# One surprising fact about each of the 100 most influential people in AI

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/facts

- **Mark Chen** (Chief 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. ([event.technologyreview.com](https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-mit-2023/speaker/901826/mark-chen))
- **Sam Altman** (CEO, 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman))
- **Greg Brockman** (President, OpenAI): OpenAI's president dropped out of MIT in 2010 to join Stripe, and became the payments company's first CTO in 2013. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Brockman))
- **Elon Musk** (CEO, SpaceX): At 12, he sold Blastar, a game he had written in BASIC, to PC and Office Technology magazine for about $500. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk))
- **Dario Amodei** (Co-founder, Anthropic): In November 2023, OpenAI's board approached him about replacing Sam Altman as CEO. He said no. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Amodei))
- **Daniela Amodei** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniela_Amodei))
- **Arvind Krishna** (CEO 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Krishna))
- **Lila Ibrahim** (Chief AI Readiness Officer, Google DeepMind): Before running operations at Google DeepMind, she started out as a design engineer on Intel's Pentium chip. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_Ibrahim))
- **Liang Rubo** (Co-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. ([aljazeera.com](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/5/20/bytedance-ceo-steps-down-chooses-college-roommate-as-successor))
- **A.G. Sulzberger** (Publisher 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._G._Sulzberger))
- **Hock Tan** (CEO, Broadcom): Broadcom's CEO was once a vice president at Commodore, the 1980s home computer maker founded by Jack Tramiel. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hock_Tan))
- **Arvind Raman** (Acting 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. ([nist.gov](https://www.nist.gov/people/arvind-raman))
- **Jeff Bezos** (Founder, 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. ([cnbc.com](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/project-prometheus-bezos-bajaj-live-updates.html))
- **Moustapha Cissé** (Founder 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/moustapha-cisse/))
- **Josh Payne** (Founder and CEO, Nscale): He dropped out of high school to work three years as a coal miner in Australia; now his AI data-centre company is going public at a target $30 billion valuation. ([europeancapitalist.com](https://europeancapitalist.com/this-ceo-went-from-coal-mines-to-a-30-billion-ai-data-center-ipo-investors-arent-convinced-yet/))
- **Larry Ellison** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison))
- **He Tingbo** (Director, 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. ([english.aaj.tv](https://english.aaj.tv/news/330459486))
- **Valerii Borovyk** (Founder 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. ([global.espreso.tv](https://global.espreso.tv/sophisticated-drones-not-cheap-fpvs-behind-ukraines-strikes-on-russian-bombers-drone-manufacturer))
- **Joëlle Pineau** (Chief 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABlle_Pineau))
- **Matt Garman** (CEO, 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. ([kellogg.northwestern.edu](https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/news/blog/2025/11/20/intern-industry-leader-matt-garman-amazon/))
- **Ali Ghodsi** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Ghodsi))
- **Eddie Wu** (CEO, Alibaba): Alibaba's CEO is one of its co-founders and was the company's technology director when it started in 1999. ([alibabagroup.com](https://www.alibabagroup.com/about-alibaba-leadership-1637927598568767488))
- **Elizabeth Reid** (VP 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. ([sources.news](https://sources.news/p/liz-reid-google-search-gemini-interview))
- **Nigel Vaz** (CEO, Publicis Sapient): He says AI turned one client's 10-year migration of legacy COBOL code to Java into a three-year project. ([tearsheet.co](https://tearsheet.co/partner-content/how-ai-is-disrupting-financial-services-and-how-companies-can-respond-with-publicis-sapient-ceo-nigel-vaz/))
- **Michael Intrator** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Intrator))
- **Liang Mong Song** (Co-CEO, SMIC): After 17 years at TSMC, he helped rival Samsung beat TSMC to 14nm chips, then became co-CEO of China's SMIC. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liang_Mong_Song))
- **Daniel Nadler** (Founder and CEO, OpenEvidence): His AI medical search tool, known as ChatGPT for doctors, is used by 40% of US physicians, he told CNBC. ([cnbc.com](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/openevidence-chatgpt-for-doctors-doubles-valuation-to-12-billion.html))
- **Ben Affleck** (Actor and filmmaker): The Oscar-winning actor says Instagram banned him twice for impersonating himself. ([vanityfair.com](https://www.vanityfair.com/story/ben-affleck-instagram-ban?srsltid=AYCX9vL3VwonluwbuK9WFLPDAhE_mZtRQa5bpyrhh30Tx9LKfknVB7Lq))
- **Stella Li** (Executive 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Li))
- **Michael Truell** (Co-founder and CEO, Cursor): In 2016 he co-created Halite, a programming contest where players build AI bots that battle each other. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halite_AI_Programming_Competition))
- **Azalia Mirhoseini** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/azalia-mirhoseini-anna-goldie/))
