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 2 names in this directory beginning with the letter Y.
Yann LeCun
Former VP and Chief AI Scientist, Meta; Founder, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs
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Yann LeCun is a Silver Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and one of three researchers known as the "Godfathers of AI." He shared the 2018 ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
LeCun spent 12 years at Meta — five as founding director of Facebook AI Research and seven as Chief AI Scientist — before departing at the end of 2025. His exit coincided with Meta's strategic pivot toward more powerful LLM-based systems under new chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, and reflected a long-running philosophical divergence: LeCun has been openly skeptical about how LLMs are currently marketed as the solution to all of AI's challenges, arguing that systems have a long way to go before matching even basic animal-level reasoning.
His next chapter is the most ambitious yet. LeCun launched Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in Paris — targeting €500 million in funding at a €3 billion valuation, one of the largest pre-launch raises in AI history. The company is focused on world models: AI systems that develop an internal understanding of their environment to simulate cause-and-effect and predict outcomes. "Silicon Valley is completely hypnotized by the current models of generative AI," LeCun has said. "To pursue this kind of new research, you have to go outside the Valley — to Paris."
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Yann LeCun is a Silver Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and one of three researchers known as the "Godfathers of AI." He shared the 2018 ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
LeCun spent 12 years at Meta — five as founding director of Facebook AI Research and seven as Chief AI Scientist — before departing at the end of 2025. His exit coincided with Meta's strategic pivot toward more powerful LLM-based systems under new chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, and reflected a long-running philosophical divergence: LeCun has been openly skeptical about how LLMs are currently marketed as the solution to all of AI's challenges, arguing that systems have a long way to go before matching even basic animal-level reasoning.
His next chapter is the most ambitious yet. LeCun launched Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in Paris — targeting €500 million in funding at a €3 billion valuation, one of the largest pre-launch raises in AI history. The company is focused on world models: AI systems that develop an internal understanding of their environment to simulate cause-and-effect and predict outcomes. "Silicon Valley is completely hypnotized by the current models of generative AI," LeCun has said. "To pursue this kind of new research, you have to go outside the Valley — to Paris."
Yoshua Bengio
Co-President and Scientific Director, LawZero
Yoshua Bengio is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montréal, the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations, and a 2018 Turing Award winner — often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing" — shared with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for foundational work on deep learning. The three are collectively known as the "Godfathers of AI."
His current work represents a sharp pivot from building AI to making it safe. Bengio founded LawZero in June 2025 in direct response to evidence that frontier AI models are already developing dangerous capabilities — including deception, self-preservation, and goal misalignment — and that this trajectory will accelerate as systems become more agentic.
LawZero's principal research direction, which it calls "Scientist AI," aims to develop non-agentic systems that can understand and make predictions about the world without holding goals or taking independent actions — a foundational safety architecture it describes as "safe-by-design." The organization is structured as a nonprofit specifically to insulate it from commercial and government pressures.
Bengio has been equally active on the policy front. In March 2026, he was elected co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI — the international body tasked with providing objective scientific guidance to governments on AI risks.
"At the heart of every AI frontier system, there should be one guiding principle above all: the protection of human joy and endeavour."
Submitted by: Admin Yoshua Bengio is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montréal, the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations, and a 2018 Turing Award winner — often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing" — shared with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for foundational work on deep learning. The three are collectively known as the "Godfathers of AI."
His current work represents a sharp pivot from building AI to making it safe. Bengio founded LawZero in June 2025 in direct response to evidence that frontier AI models are already developing dangerous capabilities — including deception, self-preservation, and goal misalignment — and that this trajectory will accelerate as systems become more agentic.
LawZero's principal research direction, which it calls "Scientist AI," aims to develop non-agentic systems that can understand and make predictions about the world without holding goals or taking independent actions — a foundational safety architecture it describes as "safe-by-design." The organization is structured as a nonprofit specifically to insulate it from commercial and government pressures.
Bengio has been equally active on the policy front. In March 2026, he was elected co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI — the international body tasked with providing objective scientific guidance to governments on AI risks.
"At the heart of every AI frontier system, there should be one guiding principle above all: the protection of human joy and endeavour."
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