founders Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample and Arthur Mensch are core contributors. In 2023, the French trio made their first large language model free for everyone—establishing Mistral as a prominent open-source competitor to U.S.-based generative A.I. giants like OpenAI and DeepMind—and sent shockwaves across the tech scene with a massive $116 million seed round, followed a few months later in December 2023 by a $415 million Series A. Mistral's most recent funding round of $645 million in June 2024 reportedly valued the company, just over a year old, at more than $6 billion. The valuation followed an announcement in February that the company had landed a deal with Microsoft to make its models available to U.S. customers in exchange for access to Microsoft’s computational resources.

The Paris-based company has attracted prominent investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia. The Mistral team’s insights and innovations often signal new directions in A.I. development—evidenced by Nvidia’s recent partnerships with Mistral AI—and major tech firms and venture capitalists are known to closely track their work.

As CEO of the company, Mensch has been vocal in debates over the European Union’s landmark A.I. law, passed in March 2024. He argues that instead of regulating general-purpose A.I. models like Mistral’s, lawmakers should focus on how others use such models. He also opposes limitations on A.I. developers freely sharing their models. Unlike Lample and Lacroix, who started their careers at Facebook, Mensch’s background is in academia. All three founders have played crucial roles in several breakthrough projects, contributing to deep learning models that pushed the boundaries of language understanding and generation.

Yann LeCun, Meta

The Maverick of Modern A.I.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s vice president and chief A.I. scientist, is considered a pioneer in convolutional neural networks. Since starting his career at AT&T’s Bell Labs and going on to serve as the founding director of the now-iconic Facebook AI Research Lab, LeCun has long been pushing the envelope on machine learning with his influential work in deep learning. His algorithms have redefined image and text recognition and provided the backbone for many of today’s most advanced A.I. systems. LeCun is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. At NYU’s Computational and Biological Learning Laboratory, LeCun is currently working on projects like automatic phenotyping and unsupervised deep learning. With accolades such as the 2018 ACM Turing Award, which he won for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing,” LeCun’s contributions have made him a magnet for investment.

Fei-Fei Li, Stanford HAI

The Godmother of A.I.

Fei-Fei Li, the distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, has made enough waves in A.I. to earn her the nickname the “Godmother of A.I.” Creator of the computer vision project ImageNet, her work has been a cornerstone in developing deep learning technologies. Her role as a thought leader has not only secured her accolades like the IEEE Fellow status but also solidified her as a linchpin in A.I.’s financial ecosystem. This year, Li built a startup dubbed World Labs, which focuses on spatial A.I., into a unicorn worth $1 billion in just a few months. Of course, the Godmother of A.I. also has a hand in driving diversity and inclusion in A.I. research, development and policy through AI4ALL, a non-profit she co-founded in 2015. Li is a Sequoia professor of computer science at Stanford University and Denning Family co-director for the Stanford University Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). Her vision for A.I.—one that balances cutting-edge research with ethical considerations—continues to shape investment strategies and set the bar for innovation in the sector.

Jeff McMillan, Morgan Stanley

The Wall Street Wizard

Jeff McMillian is Morgan Stanley’s first Head of Firmwide A.I., a powerful seat dedicated to developing the investment bank’s framework for A.I. strategy and governance. In earlier roles with the company, the wealth management veteran led analytics, data and innovation, solidifying an exclusive partnership with OpenAI and establishing Morgan Stanley as the first Wall Street firm to leverage GPT-4 into A.I. solution. In September 2023, McMillan’s team deployed the AI Morgan Stanley Assistant, described as a “chief investment strategist, chief global economist and global equities strategist on call—24 hours a day,” to over 15,000 financial advisors.

“In the financial services sector, our strength lies in our interactions with clients,” McMillan tells Observer. “Our immediate focus is on using A.I. to increase the time our employees spend with clients, so they can focus more on building relationships.” Among the tools McMillan’s team has developed is the Morgan Stanley Debrief, an A.I. assistant that distills complex client discussions into clear takeaways and surfaces the necessary action items—this and other practical solutions use generative A.I. to reduce repetitive and administrative operational tasks.