- **Anna Goldie** (Co-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. ([annagoldie.com](https://www.annagoldie.com/))
- **Yang Zhilin** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/yang-zhilin/))
- **Peter Steinberger** (Creator, OpenClaw): He made OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent that became GitHub's most-starred software project. ([steipete.me](https://steipete.me/about))
- **Anima Anandkumar** (Bren 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. ([tensorlab.cms.caltech.edu](http://tensorlab.cms.caltech.edu/users/anima/))
- **Mohamed Moussa** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/mohamed-moussa/))
- **Coerte Voorhees** (Writer and filmmaker): 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. ([variety.com](https://variety.com/2026/film/news/val-kilmer-ai-as-deep-as-the-grave-trailer-1236722342/))
- **Brendan Foody** (Co-founder and CEO, Mercor): His startup Mercor pays over 30,000 contractors more than $1.5 million a day, combined, to help train AI. ([cnbc.com](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/ai-hiring-startup-mercor-funding.html))
- **Mikey Shulman** (Co-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. ([billboard.com](https://www.billboard.com/pro/suno-ai-music-startup-cover-story/))
- **Danielle Boyer** (Founder, 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/danielle-boyer/))
- **Utkarsh Saxena** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/utkarsh-saxena/))
- **Uljan Sharka** (Founder 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. ([podcast.sifted.eu](https://podcast.sifted.eu/1877446/episodes/19670912-domyn-ceo-uljan-sharka-we-re-a-few-quarters-away-from-1bn-arr))
- **Andrew Feldman** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012720/andrew-feldman/))
- **Deng Taihua** (Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, AgiBot): 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. ([baike.baidu.com](https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Deng%20Taihua/1483725))
- **Zhang Peng** (CEO, Zhipu): He led Zhipu to become the first of China's 'AI tigers' to go public, with a $558 million Hong Kong IPO. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/zhang-peng/))
- **Winston Weinberg** (Co-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. ([fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/harvey-ceo-winston-weinberg-reearn-roles-career-advice-ai-tech-innovation-eleven-billion-dollar-startup-sam-altman-openai-backed/))
- **Suchi Saria** (Founder 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/suchi-saria/))
- **Sanjay Mehrotra** (Chairman, President, and CEO, Micron Technology): He runs Micron, the only American maker of the high-bandwidth memory that sits beside most leading AI chips. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/sanjay-mehrotra/))
- **Vivek Raghavan** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/vivek-raghavan/))
- **Hon Weng Chong** (Founder 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. ([thoughteconomics.com](https://thoughteconomics.com/hon-wen-chong/))
- **Xiao Hong** (Founder 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. ([techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/27/china-vetoes-metas-2b-manus-deal-after-months-long-probe/))
- **Doreen Bogdan-Martin** (Secretary-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doreen_Bogdan-Martin))
- **Joseph Gordon-Levitt** (Co-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. ([un.org](https://www.un.org/en/desa/un-appoints-joseph-gordon-levitt-as-global-advocate))
- **Pat Grady** (Co-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. ([sequoiacap.com](https://sequoiacap.com/people/pat-grady))
- **Alfred Lin** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Lin))
- **Andrea Bartz** (Writer): A thriller novelist who was a lead plaintiff in the authors' suit over pirated books that Anthropic agreed to settle for $1.5 billion. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Bartz))
- **Mira Murati** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/mira-murati/))
- **Max Tegmark** (Founder 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+. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/max-tegmark/))
- **Karine Perset** (Deputy 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/karine-perset/))
- **Jack Clark** (Co-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. ([importai.substack.com](https://importai.substack.com/about))
- **Hank Green** (YouTuber): 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/hank-green/))
- **Ayoung Kim** (Artist): To make her AI and game-engine films about delivery workers, she rode along with a motorbike courier through Seoul during the pandemic. ([brooklynrail.org](https://brooklynrail.org/2026/02/art/ayoung-kim-with-eana-kim/))
- **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. ([atlanticcouncil.org](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/newton-campbell/))
- **Andy Konwinski** (Co-founder, Laude, Databricks, and Perplexity): Started at a trade school and a community college, then co-founded both Databricks and Perplexity. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Konwinski))
- **Sunny Gandhi** (Co-Executive Director, Encode): At 24, he spearheaded a successful effort to mandate human control over AI in nuclear weapons systems. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/sunny-gandhi/))
- **Daniela Rus** (Director, 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniela_Rus))
