# Where the most influential people in AI worked, studied and met

From Autumn's research on TIME's 2026 TIME100 AI list (https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/). Updated 2026-10-30. Interactive version: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/most-influential-people-in-ai/connections

## 10 worked at OpenAI

- Still at OpenAI: Mark Chen (at OpenAI 2018 to now), Sam Altman (at OpenAI 2015 to now), Greg Brockman (at OpenAI 2015 to now), Peter Steinberger (at OpenAI 2026 to now)
- Now at Anthropic: Dario Amodei (at OpenAI 2016–2020), Daniela Amodei (at OpenAI 2018–2020), Jack Clark (at OpenAI 2016–2020)
- Now at Thinking Machines Lab: Mira Murati (at OpenAI 2018–2024)
- Now at Safe Superintelligence: Ilya Sutskever (at OpenAI 2015–2024)
- Now at METR: Beth Barnes (at OpenAI 2019–2022)

## They worked together before

- Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie: Built the AI that lays out Google's TPU chips together at Google Brain, moved to Anthropic and then Google DeepMind together, and co-founded Ricursive Intelligence in 2025.
- Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever: Colleagues at OpenAI from 2016 to 2020. Each has since left to run a rival lab: Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence.
- Daniel Nadler and Mikey Shulman: Shulman was head of machine learning at Kensho, the AI company Nadler co-founded, before starting the AI music app Suno.
- Marian Croak and Yann LeCun: Both worked at AT&T's Bell Labs through the 1990s, long before either worked on AI at Google or Meta.
- Elon Musk and Mira Murati: Murati was a product manager on the Model X at Musk's Tesla from 2013 to 2016, then joined OpenAI, which Musk had co-founded.
- Elon Musk and Michael Truell: Cursor, the coding tool Truell co-founded, became part of Musk's SpaceX in 2026.
- Greg Brockman and Daniela Amodei: Overlapped at Stripe, where he was CTO, and again at OpenAI before she left to co-found Anthropic.
- Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston: Ralston followed Altman as president of Y Combinator in 2019, when Altman left to run OpenAI.
- Ali Ghodsi and Andy Konwinski: Co-founded Databricks in 2013. Konwinski went on to co-found Perplexity as well.
- Yann LeCun and Joëlle Pineau: Worked side by side in Meta's AI research lab until both left in 2025, she for Cohere and he to found his own lab.
- Arvind Krishna and Darío Gil: Gil spent two decades at IBM Research, which he led, before becoming the US Energy Department's under secretary for science.
- Pat Grady and Alfred Lin: Run Sequoia Capital together, one of the biggest investors in AI companies.

## Where they have worked (internships and university posts not counted)

- Google or DeepMind: 13 (Dario Amodei, Lila Ibrahim, Moustapha Cissé, Elizabeth Reid, Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Max Spero, Ilya Sutskever, Fei-Fei Li, Marian Croak, Chelsea Finn, Beth Barnes, Sanmi Koyejo)
- OpenAI: 10 (Mark Chen, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Peter Steinberger, Mira Murati, Jack Clark, Ilya Sutskever, Beth Barnes)
- Meta: 7 (Moustapha Cissé, Joëlle Pineau, Mohamed Moussa, Xiao Hong, Yann LeCun, Sanmi Koyejo, Alex Rives)
- Anthropic: 5 (Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Azalia Mirhoseini, Anna Goldie, Jack Clark)
- Amazon: 3 (Jeff Bezos, Matt Garman, Anima Anandkumar)
- IBM: 3 (Arvind Krishna, Darío Gil, Zhou Bowen)

## Where they studied (34 have a PhD)

- Stanford University: 13 (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, Matt Garman, Anna Goldie, Andrew Feldman, Suchi Saria, Alfred Lin, Andy Masley, Emil Michael, David Sacks, Geoff Ralston, Max Spero)
- Harvard University: 8 (Greg Brockman, Hock Tan, Daniel Nadler, Mikey Shulman, Utkarsh Saxena, Alfred Lin, David Autor, Emil Michael)
- MIT: 8 (Mark Chen, Greg Brockman, Hock Tan, Michael Truell, Anna Goldie, Darío Gil, Chelsea Finn, Owain Evans)
- UC Berkeley: 6 (Arvind Raman, Liang Mong Song, Sanjay Mehrotra, Max Tegmark, Andy Konwinski, Chelsea Finn)
- Columbia University: 5 (Michael Intrator, Mikey Shulman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, David Autor, Owain Evans)
- Princeton University: 4 (Dario Amodei, Jeff Bezos, Fei-Fei Li, Marian Croak)