“Let’s remember what has always mattered, and I believe always will: Strong leadership, cross-functional engagement, high standards of ethical behavior and a culture of ongoing learning and improvement,” McMillan tells Observer. “A.I. should enhance human capabilities, not replace them. The aim is to use A.I. to drive efficiency, improve decision-making, deepen our understanding of the world, and make knowledge more accessible.”

Jeff McMillan. Courtesy of Morgan Stanley

Vibhu Mittal, Inflection AI

The Conversational Craftsman

Vibhu Mittal's career has spanned the chaotic rise of Silicon Valley, touching nearly every corner of the digital landscape. A co-founder of Edmodo, the education platform that brought social networking to K-12 classrooms long before hybrid learning was cool, Mittal proved his knack for spotting the next big wave before it crested. His tenure as CEO transformed Edmodo from a fledgling startup into one of the world’s largest K-12 communities, used by tens of millions of students and teachers globally. Mittal didn’t stop there.

With a resume boasting leadership roles at Google and Yahoo, where he specialized in machine learning and data science, he’s had a hand in shaping the very algorithms that keep you clicking. Now, as a senior leader at Inflection AI, he’s steering a company that’s pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence to make it more intuitive, human-like, and—dare we say—empathetic. Whether launching companies or scaling them, Mittal’s career is a masterclass in harnessing tech for meaningful change, building tomorrow’s tools one strategic move at a time.

Elon Musk, Tesla, xAI and Neuralink

The Provocateur

Elon Musk has become a dominant force in A.I. innovation. The tech billionaire is the founder and CEO of Tesla, the $710 billion electric vehicle automaker that generated over $95 billion in total revenue as of late June. Under Musk’s leadership, Tesla has expanded its suite of A.I. innovations. Those include a full self-driving system, custom A.I. chips and the Dojo supercomputer for model training. The electric carmaker is even developing Optimus, a humanoid, bipedal robot with the goal of automating repetitive, dangerous or labor-intensive tasks across business and the home.

Musk has also started multiple A.I.-focused companies. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as an A.I. research non-profit and left before it became a private enterprise that launched the wildly successful ChatGPT. In 2016, Musk founded Neuralink, a startup developing a brain-computer interface with the goal of enhancing cognition and helping patients overcome neurological disorders. Musk’s most recent A.I. venture is xAI, a startup launched in July 2023 to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) intended to align with human interests. Within a year, xAI raised more than $6.1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners and other investors. xAI’s first product is Grok, an A.I. chatbot designed to be “anti-woke” in the name of free speech. Grok is integrated into X, formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought for $44 billion in late 2022.

Andrew Ng, Coursera and Google Brain

The Educator-in-Chief

Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain and Coursera, is leading global efforts to democratize A.I. The Palo Alto-based A.I. whiz has made significant contributions to deep learning through his work at Google Brain, where he helped develop large-scale neural networks that powered advancements in speech recognition, image classification and other A.I. features. Under his leadership, Google Brain laid the foundation for A.I. capabilities integrated into products like Google Maps, which has over 1 billion active users a month and Google Ads, used by more than 80 percent of businesses globally. The division also created TensorFlow, an open-source software library bookmarked by roughly 185,000 users on GitHub that developers and researchers can use to train their machine-learning models. Ng is also a driving force in A.I. education as co-founder of Coursera, which has a $1.27 billion market cap as of September 2024. Under Ng’s leadership, Coursera has democratized access to high-quality education by hosting over 7,000 courses, projects and professional certificate programs on the platform. He’s an instructor on courses like “A.I. For Everyone,” “Advanced Learning Algorithms” and “ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers” have enrolled more than a million people. Beyond Coursera, he founded DeepLearning.Ai, a technical training program for A.I. skills.

