One surprising fact about each of them

Joëlle PineauChief AI Officer, Cohere

Before leading Meta's AI research lab, she sat in a helicopter cockpit recording her own voice to train a speech system, because no female pilots were available.

Danielle BoyerFounder, The STEAM Connection

She turned down a reported $65 million from a big tech company for the AI she built to teach her endangered language.

Yang ZhilinCo-founder and CEO, Moonshot AI

A Pink Floyd devotee, he named his AI lab, Moonshot AI, after the band's album The Dark Side of the Moon.

Ben AffleckActor and filmmaker

The Oscar-winning actor says Instagram banned him twice for impersonating himself.

Owain EvansDirector, Truthful AI

He co-authored research showing that training a model to write insecure code can make it act misaligned on unrelated prompts.

Greg BrockmanPresident, OpenAI

OpenAI's president dropped out of MIT in 2010 to join Stripe, and became the payments company's first CTO in 2013.

Daniela AmodeiCo-founder, Anthropic

Anthropic's president studied English literature on a flute scholarship and worked on a congressional campaign before joining Stripe as an early employee.

A.G. SulzbergerPublisher and Chairman, The New York Times Co.

The New York Times publisher once wrote about the last place still developing Kodachrome film, and the story became a 2017 movie.

Jeff BezosFounder, Amazon; Co-founder and Co-CEO, Prometheus

Four years after stepping down as Amazon CEO, he is a CEO again, co-running an AI lab that raised $18 billion in its first seven months.

He TingboDirector, Huawei

After US sanctions hit Huawei, China's 'chip queen' told staff in a 2019 letter that her chip unit was building a backup lifeline for Huawei and the whole country.

Ali GhodsiCo-founder and CEO, Databricks

An Iranian-born computer scientist who came to Berkeley as a visiting scholar in 2009, he now runs a company valued at $190 billion.

Nigel VazCEO, Publicis Sapient

He says AI turned one client's 10-year migration of legacy COBOL code to Java into a three-year project.

His AI medical search tool, known as ChatGPT for doctors, is used by 40% of US physicians, he told CNBC.

Azalia MirhoseiniCo-founder, Ricursive Intelligence

She helped build an AI that Google used to design its own TPU chips, and now runs a startup where AI designs the chips that power AI.

With the family's consent, he used AI to finish the late Val Kilmer's role, which now fills over an hour of his film.

Uljan SharkaFounder and CEO, Domyn

He moved from Albania to Italy in 2008 without knowing a word of Italian; now his company leads the EU's Europa frontier AI model consortium.

He led Zhipu to become the first of China's 'AI tigers' to go public, with a $558 million Hong Kong IPO.

Sanjay MehrotraChairman, President, and CEO, Micron Technology

He runs Micron, the only American maker of the high-bandwidth memory that sits beside most leading AI chips.

Doreen Bogdan-MartinSecretary-General, United Nations International Telecommunication Union

The first woman to lead the UN's telecom agency, the ITU, is also an active amateur radio operator.

Andrea BartzWriter

A thriller novelist who was a lead plaintiff in the authors' suit over pirated books that Anthropic agreed to settle for $1.5 billion.

Karine PersetDeputy Head of AI and Emerging Digital Technologies Division, OECD

She oversaw the OECD's AI Principles, and her job includes getting 46 governments to understand AI terms the same way.

Ayoung KimArtist

To make her AI and game-engine films about delivery workers, she rode along with a motorbike courier through Seoul during the pandemic.

Sunny GandhiCo-Executive Director, Encode

At 24, he spearheaded a successful effort to mandate human control over AI in nuclear weapons systems.

Darío GilUnder Secretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy

He came to the U.S. from Spain as an exchange student, led the IBM team that put the first quantum computer on the cloud, and is now DOE's Under Secretary for Science.

Paris HiltonAdvocate against deepfakes

Paris Hilton says more than 100,000 fake explicit images of her are online, and she took that fight to Congress.

Wafa Ben-HassineChief, Digital Technology and Human Rights Section, OHCHR

An international lawyer who has worked with the UN human rights office, she helped draft the preamble of Tunisia's post-revolution constitution.

