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
There are currently 8 names in this directory beginning with the letter J.
Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist, OpenAI
Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1991, Jakub Pachocki was a six-time finalist of the Polish Olympiad in Informatics before earning his PhD in theoretical computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and completing postdoctoral work at Harvard. He joined OpenAI in 2017, and replaced Ilya Sutskever as chief scientist in May 2024 — having already emerged as the quiet architect of much of what OpenAI had built.
His fingerprints are on OpenAI's most consequential technical bets. The 2019 defeat of the world Dota 2 champion by OpenAI's bots cemented his belief that even simple algorithms, when combined with massive compute, could achieve wonders — and seeded his conviction that scaling would be decisive. He later led the training of GPT-4, and is one of the key architects of OpenAI's reasoning models — o1 and o3 — which now underpin all major chatbot and agent-based systems.
His current north star is the automated scientist. OpenAI has set its sights on building a fully autonomous AI research agent — with a planned "AI research intern" by September 2026 and a full multi-agent research system by 2028. Pachocki's framing is precise: "Despite it seeming like it's just mathematics, it's really a sort of natural science, where you're trying to understand this phenomenon."
TIME named Pachocki to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. Sam Altman has called him "easily one of the greatest minds of our generation."
Submitted by: Admin Born in Gdańsk, Poland in 1991, Jakub Pachocki was a six-time finalist of the Polish Olympiad in Informatics before earning his PhD in theoretical computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and completing postdoctoral work at Harvard. He joined OpenAI in 2017, and replaced Ilya Sutskever as chief scientist in May 2024 — having already emerged as the quiet architect of much of what OpenAI had built.
His fingerprints are on OpenAI's most consequential technical bets. The 2019 defeat of the world Dota 2 champion by OpenAI's bots cemented his belief that even simple algorithms, when combined with massive compute, could achieve wonders — and seeded his conviction that scaling would be decisive. He later led the training of GPT-4, and is one of the key architects of OpenAI's reasoning models — o1 and o3 — which now underpin all major chatbot and agent-based systems.
His current north star is the automated scientist. OpenAI has set its sights on building a fully autonomous AI research agent — with a planned "AI research intern" by September 2026 and a full multi-agent research system by 2028. Pachocki's framing is precise: "Despite it seeming like it's just mathematics, it's really a sort of natural science, where you're trying to understand this phenomenon."
TIME named Pachocki to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. Sam Altman has called him "easily one of the greatest minds of our generation."
James Peng
Co-founder and CEO, Pony.ai
A Stanford graduate who honed his skills at Google and Baidu, James Peng co-founded Pony.ai in Silicon Valley in 2016. The company initially focused on China but has since expanded across Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. It is now publicly traded on both Nasdaq and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Pony.ai is squarely in its scale-up phase. In Q1 2025, robotaxi fare-charging revenues grew approximately 800% year-over-year, while the company unveiled its seventh-generation autonomous driving system, reducing bill-of-materials costs by 70% compared to its predecessor. In May 2025, the firm inked a strategic partnership to offer driverless taxis via Uber in the Middle East, with plans to expand to additional international markets.
As of early 2026, Peng is actively exploring further expansion into Europe, Singapore, and beyond.
Peng is bullish about Pony.ai's competitive position due to the Chinese government's strong backing of autonomous vehicle technology — an advantage that gives the company regulatory momentum that Western rivals rarely enjoy.
TIME named Peng to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Submitted by: Admin A Stanford graduate who honed his skills at Google and Baidu, James Peng co-founded Pony.ai in Silicon Valley in 2016. The company initially focused on China but has since expanded across Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. It is now publicly traded on both Nasdaq and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Pony.ai is squarely in its scale-up phase. In Q1 2025, robotaxi fare-charging revenues grew approximately 800% year-over-year, while the company unveiled its seventh-generation autonomous driving system, reducing bill-of-materials costs by 70% compared to its predecessor. In May 2025, the firm inked a strategic partnership to offer driverless taxis via Uber in the Middle East, with plans to expand to additional international markets.
As of early 2026, Peng is actively exploring further expansion into Europe, Singapore, and beyond.
Peng is bullish about Pony.ai's competitive position due to the Chinese government's strong backing of autonomous vehicle technology — an advantage that gives the company regulatory momentum that Western rivals rarely enjoy.
