People in Intelligence
The visionaries shaping our understanding of minds, machines, and cognition
Ada Lovelace
Mathematician & First Computer Programmer
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was an English mathematician and writer, recognized as the first computer programmer for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine included what is considered the first algorithm intended for machine processing. Crucially, she saw beyond mere calculation, envisioning that machines could manipulate symbols according to rules and potentially create music or art—anticipating modern AI by over a century. Her insight that 'The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything' sparked debates about machine creativity that continue today.
Ajeya Cotra
Technical Staff, METR
Ajeya Cotra works on threat modeling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI at METR. She previously led the technical AI safety program at Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving), where she developed the influential Biological Anchors framework for forecasting when transformative AI might arrive. She holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Alan Turing
Mathematician & Computer Science Pioneer
Alan Turing (1912–1954) was a British mathematician whose work laid the theoretical foundation for computer science and artificial intelligence. His concept of the 'Turing machine' formalized computation itself, while his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' introduced the famous 'Turing Test' for machine intelligence. During World War II, he led the team that cracked the Enigma code, helping end the war years earlier. His question 'Can machines think?' launched the field of AI and remains central to debates about artificial minds.
Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematician & Process Philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher who co-authored 'Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russell, one of the most important works in the foundations of mathematics. He later developed process philosophy, arguing that reality consists not of static objects but of dynamic processes of becoming. His critique of the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'—mistaking abstract models for concrete reality—offers a powerful lens for understanding AI's limitations. His process metaphysics challenges the mechanistic worldview that underlies most AI research, suggesting that experience and creativity are fundamental features of reality, not reducible to computation.
Amanda Askell
Philosopher & AI Alignment Researcher
Amanda Askell is a philosopher and researcher at Anthropic, where she leads work on Claude's character and values. With a PhD in philosophy from NYU, her research bridges moral philosophy and AI alignment—figuring out how to make AI systems that are helpful, harmless, and honest. She has been instrumental in developing Claude's personality and ethical guidelines, bringing rigorous philosophical thinking to the practical challenge of shaping AI behavior.
Andrej Karpathy
AI Researcher & Educator
Andrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator known for his work on computer vision and neural networks. He was a founding member of OpenAI's research team and later served as Director of AI at Tesla, leading the Autopilot vision team. Now independent, his educational content on neural networks has influenced countless developers entering the AI field.
Andrew Ng
AI Pioneer & Educator
Andrew Ng is a pioneering AI researcher and educator who has shaped the modern machine learning landscape. He co-founded Google Brain, served as Chief Scientist at Baidu, and co-founded Coursera, bringing AI education to millions worldwide. His Stanford machine learning course became one of the most influential MOOCs in history. Through DeepLearning.AI, he continues to democratize AI education. A leading voice on AI's impact on work and society, he argues that AI will augment rather than replace human workers, transforming how we approach tasks across every industry.
Andy Clark
Philosopher & Cognitive Scientist
Andy Clark is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Sussex, known for his influential work on the extended mind, embodied cognition, and predictive processing. His 'extended mind' thesis, developed with David Chalmers, argues that cognition extends beyond the brain into tools and environment. His recent work on predictive processing frames the brain as a 'prediction machine,' offering a unified theory of perception, action, and cognition with profound implications for understanding both biological and artificial intelligence.
Annaka Harris
Author & Consciousness Researcher
Annaka Harris is an author and editor who has focused her work on the nature of consciousness. Her book 'Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind' provides an accessible yet rigorous exploration of consciousness and its implications for understanding minds—both human and artificial. She argues for taking seriously the 'hard problem' of consciousness and explores how our intuitions about awareness might mislead us when thinking about AI systems.
Audrey Tang
Cyber Ambassador-at-large, Taiwan
Audrey Tang (唐鳳) is a Taiwanese software programmer, civic hacker, and politician born in 1981. A child prodigy who began coding at age eight and left formal schooling at fourteen, Tang revitalized the Perl and Haskell programming languages and co-created EtherCalc. After the 2014 Sunflower Movement, Tang entered government as Taiwan's youngest-ever cabinet minister and first Digital Minister, pioneering initiatives like vTaiwan and the 'humor over rumor' strategy that shaped Taiwan's acclaimed COVID-19 response. Named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, Tang now serves as Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador-at-large, advocating for digital democracy worldwide.