Bernie SandersU.S. Senator, Vermont

He worked as a carpenter and writer and lost two Senate races in the 1970s before becoming the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history.

Alessandra SalaCo-chair, UNESCO Women for Ethical AI & senior director of AI and data science, Shutterstock

Her father got an AI voicemail that sounded exactly like her sister; she now represents Shutterstock in a group writing standards to tackle deepfakes.

Philip ColliganCEO, Raspberry Pi Foundation

His Raspberry Pi Foundation launched an AI course for kids two months before ChatGPT; it has since reached about 5 million children.

Geoff RalstonFounder, SAIF

The man who built RocketMail, which became Yahoo Mail, later ran Y Combinator and is now focused on SAIF, a fund steering AI toward a good future.

Marian CroakVP, Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology, Google

The social psychologist who co-developed text-to-donate and earned 200-plus patents is now Google's VP of Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology.

Zhou BowenDirector and Chief Scientist, Shanghai AI Laboratory

After 15 years at IBM, he now directs the Shanghai AI Lab and chairs a Chinese standards group shaping how frontier AI risks are measured.

Veronyka GimenesCo-founder and Institutional Director, Código Não Binário

When a viral clip brought a wave of anti-trans hate, she turned to AI and built TybyrIA, an open-source model that detects anti-LGBTQIA+ hate speech.

Peter SteinbergerCreator, OpenClaw

He made OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent that became GitHub's most-starred software project.

Liang RuboCo-founder, Chairman, and CEO, Bytedance

ByteDance's CEO roomed with founder Zhang Yiming at Nankai University and was the company's head of human resources when he was named CEO in 2021.

Hon Weng ChongFounder and CEO, Cortical Labs

A medical doctor by background, he founded Cortical Labs, which grows neurons on silicon; its CL1 is the first biological computer available outside a research lab.

Utkarsh SaxenaCo-founder and CEO, Adalat AI

His first case as a court clerk was a man jailed 12 years awaiting trial; his AI now speeds up 5,500 Indian courtrooms.

Mark ChenChief Research Officer, OpenAI

Before joining OpenAI, he was a quant trader at firms including Jane Street; at OpenAI he led the teams behind Codex and DALL-E and worked on Image GPT.

Elon MuskCEO, SpaceX

At 12, he sold Blastar, a game he had written in BASIC, to PC and Office Technology magazine for about $500.

Arvind KrishnaCEO and Chairman, IBM

IBM's CEO began his career at its research lab in 1990 and spent 18 years there before climbing to the top job.

Hock TanCEO, Broadcom

Broadcom's CEO was once a vice president at Commodore, the 1980s home computer maker founded by Jack Tramiel.

Moustapha CisséFounder and CEO, Kera Health Platforms

His AI health insurer in Senegal runs entirely through WhatsApp and approves claims within 30 seconds; providers there usually wait 120 days to be paid.

Valerii BorovykFounder and CEO, First Contact

He founded First Contact, maker of the Osa drones likely used in Operation Spiderweb, and says such strikes need sophisticated drones, not cheap $500 FPVs.

Eddie WuCEO, Alibaba

Alibaba's CEO is one of its co-founders and was the company's technology director when it started in 1999.

Michael IntratorCo-founder and CEO, CoreWeave

CoreWeave started as a crypto-mining side project in a natural gas hedge fund's office, then moved to a New Jersey garage.

Stella LiExecutive Vice President, BYD

She joined BYD in 1996 to sell its batteries abroad, and became the first woman ever named World Car Person of the Year.

Anna GoldieCo-founder, Ricursive Intelligence

The AI chip designer she co-led has laid out four generations of Google's TPU chips; now her startup is a frontier AI lab targeting chip design.

Brendan FoodyCo-founder and CEO, Mercor

His startup Mercor pays over 30,000 contractors more than $1.5 million a day, combined, to help train AI.

Andrew FeldmanCo-founder and CEO, Cerebras Systems

His company builds a dinner-plate-sized AI chip, about 57 times the size of a GPU and the largest chip ever made.

