It may seem like AI emerged in the mainstream consciousness from nowhere. But not everyone is surprised.
For prescient researchers, founders, and others who make up Insider's AI 100, this moment was inevitable.
Even among those who predicted this moment, the speed with which AI has arrived on the world stage has been startling. And it's led to mixed reactions; first, a wave of wonder, followed by a period of deep skepticism.
AI has become a Rorschach test: Ask someone about it, and they'll reveal something about themselves, about how they feel about technology, the economy, and the future.
What's clear is it's here, and the pace of change is showing no signs of letting up.
Insider set out to identify the people behind the AI, those building it, utilizing it, and thinking carefully about its risks.
"The problem is that algorithms aren't the kind of thing that can have accountability — only people can do that. And 'intelligence' is not a good cover term for those concepts, nor a neutral way to refer to this tech," Dr. Emily M. Bender, the University of Washington professor told Insider via email.
Our list includes people who are not only pushing the boundaries of the field but also those who are trying to ensure AI develops steadily and responsibly.
We considered people who were:
- Successfully reinventing a business model with AI
- May have had a unique path into this field
- Tackling "human condition" problems and using AI to make people happier, healthier, etc.
- Providing checks, balances, and transparency for the industry or particular tools
- Limiting harms or addressing negative consequences of the technology
The people on our list will likely impact the future of this technology and how it may shape our lives.
David Brown
Amazon Web Services
Mike Intrator
CoreWeave
Sanja Fidler
Nvidia
Sean Lie
Cerebras Systems
Renee James
Ampere
Sissie Hsiao
Daphne Luong
Apple
Lisa Su
AMD
Sandra Rivera
Intel
Jack Hidary
SandboxAQ
Kevin Scott
Microsoft
Greg Brockman
OpenAI
Dario Amodei
Anthropic
Clem Delangue
Hugging Face
Sarah Nagy
Seek AI
Karén Simonyan
Inflection AI
Robin Li
Baidu
Aidan Gomez
Cohere
Mira Murati
OpenAI
Ovetta Sampson
Naveen Rao
Databricks
Silvio Savarese
Salesforce
Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec
Amazon Web Services
Diya Wynn
Amazon Web Services
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury
Grammarly
Daphne Koller
Insitro
Brendan Frey
Deep Genomics
Dave Ferrucci
Elemental Cognition
Claire Novorol
Ada Health
James Min
Cleerly
Alex Wiltschko
Osmo
Noémie Elhadad
Columbia University/NewYork-Presbyterian
Kristen Fortney
BioAge Labs
Pushmeet Kohli
DeepMind
Jo Aggarwal
Wysa
Rohit Prasad
Amazon
Nikko Ström
Amazon
Shreya Shankar
Alta
Prakhar Mehrotra
Walmart
Miqdad Jaffer
Shopify
Raquel Urtasun
Waabi
Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov
eBay
Reid Hoffman
Greylock
Sarah Guo
Conviction
Martin Casado
Andreessen Horowitz
Sonya Huang
Sequoia Capital
Anju Kambadur
Bloomberg
Rajat Taneja
Visa
Manuela Veloso
JPMorgan
Greg Jensen
Bridgewater
Marco Argenti
Goldman Sachs
Vincent Spruyt
KINESSO
Vidhya Srinivasan
Matt Steiner
Meta
David Evan Harris
UC Berkeley
Camille Carlton
Center for Humane Technology
Joy Buolamwini
Algorithmic Justice League
Elham Tabassi
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Aviv Ovadya
Independent researcher
Chris Wiggins
The New York Times
Alexandru Costin
Adobe
Sarah Silverman
Self
Rob Bredow
Industrial Light & Magic
Charlie Brooker
Broke & Bones
Ofir Krakowski
Deepdub
Aaron Ng
Hyper
Andrew Mason
Descript
Cristóbal Valenzuela
Runway
Luka Pataky
Sportradar
Tony Jebara
Spotify
Hadi Partovi
Code.org
Sal Khan
Khan Academy
Rachel Thomas
Fast.ai
Max Tegmark
Future of Life Institute
Edward Tian
GPTZero
Ling Cheng
Quizlet
John Serafini
HawkEye 360
E. Egon Rinderer
Shift5
Kathleen Fisher
DARPA
Bradley Boyd
Stanford University
Nini Hamrick
Vannevar Labs
Ken Bedingfield
Epirus
Shyam Sankar
Palantir
Antoine Rostand
Kayrros
Patrick Beukema
Skylight, Allen Institute for AI
Himanshu Gupta
ClimateAi
Karen Panetta
Tufts University School of Engineering
Jason Koeller
Chemix
Emily M. Bender
University of Washington
Camille Stewart Gloster
The White House
Safiya Noble
UCLA
Timnit Gebru
Distributed AI Research Institute
Geoffrey Hinton
University of Toronto
Ali Alkhatib
Independent Researcher
Inioluwa Deborah Raji
Mozilla
Margaret Mitchell
Hugging Face
Ranjit Singh
Data & Society
Shane Legg
Google DeepMind
Meredith Whittaker
Signal, AI Now Institute
Jack Clark
Anthropic