Peter Norvig, Stanford HAI

The Sage of A.I. Knowledge

Peter Norvig, engineering director at Google and education fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), has had a seismic impact on the A.I. industry. His co-authored textbook, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” is the authoritative, most-used textbook in the space, adopted by more than 1500 schools. Norvig has performed immense research in probabilistic reasoning and machine learning, and he is known for his knack for translating theoretical insights into practical advancements. Through his work at Stanford and elsewhere, Norvig has championed human-centered A.I. Earlier on in his career, Norvig headed up the computational sciences division at NASA Ames. He’s been at the helm of research and development for search improvements at Google for more than two decades.

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI

The Algorithmic Architect

Jakub Pachocki has stepped into a new leadership role at one of the most powerful A.I. companies in the world. Since Pachocki joined OpenAI in 2017, the ChatGPT-maker went from a non-profit with a $1 billion donation commitment to a private enterprise nearing a $100 billion valuation. After receiving his PhD in theoretical computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, the Polish native joined OpenAI’s research team, where he helped spearhead the development of GPT-4 and scale the company’s research in deep learning systems. Years later, after climbing the ranks, Pachocki was promoted to Chief Scientist of the A.I. giant, where he now oversees OpenAI’s efforts to develop AGI, short for artificial general intelligence, safely and beneficial to humanity. He was tapped to fill the role after co-founder Ilya Sutskever left to pursue new ventures. In response to the co-founder’s departure, Pachocki wrote on X that Sutskever introduced him to deep learning research and has been a “mentor” and “great collaborator” for years. CEO Sam Altman called him “one of the great minds of our generation.”

Vasi Philomin, AWS

The Cloud Conductor

Vasi Philomin is driving generative A.I. initiatives at one of the biggest cloud companies in the world. Amazon Web Services, AWS for short, has millions of active users and tens and thousands of partners. AWS holds a 33 percent market share in the $78.2 billion global cloud infrastructure market as of the second quarter of 2024, beating the likes of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, according to research firm Canalys. As vice president of GenAI at AWS, Philomin oversees the team behind Amazon Bedrock. Used by more than 10,000 businesses across industries, Bedrock provides AWS customers access to large language models such as Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, Mistral and AWS’s in-house model Titan. Under Philomin’s wing, AWS launched A.I. services in voice translation and computer vision, as well as tools for code developers and the industrial sector. Philomin also managed AWS’s Machine Learning Solutions Lab, a program that connects A.I. experts with businesses to identify potential use cases. On top of that, Philomin has led responsible A.I. efforts across AWS such as the creation of tools that introduce guardrails and mitigate bias in A.I. models, watermarks for A.I.-generated content and risk assessments to prevent cybersecurity attacks.

Joelle Pineau, Meta

The Research Revolutionary

Joelle Pineau is vice president of A.I. research at Meta, professor at McGill University and co-director of the university's Reasoning and Learning Lab. Pineau is the brains behind Smartwheeler, a robotic wheelchair initiative that aims to help elderly and mobility-impaired individuals regain independence. She also co-founded NurseBot, a personal robotics assistance project for the elderly. Her work on reinforcement learning and robotics has not only advanced A.I.'s capabilities over the 21st century but also attracted significant venture capital interest. Pineau's projects, like her groundbreaking work on autonomous systems, have earned her accolades that include the prestigious A.I. Chair at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada. Her dual role in academia and industry places her at a strategic vantage point, enabling her to channel academic insights into commercial success and shape the future of A.I. Pineau is part of a research cohort called Mila, which is renowned for its contributions to deep learning and has received significant funding from sources like the Quebec government.

Joelle Pineau. Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

David Rowlands, KPMG

The Enterprise Evangelist

David Rowlands, the no-nonsense Global Head of A.I. at KPMG, is the architect behind the firm’s push to inject artificial intelligence into the buttoned-up world of professional services. With his sharp strategic vision, Rowlands didn’t just introduce A.I. to KPMG—he rewrote the playbook by creating the KPMG Trusted A.I. framework, a blueprint designed to ensure that the firm’s algorithms are as ethical and reliable as they are innovative. His tenure has seen KPMG double down on its tech ambitions, pouring a staggering $2 billion into integrating A.I. and cloud computing throughout its operations. And it’s not just a vanity project: Rowlands expects this investment to rake in $12 billion in fresh revenue over the next five years, proving that his approach isn’t just forward-thinking—it’s a bottom-line game-changer.