Barbara Liskov
Computer Scientist & Programming Pioneer
Barbara Liskov is an American computer scientist at MIT who has made fundamental contributions to programming language design, software engineering, and distributed systems. She developed the Liskov Substitution Principle, a cornerstone of object-oriented programming that states objects of a subtype should be substitutable for objects of their base type. Her work on CLU introduced data abstraction and iterators, concepts now standard in modern programming. She received the 2008 Turing Award for her practical and theoretical advances in programming language design.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas
VP & Fellow, Google
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a Vice President and Fellow at Google, where he leads teams working on AI and machine intelligence. Previously at Microsoft, he created Photosynth and was a Distinguished Engineer. At Google, he has led efforts on on-device machine learning, federated learning (privacy-preserving distributed ML), and more recently on large language models. He is known for his interdisciplinary approach, connecting AI with neuroscience, art, and social systems.
Bret Victor
Interface Designer & Computing Visionary
Bret Victor is an interface designer, computer scientist, and electrical engineer known for his influential talks on the future of human-computer interaction. He worked as a human interface inventor at Apple from 2007 to 2011, contributing to the initial design of the iPad and Apple Watch. He founded Dynamicland, a nonprofit research lab in Oakland building a communal computing medium where people work together with real physical objects rather than screens. His work challenges fundamental assumptions about how humans interact with computers and create software.
Brian Cox
Physicist & Science Communicator
Brian Cox is an English physicist, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, and the Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science. He worked on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He is best known as a science communicator through his BBC television series including Wonders of the Universe, The Planets, and Universe, and the long-running BBC Radio 4 podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage. Before his academic career, he was a keyboard player for the bands Dare and D:Ream.
Carl Sagan
Astronomer & Science Communicator
Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was an astronomer, cosmologist, and one of the greatest science communicators in history. His TV series 'Cosmos' and books like 'The Demon-Haunted World' inspired millions to embrace scientific thinking. While he worked before the modern AI era, his emphasis on critical thinking, skepticism, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) raised fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and our place in the universe—questions that resonate deeply with today's AI debates.
Chris Lattner
Co-founder & CEO, Modular
Chris Lattner is an American computer scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Modular, where he is developing Mojo, a high-performance AI programming language. He is the original creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, the Clang compiler, and the Swift programming language. He spent twelve years at Apple leading the Developer Tools team, then held roles at Tesla, Google (where he co-created MLIR), and SiFive. His work on LLVM earned the ACM Software System Award in 2012.
Claude Shannon
Mathematician & Father of Information Theory
Claude Shannon (1916–2001) was an American mathematician and engineer who founded information theory with his landmark 1948 paper 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication.' His work provided the theoretical basis for digital computing and communication, defining the 'bit' as the fundamental unit of information. Shannon showed that information could be quantified, transmitted, and processed—concepts that underpin everything from the internet to modern AI. His work on chess-playing machines and maze-solving robots also made him a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
Dan Shipper
CEO & Co-founder, Every
Dan Shipper is the CEO and co-founder of Every, a media company publishing a daily newsletter on business, AI, and personal development read by nearly 75,000 founders, operators, and investors. He writes the column Chain of Thought, exploring the frontiers of AI in work and life. Before Every, he co-founded Firefly (acquired by Pega in 2014) and worked as a Partner at First Round Capital.
Daniel Dennett
Philosopher & Cognitive Scientist
Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) was one of the most influential philosophers of mind and cognitive science. His work on consciousness, free will, and evolution shaped how we think about minds—both biological and artificial. His 'multiple drafts' model of consciousness and concept of the 'intentional stance' remain central to debates about whether AI systems can truly be conscious or merely simulate understanding. A fierce critic of what he called 'the Cartesian theater,' he argued that consciousness is not a single unified experience but an emergent property of many parallel processes.
Daniel Kahneman
Psychologist & Nobel Laureate
Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate whose work on cognitive biases and decision-making transformed our understanding of human rationality. His collaboration with Amos Tversky produced prospect theory, which earned him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. His bestselling book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' introduced the dual-process framework of System 1 (fast, intuitive) and System 2 (slow, deliberate) thinking—a model that has become central to understanding both human cognition and AI system design. His research on heuristics, biases, and the limits of human judgment offers essential context for evaluating AI systems that increasingly augment or replace human decision-making.