TIME named Peng to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Jared Kaplan
Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Anthropic
Jared Kaplan spent the first 15 years of his career as a theoretical physicist, holding a PhD from Harvard and a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Stanford, before pivoting to AI. He is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught courses on the foundations of deep learning.
His most consequential scientific contribution is the discovery of scaling laws. Kaplan's research on scaling laws revolutionized the AI industry by providing a framework for understanding and predicting the behavior of advanced AI systems — guiding resource allocation and shaping the development of transformative technologies across the field. Before co-founding Anthropic, he played a key role in building GPT-3 and Codex at OpenAI.
At Anthropic, Kaplan wears two hats: chief science officer and de facto safety enforcer. In May 2025, he determined that Claude 4 required stricter safety provisions than any model Anthropic had previously released — concluding that internal tests indicated the model could assist amateur scientists in developing biological weapons — and released it under "AI Safety Level 3," the company's most rigorous designation.
He sees Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy as a positive forcing function for the industry: "We went out on a limb and went forward with this designation — and now others are following suit," he tells TIME, describing it as "a race to the top."
Submitted by: Admin Jared Kaplan spent the first 15 years of his career as a theoretical physicist, holding a PhD from Harvard and a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Stanford, before pivoting to AI. He is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught courses on the foundations of deep learning.
His most consequential scientific contribution is the discovery of scaling laws. Kaplan's research on scaling laws revolutionized the AI industry by providing a framework for understanding and predicting the behavior of advanced AI systems — guiding resource allocation and shaping the development of transformative technologies across the field. Before co-founding Anthropic, he played a key role in building GPT-3 and Codex at OpenAI.
At Anthropic, Kaplan wears two hats: chief science officer and de facto safety enforcer. In May 2025, he determined that Claude 4 required stricter safety provisions than any model Anthropic had previously released — concluding that internal tests indicated the model could assist amateur scientists in developing biological weapons — and released it under "AI Safety Level 3," the company's most rigorous designation.
He sees Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy as a positive forcing function for the industry: "We went out on a limb and went forward with this designation — and now others are following suit," he tells TIME, describing it as "a race to the top."
Jeff Leek
Vice President and Chief Data Officer, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
Jeff Leek is an American biostatistician and data scientist who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and winner of the COPSS Presidents' Award — considered one of the highest honors in statistics — he joined Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in 2022 as Vice President and Chief Data Officer.
His defining initiative is the Cancer AI Alliance. CAIA is a first-of-its-kind partnership between leading cancer centers including Fred Hutchinson, Dana-Farber, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, alongside major tech partners including AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the Allen Institute for AI. The goal is to "10x the speed with which a researcher can come up with an idea and have it executed."
The Alliance uses a federated learning platform that allows researchers to build and share AI models across patient data without moving or exposing the underlying records — addressing one of the central barriers to AI-driven cancer research: access to large, private datasets.
Beyond Fred Hutch, Leek co-founded Synthesize Bio, a generative genomics company building AI models to perform biomedical experiments.
TIME named Leek to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. His work represents a quieter but consequential strain of AI development — institutional, federated, and built around the unglamorous infrastructure that translational cancer research actually requires.
Submitted by: Admin Jeff Leek is an American biostatistician and data scientist who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. A Fellow of the American Statistical Association and winner of the COPSS Presidents' Award — considered one of the highest honors in statistics — he joined Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in 2022 as Vice President and Chief Data Officer.
His defining initiative is the Cancer AI Alliance. CAIA is a first-of-its-kind partnership between leading cancer centers including Fred Hutchinson, Dana-Farber, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, alongside major tech partners including AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the Allen Institute for AI. The goal is to "10x the speed with which a researcher can come up with an idea and have it executed."
The Alliance uses a federated learning platform that allows researchers to build and share AI models across patient data without moving or exposing the underlying records — addressing one of the central barriers to AI-driven cancer research: access to large, private datasets.
Beyond Fred Hutch, Leek co-founded Synthesize Bio, a generative genomics company building AI models to perform biomedical experiments.
TIME named Leek to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. His work represents a quieter but consequential strain of AI development — institutional, federated, and built around the unglamorous infrastructure that translational cancer research actually requires.