Eric Schmidt, Schmidt Sciences

The Titan of Strategy

Eric Schmidt is the kind of power player who reshapes industries and leaves a seismic impact wherever he steps. As Google’s CEO and chairman during its defining decade, Schmidt took the reins of a scrappy startup and turned it into the digital behemoth that dictates the very terms of modern life. Even after stepping down in 2011, Schmidt remained the company’s secret weapon, serving as executive chairman until 2015 and later as Technical Advisor to Alphabet, where his insights guided the conglomerate’s technological strategy through turbulent years.

Schmidt didn’t stop there—he became a kingmaker in the A.I. world, wielding his clout through Innovation Endeavors, his Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Schmidt’s portfolio reads like a who’s who of artificial intelligence: alongside Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Microsoft and NVIDIA, Schmidt poured a jaw-dropping $1.3 billion into OpenAI, transforming the startup into a four-time unicorn practically overnight. Not content with one bet, he swooped in to rescue Stability AI, wiring $80 million alongside other heavy hitters to stabilize the troubled company after a CEO exodus and spiraling financial woes. And if that weren’t enough, Schmidt’s influence extended to thought leadership—teaming up with none other than Henry Kissinger to co-author the 2021 bestseller, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, cementing his role as both a titan and theorist in the tech space.

Karén Simonyan, Microsoft AI

The Cognitive Conductor

Karen Simonyan is the type of A.I. mastermind whose career reads like a greatest-hits album of cutting-edge research and billion-dollar breakthroughs. He’s best known for co-founding Inflection AI, a startup that went from academic curiosity to valuation juggernaut practically overnight, thanks to his prowess as Chief Scientist. But in a dramatic move fit for Silicon Valley lore, Simonyan and a fellow co-founder jumped ship to Microsoft AI in March 2024, where he now holds the coveted Chief Scientist role, steering the tech giant’s ambitious projects. Even before he became a top-billing name, Simonyan made waves during his postdoc at Oxford by designing VGGNet, the object recognition algorithm that clinched the prestigious ImageNet Challenge and became a gold standard in computer vision. His first venture was snapped up by DeepMind, where he spent years as a Principal Scientist, building A.I. models at a scale that left competitors scrambling to catch up. From the legendary AlphaZero, which redefined machine learning strategy, to the groundbreaking AlphaFold, which cracked the protein-folding problem, Simonyan’s work isn’t just impactful—it’s reshaping the very future of artificial intelligence.

Observer

Alex Singla, McKinsey & Company

The Strategic Sage of A.I. Transformation

Alex Singla is the man McKinsey turns to when they want A.I. to do more than just look impressive on a PowerPoint slide. As a senior partner and global head of QuantumBlack—the firm’s sleek, high-octane A.I. division—Singla’s specialty is taking digital dreams and scaling them into data-driven reality for McKinsey’s elite clientele. Under his watch, QuantumBlack has morphed from an ambitious concept into a powerhouse operation, deploying advanced machine learning and analytics to crack the toughest industry riddles. Whether it’s streamlining complex healthcare systems, turbocharging manufacturing, or giving financial giants an edge, Singla’s A.I. arsenal turns insights into action. And it’s not just about tools—Singla’s built up McKinsey’s A.I. muscle with precision, recruiting top-tier talent and creating cutting-edge labs to keep his firm at the front of the pack. For him, it’s not enough to just predict trends—he’s out to shape them.

Lisa Su, AMD

The Silicon Strategist

Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is one of the most influential people—let alone women—in A.I. Since taking the helm in 2014, Su has been a pivotal force in diversifying the A.I. chip industry, transforming AMD from a semiconductor firm rivaling big players like Nvidia into a key player in high-performance computing and graphics. Under Su’s leadership, the more than $200 billion company has made significant strides in developing processors and GPUs for data centers that power A.I. workloads, including generative A.I. These include AMD's EPYC processors that provide computational power across industries like the cloud, financial services and healthcare, and Instinct GPUs used by companies like Hugging Face, MosaicML and Lamini to train and deploy large language models. AMD’s chips work together to accelerate A.I. and machine learning tasks and optimize the performance of A.I. systems for efficiency and scalability. AMD’s chips have caught the attention of Big Tech: Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed to purchase AMD’s Instinct MI300X chip as a cheaper, readily available alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs.