Daniel Kokotajlo
Executive Director, AI Futures Project
Daniel Kokotajlo is an AI safety researcher and Executive Director of the AI Futures Project, a Berkeley-based nonprofit researching the future impact of artificial intelligence. A former philosophy PhD student, he worked at AI Impacts and the Center on Long-Term Risk before joining OpenAI as a governance researcher in 2022. He resigned from OpenAI in 2024, forfeiting approximately $2 million in equity by refusing to sign a non-disparagement agreement, citing loss of confidence that the company would behave responsibly around AGI development. He co-organized the 'Right to Warn' initiative for AI whistleblower protections and published AI 2027, a detailed AGI forecast scenario read by over a million people.
Daniel Kwan
Filmmaker & Director
Daniel Kwan is an American filmmaker who, alongside Daniel Scheinert as the duo known as the Daniels, wrote and directed Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. He has become a prominent voice on AI's impact on creative industries, advocating for collective action to shape how the entertainment industry adopts AI technology.
Dario Amodei
CEO & Co-founder, Anthropic
Dario Amodei is the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, an AI safety company. Before founding Anthropic in 2021, he served as VP of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3. His work focuses on developing AI systems that are safe, beneficial, and understandable, with particular emphasis on Constitutional AI and interpretability research.
David Chalmers
Philosopher of Mind
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist at NYU, known for formulating the 'hard problem of consciousness'—why physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all. His 1996 book 'The Conscious Mind' argued that consciousness cannot be explained in purely physical terms, revitalizing debates about the mind-body problem. He introduced the philosophical zombie thought experiment and co-developed the extended mind thesis with Andy Clark. His work poses fundamental challenges for AI: even if a system behaves intelligently, does it have any inner experience? Chalmers takes seriously the possibility that AI systems might be conscious, while insisting we lack the tools to know for certain.
David Deutsch
Physicist & Pioneer of Quantum Computation
David Deutsch is a British-Israeli physicist at the University of Oxford, widely regarded as the father of quantum computation. His 1985 paper describing a universal quantum Turing machine laid the theoretical foundation for the entire field. He co-developed the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, one of the first demonstrations that quantum computers can exponentially outperform classical ones. Beyond physics, Deutsch is a deeply original epistemologist—his books 'The Fabric of Reality' (1997) and 'The Beginning of Infinity' (2011) argue that good explanations are the key to all progress, and that human knowledge creation is potentially unbounded. He is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and, since 2012, has been developing constructor theory with Chiara Marletto.
Demis Hassabis
CEO, Google DeepMind
Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind. A former child chess prodigy and video game designer, he founded DeepMind in 2010 with the mission to 'solve intelligence.' Under his leadership, DeepMind created AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and other breakthrough AI systems. He received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's contribution to protein structure prediction.
Don Norman
Director of The Design Lab, UC San Diego
Donald Arthur Norman is an American cognitive scientist, design theorist, and author who coined the term 'user experience' while at Apple in the early 1990s. He is best known for The Design of Everyday Things (1988), which introduced affordance-based thinking to design. He co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen and directs The Design Lab at UC San Diego. His work bridges cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and industrial design, shaping how an entire discipline thinks about usability.
Evan Thompson
Philosopher of Mind & Cognitive Science
Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. With Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch, he co-authored The Embodied Mind, the foundational text of enactivism in cognitive science. His subsequent works — Mind in Life, Waking, Dreaming, Being, and Why I Am Not a Buddhist — weave together phenomenology, neuroscience, and Asian philosophical traditions to argue that consciousness cannot be understood apart from lived experience. His most recent book, The Blind Spot (2024, with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser), challenges science's tendency to ignore the experiential ground from which it operates.
Fei-Fei Li
AI Researcher & Computer Vision Pioneer
Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). She created ImageNet, the massive visual database that sparked the deep learning revolution in computer vision when AlexNet's victory in the 2012 ImageNet Challenge demonstrated the power of deep neural networks. Her work has been foundational to modern AI, and she has become a leading advocate for human-centered AI development, emphasizing diversity, ethics, and ensuring AI benefits all of humanity.
