Who’s Who In AI: A curated directory of influential builders, researchers, founders, engineers, investors, writers, and public figures shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
About This Directory
Artificial intelligence is evolving rapidly, driven by a relatively small group of individuals whose ideas, research, products, and companies influence the direction of the industry.
This directory serves as a practical reference guide for anyone seeking to understand the people behind today’s most important AI breakthroughs, businesses, platforms, and conversations.
Whether you’re researching industry leaders, discovering influential voices, following emerging startups, or simply learning who’s shaping the future of AI, this directory provides a structured place to begin.
Who’s Who in AI
Born in China, Li moved to the US at age 15 and went on to study physics at Princeton before earning her PhD in electrical engineering from Caltech. She is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and a founding co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and served as Director of Stanford's AI Lab from 2013 to 2018.
Her foundational contribution to the field is ImageNet — a massive labeled image dataset whose creation in 2009 became the catalyst for the deep learning revolution. Without ImageNet, the breakthroughs of the 2010s happen differently, if at all.
In October 2025, Li released RTFM, a real-time generative world model capable of generating video while interacting with users, built around three principles: efficiency, scalability, and persistence. In February 2026, she disclosed the technical details of World Labs' first spatial intelligence product, Marble, at the Cisco AI Summit.
Her recognition has been extraordinary even by the standards of this field. Li received the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and was named TIME's 2025 Person of the Year. She was also named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Her framing of the work is consistent: "Human-centered AI is about augmenting human intelligence, not replacing it. I believe in AI that benefits people in positive and benevolent ways, and which reflects the diversity of the human experience."
Fidji Simo was the first member of her family to graduate from high school, growing up in France before building one of the more distinctive executive careers in tech. She spent a decade at Meta, rising to head of the Facebook app in 2019, where she oversaw News Feed, Marketplace, Ads, Groups, Video, and Stories. She then led Instacart as CEO, taking the company public in 2023, helping to break the longest tech IPO drought in three decades.
In August 2025, Simo joined OpenAI as CEO of Applications, overseeing product, business, technology, and engineering functions, reporting directly to Sam Altman and driving the company's consumer and enterprise AI offerings.
Her tenure has already included the January 2026 launch of ChatGPT Health, a service integrating users' medical records and wellness data for personalized health insights. That focus on health is personal — Simo founded the Metrodora Institute in 2023 after being misdiagnosed for years before receiving a diagnosis of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a lesser-known nervous system disorder.
She also sits on the board of Shopify, making her one of the most operationally connected executives in the AI and consumer tech landscape.
Submit a name