Winston WeinbergCo-founder and CEO, Harvey

A lawyer by training, he and his co-founder cold-emailed Sam Altman, which helped their legal AI startup Harvey get early access to GPT-4.

Vivek RaghavanCo-founder, Sarvam AI

He spent over a decade helping build Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric ID system, before setting out to build India its own AI.

Joseph Gordon-LevittCo-founder, Creators Coalition on AI

The actor is now the UN's first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance, a role created in March 2026.

Mira MuratiCo-founder and CEO, Thinking Machines Lab

Served as OpenAI's interim CEO during the 2023 ouster, then co-founded Thinking Machines Lab, whose $2 billion raise TIME calls the largest seed round ever.

Jack ClarkCo-founder and Head of Public Benefit, Anthropic

A former Bloomberg and Register tech reporter who co-founded Anthropic and still writes Import AI, a weekly AI newsletter.

Newton Campbell Jr.Senior AI Researcher, NASA OCIO & Board Member, The Planetary Society

A senior AI researcher for NASA's chief information office who also sits on the board of directors of The Planetary Society.

Daniela RusDirector, MIT CSAIL; Co-founder, Liquid AI

The director of MIT's AI lab co-founded Liquid AI, a spinout from that lab, and has co-founded other robotics and AI companies.

Andy MasleyResearcher and writer

A former high school physics teacher who built his audience arguing that using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment.

Emil MichaelUnder Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and Department of Defense CTO

Before becoming the Pentagon's chief technology officer, he was Uber's chief business officer from 2013 to 2017.

Bernadette MeehanCEO, Wikimedia Foundation

Before running Wikipedia's nonprofit, she was a Wall Street banker, the White House's national security spokesperson and U.S. ambassador to Chile.

David SacksCo-Chair, President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology

Before shaping White House AI policy, he was PayPal's COO and product leader and produced the movie Thank You for Smoking.

Garrett LordCo-founder and CEO, Handshake

His student careers platform, Handshake, built an AI unit that went from zero to over $1 billion in gross annualized revenue in 16 months.

Meetali JainExecutive Director, Tech Justice Law

A lawyer who started out representing Guantanamo detainees now runs Tech Justice Law, which takes tech companies to court.

Ilya SutskeverCo-founder and Chief Scientist, Safe Superintelligence

At 16 he spent a month in a Canadian high school before entering university as a third-year student; he later co-built AlexNet and co-founded OpenAI.

Yann LeCunExecutive chairman & co-founder, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs

The former Meta chief AI scientist co-founded AMI Labs in Paris to build world-model AI, and it raised $1.03 billion in a seed round.

Chelsea FinnCo-founder, Physical Intelligence

Her robot startup's model assembled and labeled 59 chocolate boxes without interruption; she says her co-founders talk to people while she talks to robots.

Sanmi KoyejoCo-founder, Virtue AI

He co-wrote the award-winning paper arguing that AI's sudden 'emergent abilities' can be a measurement illusion.

Pat GradyCo-steward, Sequoia Capital

Before Sequoia, he made $9 an hour putting down shingles in a high school construction job, and Sequoia's returns helped pay his Boston College tuition.

Josh ParkerHead of Sustainability, Nvidia

Nvidia's sustainability chief is a former patent lawyer who got hired while trying to poach someone from Nvidia.

Mohamed MoussaCo-founder and CTO, Tarteel

Finding it hard to type Arabic to look up Quran verses, he helped build a voice AI app for Quran study that now has 20 million downloads.

Max SperoCo-founder and CEO, Pangram Labs

His AI-text detector Pangram says its monthly users jumped from 2,700 in June 2025 to 120,000 in June 2026.

Sam AltmanCEO, OpenAI

OpenAI's board fired him in November 2023, and he was back in charge five days later after more than 700 of 770 employees threatened to quit.

Dario AmodeiCo-founder, Anthropic

In November 2023, OpenAI's board approached him about replacing Sam Altman as CEO. He said no.

Lila IbrahimChief AI Readiness Officer, Google DeepMind

Before running operations at Google DeepMind, she started out as a design engineer on Intel's Pentium chip.