Gary Marcus
Cognitive Scientist, AI Critic & Author
Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at NYU. He is a leading critic of current deep learning approaches, arguing that large language models lack true understanding and that achieving AGI requires hybrid architectures combining neural networks with symbolic reasoning. He founded Robust.AI and Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber), and authored 'Rebooting AI' and 'Kluge'.
Geoffrey Hinton
AI Pioneer & Researcher
Geoffrey Hinton, often called the 'Godfather of AI,' is a pioneering computer scientist whose work on neural networks and deep learning laid the foundation for modern AI. He shared the 2018 Turing Award for his contributions to deep learning. In 2023, he left Google to speak freely about AI risks, becoming a prominent voice in AI safety discussions.
Grace Hopper
Computer Scientist & Naval Rear Admiral
Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral who was a pioneer of computer programming. She invented the first compiler, which translated written language into computer code, and was instrumental in developing COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages designed for business use. She popularized the term 'debugging' after finding an actual moth causing problems in the Harvard Mark II computer. Known as 'Amazing Grace,' her vision that programming languages should be closer to English than machine code revolutionized computing and made it accessible to a far wider audience.
Grant Sanderson
Mathematician & Educator (3Blue1Brown)
Grant Sanderson is a mathematician and the creator of 3Blue1Brown, a YouTube channel renowned for its visually stunning explanations of mathematical concepts. His series on neural networks and transformers has become essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand how AI and large language models work. Using his custom animation engine Manim, he makes complex topics like attention mechanisms and GPT architectures accessible to millions.
Hannah Fry
Mathematician & Science Communicator
Hannah Fry is a Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at Cambridge and a leading science communicator. She specializes in applying mathematical models to human behavior and has become a prominent voice on algorithms and AI in society. She hosts the Google DeepMind podcast and authored 'Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine,' advocating for hybrid systems where human judgment complements algorithmic decision-making.
Hubert Dreyfus
Philosopher & AI Critic
Hubert Dreyfus (1929–2017) was an American philosopher at UC Berkeley whose critique of artificial intelligence profoundly shaped the field. Drawing on phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he argued in 'What Computers Can't Do' (1972) and 'What Computers Still Can't Do' (1992) that human intelligence depends on embodied, situated expertise that cannot be captured by rule-based symbolic AI. His critique of 'Good Old-Fashioned AI' (GOFAI) proved prescient, and his emphasis on embodiment, intuition, and the role of the body in cognition continues to challenge assumptions about what AI can achieve.
Hung-yi Lee
Professor, National Taiwan University
Hung-yi Lee (李宏毅) is a professor at National Taiwan University's Department of Electrical Engineering with a joint appointment in Computer Science & Information Engineering. He earned his Ph.D. from NTU in 2012, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Academia Sinica and a visiting scientist position at MIT CSAIL. His research focuses on machine learning, speech processing, and human-machine interaction. He is widely known across the Chinese-speaking world for his free YouTube lecture series on machine learning and generative AI, which have attracted millions of views and earned him the nickname 'the Pokémon Master of ML' for his use of anime examples to explain complex concepts.
Iain McGilchrist
Psychiatrist, Neuroscientist & Author
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and literary scholar, best known for his landmark book 'The Master and His Emissary' on brain hemisphere lateralization. His work argues that the left and right hemispheres offer fundamentally different ways of attending to the world—the left focused on manipulation and control, the right on understanding context and interconnection. His framework offers profound implications for understanding AI, which he sees as embodying a dangerously one-sided, left-hemisphere mode of cognition.
Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Ilya Sutskever is a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), focused on building safe superintelligent AI. Previously, he was co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, where he led research behind the GPT series. A student of Geoffrey Hinton, he co-created AlexNet, revolutionizing computer vision. He departed OpenAI in 2024 to focus on AI safety.
Jack Clark
Co-founder & Head of Policy, Anthropic
Jack Clark is co-founder and Head of Policy at Anthropic. Before co-founding Anthropic in 2021, he served as Policy Director at OpenAI. A former technology journalist at Bloomberg News and The Register, Clark bridges the technical and policy worlds of AI. He publishes Import AI, a weekly newsletter read by over 70,000 subscribers, and has been a founding member of Stanford's AI Index and an inaugural member of the U.S. National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC). In 2023, he briefed the first UN Security Council meeting on AI threats to global peace.