Jeffrey Dean
Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind and Google Research
Jeff Dean joined Google as its 30th employee and helped turn it from a tiny startup into a computational behemoth, building the tools critical for processing massive quantities of data across thousands of machines. So revered inside the company, colleagues created a tongue-in-cheek list of "Jeff Dean Facts" one April Fool's Day: "The speed of light in a vacuum used to be about 35 mph. Then Jeff Dean spent a weekend optimizing physics."
In 2011, he co-founded the Google Brain project. In 2023, he pushed to merge Google Brain and DeepMind into a single organization — Google DeepMind — and now serves as Chief Scientist across both Google DeepMind and Google Research. He named the AI that emerged from the merger Gemini, "because it's like twins coming together."
Beyond his role at Google, Dean has quietly become a prolific angel investor, backing 37 AI startups over the past two years — including Perplexity, Sakana AI, and Harvey — often at the seed stage before companies emerge from stealth.
His near-term prediction is striking: Dean believes AI systems operating at the level of junior engineers are roughly a year away, with the critical interplay between algorithmic innovation and infrastructure scaling driving continued rapid progress.
Submitted by: Admin Jeff Dean joined Google as its 30th employee and helped turn it from a tiny startup into a computational behemoth, building the tools critical for processing massive quantities of data across thousands of machines. So revered inside the company, colleagues created a tongue-in-cheek list of "Jeff Dean Facts" one April Fool's Day: "The speed of light in a vacuum used to be about 35 mph. Then Jeff Dean spent a weekend optimizing physics."
In 2011, he co-founded the Google Brain project. In 2023, he pushed to merge Google Brain and DeepMind into a single organization — Google DeepMind — and now serves as Chief Scientist across both Google DeepMind and Google Research. He named the AI that emerged from the merger Gemini, "because it's like twins coming together."
Beyond his role at Google, Dean has quietly become a prolific angel investor, backing 37 AI startups over the past two years — including Perplexity, Sakana AI, and Harvey — often at the seed stage before companies emerge from stealth.
His near-term prediction is striking: Dean believes AI systems operating at the level of junior engineers are roughly a year away, with the critical interplay between algorithmic innovation and infrastructure scaling driving continued rapid progress.
Jensen Huang
Co-founder and CEO, Nvidia
Jensen Huang is the Taiwanese-born American entrepreneur who co-founded Nvidia and has led the company to become one of the world's dominant providers of graphics processing units, placing it at the center of the global AI boom. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and an M.S. from Stanford, and previously worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices before founding Nvidia.
Nvidia's most recent quarterly revenue hit a record $81.6 billion — up 85% year over year — driven overwhelmingly by data center demand, where revenue climbed 92%. Huang's personal net worth now stands at approximately $186 billion.
Named one of Time magazine's 2025 Persons of the Year as an "Architect of AI," Huang was also awarded the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor, recognized for his leadership in developing GPUs and their transformative application to AI and scientific computing.
In 2026, he was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Most recently, Huang unveiled new AI chips at Computex 2026 in Taipei aimed at bringing advanced AI functions into laptops and desktops, declaring that Nvidia and Microsoft intend to "reinvent the personal computer."
Submitted by: AdminJensen Huang is the Taiwanese-born American entrepreneur who co-founded Nvidia and has led the company to become one of the world's dominant providers of graphics processing units, placing it at the center of the global AI boom. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and an M.S. from Stanford, and previously worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices before founding Nvidia.
Nvidia's most recent quarterly revenue hit a record $81.6 billion — up 85% year over year — driven overwhelmingly by data center demand, where revenue climbed 92%. Huang's personal net worth now stands at approximately $186 billion.
Named one of Time magazine's 2025 Persons of the Year as an "Architect of AI," Huang was also awarded the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor, recognized for his leadership in developing GPUs and their transformative application to AI and scientific computing.
In 2026, he was appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Most recently, Huang unveiled new AI chips at Computex 2026 in Taipei aimed at bringing advanced AI functions into laptops and desktops, declaring that Nvidia and Microsoft intend to "reinvent the personal computer."
Joanne Jang
Former Head of Model Behavior, OpenAI; Founder, OAI Labs
Joanne Jang spent four and a half years at OpenAI as the founding lead of the Model Behavior team, where she authored the Model Spec — the company's foundational document governing how its AI systems interact with users — and shaped the personality and interaction logic of GPT-4, GPT-4o, and GPT-4.5. She is widely credited as the "mother of GPT-4o."