Arvind RamanActing head, U.S. CAISI; Director, NIST

The director of NIST, the US standards agency, is a mechanical engineer whose research has focused on atomic force microscopes.

Larry EllisonCo-founder, CTO, and Executive Chairman, Oracle

A college dropout whose early project was a CIA database code-named Oracle, he put $1,200 of his own money into the company that became Oracle in 1977.

Matt GarmanCEO, Amazon Web Services

He joined Amazon as an intern in 2005 on a project that would become AWS, and 19 years later became its CEO.

Elizabeth ReidVP and Head of Search, Google

Google's head of Search was the first female engineer in its New York office, and started on the team that built Google Local, the foundation for Maps.

Liang Mong SongCo-CEO, SMIC

After 17 years at TSMC, he helped rival Samsung beat TSMC to 14nm chips, then became co-CEO of China's SMIC.

Michael TruellCo-founder and CEO, Cursor

In 2016 he co-created Halite, a programming contest where players build AI bots that battle each other.

Anima AnandkumarBren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Caltech

Her lab built an AI weather forecaster that runs 45,000 times faster than standard weather models with the same accuracy.

Mikey ShulmanCo-founder and CEO, Suno

His AI music app makes about 7 million songs a day, a Spotify catalog's worth every two weeks, according to a pitch deck Billboard obtained.

He co-founded AgiBot in 2023 but made his first public appearance only in August 2025, the year it shipped more humanoid robots than anyone.

Suchi SariaFounder and CEO, Bayesian Health

Her company won FDA clearance for the first continuous AI monitor that warns doctors of sepsis, a factor in over a third of hospital deaths.

Xiao HongFounder and CEO, Manus

Sold his AI agent startup Manus to Meta in a deal reported at about $2 billion, then Beijing ordered the deal unwound.

Alfred LinCo-steward, Sequoia Capital

As a Harvard student he resold pizza by the slice, which caught Tony Hsieh's eye and led to Zappos; he now co-leads Sequoia as managing partner.

Max TegmarkFounder and Chair, Future of Life Institute

An MIT physicist whose nonprofit grades AI companies on safety; the top score on its index this summer was a C+.

Hank GreenYouTuber

One of the internet's longest-running educators, he published a personal AI policy after saying chatting with LLMs gave him an unhealthy level of dopamine.

Andy KonwinskiCo-founder, Laude, Databricks, and Perplexity

Started at a trade school and a community college, then co-founded both Databricks and Perplexity.

David AutorProfessor of Economics, MIT

The MIT labor economist dropped out of Columbia and worked as a software developer at a Boston hospital before finishing college.

Chad EdwardsCo-founder and CEO, CuspAI

His startup CuspAI used AI to narrow 300 trillion possible structures to 20 molecules that might pull 'forever chemicals' out of water.

Erin BrockovichFounder, Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting

An environmental advocate for more than 30 years, Erin Brockovich now runs a map where communities report issues with AI data centers.

Sarah GuoFounder, Conviction

She built her family's company website at 14, pitched investors at 19 and became Greylock's youngest-ever general partner at 28.

Angle BushFounder, Black Women In Artificial Intelligence

She set out to build a cocoa-serving robot, never finished it, and founded Black Women in AI, which now has 155 members around the world.

Joe DominguezPresident and CEO, Constellation Energy Group

A former federal prosecutor now runs Constellation Energy, whose nuclear, wind, solar, hydro and gas plants span 19 states.

Liz ShulerPresident, AFL-CIO

She leads the AFL-CIO's 15 million workers, and its AI partnership with Microsoft includes a promise not to fight unionizing.

Fei-Fei LiCo-founder and CEO, World Labs; Founding Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

AMD agreed in September 2026 to buy World Labs, the AI lab she leads, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion.

Ravi Kumar SCEO, Cognizant

Before becoming Cognizant's CEO, he started his career as a nuclear scientist at India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center.

Beth BarnesFounder and CEO, METR

She left OpenAI to test AI from the outside; her group's chart shows AI's task length doubling every four to seven months.

Alex RivesHead of Science, Biohub and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

He started and led Meta's ESM project, which built the first large-scale transformer language models for proteins, then co-founded EvolutionaryScale.