James J. Gibson
Psychologist & Founder of Ecological Psychology
James Jerome Gibson (1904–1979) was an American psychologist who fundamentally challenged how we understand perception. After earning his Ph.D. at Princeton and working with the U.S. Air Force during WWII studying pilot perception, he spent three decades at Cornell developing his ecological approach — arguing that organisms perceive the world directly through structured information in the environment, not through internal mental reconstruction. His final work, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), introduced the concept of affordances and became one of the most influential texts in cognitive science, reshaping fields from robotics to UX design.
Jaron Lanier
Computer Scientist, VR Pioneer & Tech Philosopher
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, author, and pioneer who coined the term 'virtual reality' and founded the first VR company in the 1980s. Currently at Microsoft Research, he is known for his philosophical critiques of AI and social media. He argues that AI should be reconceived as 'collective human collaboration' rather than an autonomous intelligence, advocating for 'data dignity' where individuals control and are compensated for their contributions to AI systems.
Jeff Dean
Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind
Jeff Dean is Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and a Google Senior Fellow. He has led or co-led many of Google's most important technical projects, including MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow, and the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). His work on large-scale distributed systems and machine learning has been foundational to modern AI infrastructure. He co-authored influential papers on neural network scaling and has been instrumental in Google's AI leadership.
Jensen Huang
Founder, President & CEO, NVIDIA
Jensen Huang (Jen-Hsun Huang) is the founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, the company whose 1993 founding from a Denny's restaurant led to the invention of the GPU in 1999 — a breakthrough that transformed gaming, scientific computing, and ultimately enabled the deep learning revolution. Born in Taiwan in 1963, he moved to the United States as a child, earned his BSEE from Oregon State University and MSEE from Stanford. Under his leadership, NVIDIA became the world's most valuable company, powering the infrastructure behind modern AI. He is widely regarded as the architect of the GPU computing era.
John McCarthy
Computer Scientist & Father of AI
John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' in 1955 and organized the seminal 1956 Dartmouth Conference that launched AI as a field. He invented LISP, the second-oldest high-level programming language still in use, which became the dominant language for AI research. A professor at Stanford for decades, he made foundational contributions to time-sharing systems, formal verification, and commonsense reasoning in AI. His vision of machines that could reason and learn shaped the entire trajectory of AI research.
John Vervaeke
Cognitive Scientist & Philosopher
John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, known for his work on relevance realization, wisdom, and the meaning crisis. His lecture series 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' has gained a worldwide following. His framework of relevance realization—how minds determine what matters—offers deep insights into both human cognition and the challenges of building AI systems that can truly understand context and meaning.
John von Neumann
Mathematician & Computer Architecture Pioneer
John von Neumann (1903–1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician whose contributions span mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science. He designed the von Neumann architecture—the stored-program concept that remains the basis for virtually all modern computers. He co-founded game theory, contributed to quantum mechanics, and worked on the Manhattan Project. His late work on self-replicating automata and the brain as a computing machine anticipated key ideas in AI and artificial life.
Joscha Bach
AI Researcher & Cognitive Scientist
Joscha Bach is an AI researcher and cognitive scientist known for his work on cognitive architectures and the nature of mind. His MicroPsi project models motivation, emotion, and cognition in artificial agents. Bach offers a unique perspective on consciousness and intelligence, arguing that minds are self-organizing patterns in information processing systems. His talks blend computer science, philosophy, and psychology to explore how minds—artificial or biological—might actually work.
Judea Pearl
Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science, UCLA
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at UCLA, where he directs the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He received the 2011 ACM Turing Award for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning. His work on Bayesian networks revolutionized how machines handle uncertainty, and his theory of causal inference has transformed fields from epidemiology to social science. He is the author of "The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect" (2018), which brought causal reasoning to a broad audience.