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI

The Deep Thinker

Mustafa Suleyman has been at the forefront of the A.I. revolution for over a decade. He is best known as a co-founder of DeepMind, one of the world’s leading A.I. research labs focused on creating A.I. that can learn and think like humans. Under Suleyman’s leadership, DeepMind built AlphaGo, the first A.I. to defeat a world champion of the ancient Chinese board game Go. Google later purchased Deepmind for more than $500 million. After the acquisition, DeepMind claimed to have lowered Google’s data center cooling bill by 40 percent through investments in efficient servers, cooling techniques and green energy sources. Suleyman later left DeepMind to co-found Inflection A.I., a startup focused on creating A.I. systems that can interact with humans more naturally to make conversations feel more intuitive. That mission is reflected in Pi, Inflection’s A.I. chatbot designed to speak with empathy, which has caught the attention of high-profile investors. The company has received more than $1 billion from tech moguls like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. After releasing a book he co-authored on the dangers of A.I., Suleyman left Inflection to join Microsoft as the EVP and CEO of its A.I. division. At Microsoft A.I., Suleyman guides the development of consumer products like Copilot, an A.I. assistant; Microsoft 365, a suite of workplace tools with built-in generative A.I. features; and Azure A.I., a toolkit developers can use to build language models. Suleyman also oversees Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, which is worth more than $13 billion.

Mustafa Suleyman. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Ilya Sutskever, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

The Safety Sentinel

Ilya Sutskever is the kind of A.I. visionary who isn’t just playing the game—he’s writing the rules. As co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, Sutskever helped shape the company from a starry-eyed research lab into the juggernaut that’s rewritten the script on artificial intelligence, now flirting with a staggering $100 billion valuation. But the brains behind ChatGPT and countless other A.I. breakthroughs didn’t leave quietly. After a tumultuous stint that saw OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman dramatically ousted and then reinstated, Sutskever exited in May 2024 to launch a new venture: Safe Superintelligence Inc., a startup with a mission as bold as its name.

Armed with a fresh $1 billion war chest from marquee investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and SV Angel, Safe Superintelligence already has a jaw-dropping $5 billion valuation—and Sutskever isn’t rushing to market. This time, he’s laser-focused on building A.I. that’s not just smarter than humans, but fundamentally safe, intending to spend years in research to prevent the kind of nightmare scenarios that have haunted sci-fi. Long before OpenAI, Sutskever was a rock star in the deep learning world, putting neural networks on the map at the University of Toronto and catching Google’s eye with DNNresearch, his first startup, which was quickly snapped up in 2013. With over half a million citations to his name, he’s a generational force in A.I., poised to define not just the technology but the ethics of what comes next.

Ilya Sutskever. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

Latanya Sweeney, Ph.D, Harvard University

The Privacy Protector

Latanya Sweeney is an undisputed pioneer in algorithmic fairness and data privacy, and her role in the A.I. renaissance has been—and will continue to be—crucial. She was the first researcher to successfully demonstrate discrimination in algorithms, the first (with Ji Su Yoo and Jinyan Zang) to demonstrate vulnerabilities in voter privacy in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and—well before all of that, in 2001—the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences has multiple patents and more than 100 academic publications to her name. She founded and directed the Data Privacy Lab at both Carnegie Mellon University (2001-2011) and Harvard (2011 to present). In 2021, with a $3 million grant from the Ford Foundation, Sweeney founded the Public Interest Tech Lab, a non-profit that develops technologies to protect individual rights and ensures justice, equity and accountability are at the forefront of technology.

“Dr. Sweeney has broken barrier after barrier,” Jenny Toomey, director of the Ford Foundation Catalyst Fund, tells Observer, adding that Sweeney “maintains an unusual capacity to champion tech’s possibilities while holding it to the highest standards in public values.”