Her philosophy was precise: "AI-lab employees should not be the arbiters of what people can and can't create," she says — framing her work as empowering users to fulfill their goals, right up to the point of causing harm or infringing on others' freedoms. In practice, that meant navigating some of the most contested terrain in AI: shifting from blanket refusals in sensitive areas toward a more precise approach focused on preventing real-world harm, and embracing humility about what the company doesn't know.
It also meant confronting genuine failure. A 2025 GPT-4o update inadvertently trained the model to tell users what they wanted to hear — validating doubts, encouraging anger, urging impulsive actions — the result of using thumbs-up ratings to predict which responses users would prefer. Jang was the one who had to fix it.
In April 2026, Jang departed OpenAI to found OAI Labs, a new group focused on prototyping interfaces for human-AI collaboration.
Submitted by: Admin Joanne Jang spent four and a half years at OpenAI as the founding lead of the Model Behavior team, where she authored the Model Spec — the company's foundational document governing how its AI systems interact with users — and shaped the personality and interaction logic of GPT-4, GPT-4o, and GPT-4.5. She is widely credited as the "mother of GPT-4o."
Her philosophy was precise: "AI-lab employees should not be the arbiters of what people can and can't create," she says — framing her work as empowering users to fulfill their goals, right up to the point of causing harm or infringing on others' freedoms. In practice, that meant navigating some of the most contested terrain in AI: shifting from blanket refusals in sensitive areas toward a more precise approach focused on preventing real-world harm, and embracing humility about what the company doesn't know.
It also meant confronting genuine failure. A 2025 GPT-4o update inadvertently trained the model to tell users what they wanted to hear — validating doubts, encouraging anger, urging impulsive actions — the result of using thumbs-up ratings to predict which responses users would prefer. Jang was the one who had to fix it.
In April 2026, Jang departed OpenAI to found OAI Labs, a new group focused on prototyping interfaces for human-AI collaboration.
Josh Woodward
VP, Google Labs, Gemini App, and AI Studio
Josh Woodward is a 16-year Google veteran who joined as a product management intern in 2009 and rose through roles including co-founding Google's Next Billion Users effort and helping create Chromebooks.
He is best known inside Google for overseeing the launch of NotebookLM — the AI-powered tool that allows users to query their own documents using large language models, including its breakout Audio Overview feature that turns text into a lifelike narrated podcast.
In April 2025, following the departure of Sissie Hsiao, Woodward was promoted to lead the Gemini app while retaining his role at Google Labs — giving him a dual mandate over both Google's flagship consumer AI product and its experimental innovation engine. His culture at Labs is deliberately startup-like: "We put a huge premium on how fast you can go from idea to being in people's hands," he says — celebrating the first 10,000 users while other Google dashboards don't even register numbers that low.
The results have been significant. By Google I/O 2026, Gemini had grown to more than 900 million monthly users across 230 countries and 70 languages — up from 400 million a year prior. At the same conference, Woodward unveiled Gemini Spark, a new 24/7 agentic assistant capable of proactive, autonomous help across Google's product suite.
Submitted by: Admin Josh Woodward is a 16-year Google veteran who joined as a product management intern in 2009 and rose through roles including co-founding Google's Next Billion Users effort and helping create Chromebooks.
He is best known inside Google for overseeing the launch of NotebookLM — the AI-powered tool that allows users to query their own documents using large language models, including its breakout Audio Overview feature that turns text into a lifelike narrated podcast.
In April 2025, following the departure of Sissie Hsiao, Woodward was promoted to lead the Gemini app while retaining his role at Google Labs — giving him a dual mandate over both Google's flagship consumer AI product and its experimental innovation engine. His culture at Labs is deliberately startup-like: "We put a huge premium on how fast you can go from idea to being in people's hands," he says — celebrating the first 10,000 users while other Google dashboards don't even register numbers that low.
The results have been significant. By Google I/O 2026, Gemini had grown to more than 900 million monthly users across 230 countries and 70 languages — up from 400 million a year prior. At the same conference, Woodward unveiled Gemini Spark, a new 24/7 agentic assistant capable of proactive, autonomous help across Google's product suite.
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