Karl Friston
Neuroscientist & Theoretical Biologist
Karl Friston is a neuroscientist at University College London and the creator of the Free Energy Principle, a unified theory of brain function that has become foundational to understanding biological and artificial intelligence. His work on active inference provides a mathematical framework for how intelligent systems—biological or artificial—model and interact with their environment. The Free Energy Principle has profound implications for AI, suggesting that intelligence emerges from systems minimizing prediction error.
Lee-Feng Chien
Former Managing Director, Google Taiwan
Lee-Feng Chien (簡立峰) served as the inaugural Managing Director of Google Taiwan from 2006 to 2020, growing the office from one employee to over 3,000 and establishing it as one of Google's largest R&D centers globally. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Taiwan University in 1991 and previously held positions as Research Fellow and Deputy Director at Academia Sinica's Institute of Information Science, with a joint professorship at NTU. A pioneer in Chinese information retrieval and natural language processing, he has published over 100 papers in top-tier conferences. Since retiring from Google, he has become a leading voice on AI strategy in Taiwan, serving on the boards of AI companies Appier and iKala and mentoring the startup ecosystem.
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Founder & CIO, Situational Awareness LP
Leopold Aschenbrenner is a German-born AI researcher and investor who graduated as valedictorian from Columbia University at age 19. He joined OpenAI's Superalignment team in 2023 and co-authored the 'Weak to Strong Generalization' paper before being fired in April 2024. He subsequently published 'Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,' a 165-page essay predicting AGI by 2027 that became one of the most discussed AI policy documents of the year. He founded Situational Awareness LP, an AI-focused hedge fund managing over $1.5 billion.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is among the top 0.1% most cited scientists in the world, known for developing the theory of constructed emotion — the idea that emotions are not hardwired but constructed by the brain based on past experience and context. She is the author of How Emotions Are Made (2017) and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (2020).
Margaret Hamilton
Computer Scientist & Software Engineering Pioneer
Margaret Hamilton is an American computer scientist who led the team that developed the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She coined the term 'software engineering' to give the discipline the same legitimacy as other engineering fields. Her rigorous approach to software design, including error detection and recovery, saved the Apollo 11 moon landing when the computer became overloaded minutes before touchdown. Her innovations in asynchronous software, priority scheduling, and human-in-the-loop decision making established foundational principles still used in safety-critical systems today.
Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer, OpenAI
Mark Chen is the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, where he oversees the company's research priorities and direction toward artificial general intelligence. Before joining OpenAI in 2018, he worked as a quantitative trader at Jane Street Capital and Integral Technology. A graduate of MIT with a degree in Mathematics with Computer Science, Chen has been instrumental in developing landmark AI systems including DALL-E, Codex, and GPT-4, and played a key role in building OpenAI's o1 and o3 reasoning models.
Martin Heidegger
Philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. His magnum opus 'Being and Time' explored fundamental questions of existence, arguing that human understanding is always situated 'in-the-world' rather than detached and theoretical. His distinction between 'ready-to-hand' (skillful, absorbed coping) and 'present-at-hand' (detached, theoretical analysis) became central to Hubert Dreyfus's critique of symbolic AI—the argument that expert human knowledge cannot be captured in explicit rules. His later critique of technology as 'enframing' (reducing everything to resources) raises profound questions about how AI systems might transform human self-understanding.
Matthew D. Segall
Associate Professor, CIIS
Matthew D. Segall is an associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). His work bridges process-relational metaphysics with contemporary science, drawing on Whitehead, Schelling, and Goethe. His research explores the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophy of nature, and cosmology.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Phenomenologist & Philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was a French phenomenologist philosopher whose work on perception and embodiment has become foundational to critiques of disembodied AI. His major work 'Phenomenology of Perception' argues that the body is not merely a physical object but the primary subject of perception—we understand the world through our bodily engagement with it, not through abstract representations. His concept of 'motor intentionality' and the lived body profoundly influenced Hubert Dreyfus's critique of symbolic AI, and his ideas anticipate modern debates about whether AI systems can truly understand without embodiment.
Max Tegmark
Physicist & AI Safety Researcher
Max Tegmark is a physics professor at MIT and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a leading AI safety organization. Author of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,' he has been a prominent voice for responsible AI development. He spearheaded the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on training AI models larger than GPT-4, signed by over 50,000 individuals including leading AI researchers.