Prior to founding and directing the Public Interest Tech Lab, Sweeney was the chief technology officer at the Federal Trade Commission and, from 2016 to 2018, served on the U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, appointed by then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Sweeney’s contributions to A.I., policy, culture and innovation are expansive.

Latanya Sweeney. James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Sean White, Inflection AI

The Pioneer of Immersive A.I.

Sean White defies easy categorization, balancing a passion for cutting-edge A.I. with a relentless focus on human values. As CEO of Inflection AI, he’s at the helm of a company that’s rewriting the rules of personal A.I. with its emotionally attuned personal assistant, Pi—a chatbot designed to engage with empathy, not just efficiency. Unlike the powerhouses racing toward artificial general intelligence, White’s vision is refreshingly human-centric: Inflection AI is all about enhancing people’s capabilities, not replacing them. When he’s not steering the ship at Inflection, White serves on the boards of the Earth Species Project, which uses A.I. to unlock the secrets of animal communication, and The Tech Interactive, a hands-on science center in the heart of Silicon Valley that’s inspiring the next generation of creators and engineers. Before Inflection, White was Mozilla’s chief research and development officer, where he built the multidisciplinary research powerhouse behind Firefox’s evolution and pioneered emerging technologies that pushed the open-source browser to new heights. He’s also the founder of BrightSky Labs, a venture that made complex machine learning tools accessible for everyday creativity. With more than 30 peer-reviewed papers, 3,400 citations and 20 patents to his name, White’s track record is a testament to a career that’s as rigorous as it is visionary—all while keeping his focus firmly on using A.I. to improve the human experience.

Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face

The Luminary of Language Models

Thomas Wolf is the quintessential A.I. rebel—a computer scientist championing a vision of A.I. that’s open, accessible and collaborative. As co-founder and chief science officer at Hugging Face, Wolf has been a driving force behind the open-source revolution, turning the company into a powerhouse that’s rewriting the playbook for how cutting-edge A.I. is built and shared. With a career path as unorthodox as his approach, Wolf started out in the world of physics before making a surprising detour into patent law—only to eventually find his calling at the intersection of technology and community. His work at Hugging Face has supercharged natural language processing research, with the platform now hosting over 500,000 A.I. models and 250,000 datasets, creating a vibrant ecosystem that’s a magnet for developers and researchers alike. Last year, Hugging Face’s valuation soared to $4.5 billion after attracting investment from heavyweights like Google and Nvidia—an achievement that underscores just how indispensable Wolf’s contributions have become. But Wolf is more than a researcher; he’s an educator, using his popular Medium posts to break down complex topics and invite a global audience into the conversation. By making advanced A.I. tools and knowledge accessible, Wolf hasn’t just democratized the field—he’s made Hugging Face the beating heart of a new, community-driven A.I. era.

Zheng Zhang, AWS

The Innovator of Cross-Border A.I. Research

Zheng Zhang is the quiet powerhouse behind Amazon Web Services’ Shanghai A.I. Lab, where he’s pushing the boundaries of deep learning research in one of the world’s fastest-growing tech hubs. As director, Zhang orchestrates a team of top-tier scientists and engineers focused on machine learning, graph neural networks, and advanced data science—research that not only fuels AWS’s cutting-edge services but also sets the pace for A.I. innovation across China. With a pedigree that includes a tenure at Microsoft, Zhang’s expertise extends far beyond corporate walls. He collaborates with universities like NYU and Georgia Tech, publishing breakthrough papers on concepts like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a system that supercharges A.I. models by helping them find relevant information on the fly. His lab isn’t just a fortress of proprietary tech, though—it’s a contributor to the global A.I. community, sharing tools like the Deep Graph Library, a powerful Python package that’s leveling the playing field for researchers and developers alike. On top of his AWS role, Zhang is also a professor of computer science at NYU Shanghai (currently on leave), where he’s known for blending academic rigor with real-world impact. With his dual roles in industry and academia, Zhang is shaping A.I.’s future in ways that are as understated as they are transformative.

Masters of the Machine: The A.I. Leaders With Power, Influence, Capital and Vision