The people shaping AI

Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has led it as its GPUs became the dominant compute layer for AI training and inference. In September 2026 he laid out plans for continued rapid growth in AI infrastructure demand.

• AI infrastructure & compute

Co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and later Inflection AI before joining Microsoft in 2024 as CEO of its newly formed Microsoft AI division, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella. He now leads Copilot and the MAI Superintelligence Team formed in November 2025.

• Frontier AI research
• +1: AI governance & policy

Leads TII, the applied-research arm of ATRC and the institute behind the open-weight Falcon language models. She also serves as CEO of QuantumGate, TII's post-quantum cryptography venture, and argued in 2026 that enterprise AI agents need verifiable proof of behaviour, not vendor promises.

• Frontier AI research
• +2: AI infrastructure & compute, UAE AI ecosystem & government

Appointed in October 2017 as the world's first minister dedicated to artificial intelligence. In 2026 he chairs the UAE's newly formed Artificial Intelligence and Data Authority and continues to represent the UAE in international AI-governance forums, including the UN's global AI dialogue in July 2026.

• AI governance & policy
• +1: UAE AI ecosystem & government

Founder and Group CEO of G42, the Abu Dhabi AI and cloud-computing group whose subsidiaries include Core42 and the health-AI company M42, where he also chairs the board. Under his leadership G42 expanded AI compute infrastructure into India, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, the US and Europe through 2025–2026.

• AI infrastructure & compute
• +1: UAE AI ecosystem & government

Co-founder of LinkedIn and an early-stage investor at Greylock Partners since 2009. He co-founded Inflection AI in 2022 with Mustafa Suleyman and remains a board director there, and more recently co-founded Manas AI.

• AI governance & policy

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and GPT. In September 2026 he confirmed OpenAI would not pursue an IPO that year, voiced support for "pacing" frontier AI development so safety keeps pace with capability, and appeared before the UN Security Council to discuss AI governance.

• Frontier AI research
• +1: AI governance & policy

Independent open-source developer who built Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data, and the widely used `llm` command-line tool that connects local and hosted language models to Unix pipelines and plugins. A former Django core developer, his blog is one of the most closely followed independent sources of AI-tooling analysis.

• AI communities & open tools

Former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI research team; founded DAIR, an independent, community-rooted AI research institute, after leaving Google in December 2020. She also co-founded the Black in AI community and remains a prominent public voice on algorithmic bias and AI-industry accountability.

• AI governance & policy
• +1: AI communities & open tools

A Turing Award laureate and pioneer of convolutional neural networks who served as Meta's Chief AI Scientist for over a decade. He left Meta at the end of 2025 to found AMI Labs, a startup building AI "world models" that learn from sensory data rather than language alone; the company raised a $1.03 billion seed round in March 2026 at a $3.5 billion valuation.

• Frontier AI research