- **Josh Parker** (Head of Sustainability, Nvidia): Nvidia's sustainability chief is a former patent lawyer who got hired while trying to poach someone from Nvidia. ([axios.com](https://www.axios.com/2026/03/17/nvidia-sustainability-exec-ai-boom))
- **David Autor** (Professor of Economics, MIT): The MIT labor economist dropped out of Columbia and worked as a software developer at a Boston hospital before finishing college. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Autor))
- **Darío Gil** (Under 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. ([energy.gov](https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/under-secretary-gils-letter-community))
- **Andy Masley** (Researcher and writer): A former high school physics teacher who built his audience arguing that using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment. ([blog.andymasley.com](https://blog.andymasley.com/about))
- **Chad Edwards** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/chad-edwards/))
- **Paris Hilton** (Advocate against deepfakes): Paris Hilton says more than 100,000 fake explicit images of her are online, and she took that fight to Congress. ([19thnews.org](https://19thnews.org/2026/01/paris-hilton-aoc-deepfakes/))
- **Emil Michael** (Under 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. ([linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilmichael))
- **Erin Brockovich** (Founder, 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. ([brockovichdatacenter.com](https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/))
- **Wafa Ben-Hassine** (Chief, 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. ([wafabenhassine.com](https://www.wafabenhassine.com/about))
- **Bernadette Meehan** (CEO, 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadette_Meehan))
- **Sarah Guo** (Founder, Conviction): She built her family's company website at 14, pitched investors at 19 and became Greylock's youngest-ever general partner at 28. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Guo))
- **Bernie Sanders** (U.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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders))
- **David Sacks** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sacks))
- **Angle Bush** (Founder, 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/angle-bush/))
- **Alessandra Sala** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/alessandra-sala/))
- **Garrett Lord** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/garrett-lord/))
- **Joe Dominguez** (President and CEO, Constellation Energy Group): A former federal prosecutor now runs Constellation Energy, whose nuclear, wind, solar, hydro and gas plants span 19 states. ([aspenideas.org](https://www.aspenideas.org/speakers/joseph-dominguez))
- **Philip Colligan** (CEO, 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/philip-colligan/))
- **Meetali Jain** (Executive Director, Tech Justice Law): A lawyer who started out representing Guantanamo detainees now runs Tech Justice Law, which takes tech companies to court. ([techjusticelaw.org](https://techjusticelaw.org/about/))
- **Liz Shuler** (President, AFL-CIO): She leads the AFL-CIO's 15 million workers, and its AI partnership with Microsoft includes a promise not to fight unionizing. ([americamagazine.org](https://www.americamagazine.org/vatican-dispatch/2026/09/17/magnifica-humanitas-afl-cio-interview-labor-union/))
- **Geoff Ralston** (Founder, 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. ([tryterra.co](https://tryterra.co/podcast/Early-to-Every-Wave-Former-Y-Combinator-President-Geoff-Ralston))
- **Max Spero** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram_(AI_detector)))
- **Ilya Sutskever** (Co-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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- **Fei-Fei Li** (Co-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. ([ir.amd.com](https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1299/amd-to-acquire-world-labs-to-advance-the-future-of-ai-compute))
- **Marian Croak** (VP, 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. ([ncwit.org](https://ncwit.org/blog/2026-ncwit-pioneer-in-tech-marian-croak/))
- **Yann LeCun** (Executive 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Machine_Intelligence_Labs))
- **Ravi Kumar S** (CEO, Cognizant): Before becoming Cognizant's CEO, he started his career as a nuclear scientist at India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center. ([cognizant.com](https://www.cognizant.com/us/en/about-cognizant/corporate-governance/leadership-team/ravi-kumar-s))
- **Zhou Bowen** (Director 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/zhou-bowen/))
- **Chelsea Finn** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/chelsea-finn/))
- **Beth Barnes** (Founder 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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/beth-barnes/))
- **Veronyka Gimenes** (Co-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. ([time.com](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/veronyka-gimenes/))
- **Owain Evans** (Director, Truthful AI): He co-authored research showing that training a model to write insecure code can make it act misaligned on unrelated prompts. ([emergent-misalignment.com](https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/))
- **Sanmi Koyejo** (Co-founder, Virtue AI): He co-wrote the award-winning paper arguing that AI's sudden 'emergent abilities' can be a measurement illusion. ([neurips.cc](https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72117))
- **Alex Rives** (Head 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. ([biohub.org](https://biohub.org/team/alex-rives/))