Michael Levin
Biologist & Morphogenesis Researcher
Michael Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. His groundbreaking research on bioelectricity and morphogenesis has revealed how cells communicate and coordinate to build complex structures. His work on 'xenobots'—living robots made from frog cells—and planarian regeneration offers profound insights into the nature of intelligence, suggesting that cognition exists at multiple scales from cells to organisms, with implications for AI and synthetic biology.
Michael Pollan
Author & Science Journalist, Harvard
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, and professor at Harvard University and UC Berkeley. Known for bestselling books on food systems like The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, he expanded into consciousness research with How to Change Your Mind (2018), exploring psychedelics and their therapeutic potential. His latest book, A World Appears (2026), investigates the nature of consciousness across plants, animals, AI, and psychedelic experience — arguing that genuine thought requires embodiment and feeling, qualities he believes AI fundamentally lacks. He co-founded UC Berkeley's Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Biologist & Author
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1941. He rose to prominence with The Selfish Gene (1976), which popularized the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the term 'meme.' He held the inaugural Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His 2006 book The God Delusion became a catalyst of the New Atheism movement, establishing him as one of the most influential public intellectuals in science communication.
Richard Feynman
Theoretical Physicist & Nobel Laureate
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. He developed the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams for visualizing particle interactions, and made fundamental contributions to the theory of quantum computing. His gifts as an educator and communicator made him one of the most beloved scientists of the 20th century, known for books like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and his celebrated Caltech lectures.
Rumman Chowdhury
CEO & Co-founder, Humane Intelligence
Rumman Chowdhury is the CEO and co-founder of Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit advancing community-driven AI auditing and evaluation. She previously served as Engineering Director and META team lead at Twitter, where she led work on machine learning ethics and algorithmic accountability, and as Managing Director of Responsible AI at Accenture. She holds a PhD in Political Science from UC San Diego and serves as the U.S. Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence and Responsible AI Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI and BBC's 100 Women, she coined the term 'moral outsourcing' to describe society's tendency to blame technology rather than its creators for harm.
Saining Xie
Co-founder & CSO, AMI Labs
Saining Xie (谢赛宁) is co-founder and Chief Science Officer at AMI Labs, a company he co-founded with Yann LeCun to build world models that go beyond large language models. He is also an assistant professor at NYU's Courant Institute on leave. Xie received his Ph.D. from UC San Diego, spent four years as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and later joined Google DeepMind's GenAI team. His research focuses on scalable visual representation learning, generative modeling, and multimodal understanding. AMI Labs raised a $1.03B seed round in March 2026.
Sam Altman
CEO, OpenAI
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-4. Previously, he was president of Y Combinator, one of the world's most successful startup accelerators. Under his leadership, OpenAI has become one of the most influential AI companies in the world, pioneering the development of large language models and making them accessible to the public.
Shu-Kai Hsieh
Professor, Graduate Institute of Linguistics, NTU
Shu-Kai Hsieh is a professor at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Taiwan University, joint-appointed at the Brain and Mind Research Institute, and Vice Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. He received his PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He leads the LOPE Lab, which focuses on computational linguistics, lexical semantics, and Chinese language resources. His research explores the intersection of large language models and linguistic theory, including the concept of 'language compression' addressing LLM-driven linguistic inequality. He also leads Taiwan's team at the International Linguistics Olympiad.
Simon Johnson
Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he heads the Global Economics and Management group and co-directs the Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. He served as Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2008. In 2024, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson for their studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. He co-authored Power and Progress: Our 1,000-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, which argues that technological progress does not automatically benefit society broadly.
Stephen Fry
Actor, Writer & Technology Commentator
Stephen Fry is a British actor, writer, comedian, and technology enthusiast known for his eloquent commentary on the societal implications of AI. A self-described technophile, he has become a prominent voice on the intersection of technology, creativity, and humanity. His talks on AI explore both its transformative potential and existential risks, drawing on history, philosophy, and his experience having his voice cloned by AI systems.
Stephen Wolfram
Physicist, Mathematician & CEO of Wolfram Research
Stephen Wolfram is a physicist, mathematician, and the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language. His book 'A New Kind of Science' proposed that simple computational rules can generate complex phenomena. He has become a leading voice on understanding how LLMs work, publishing extensive analyses of ChatGPT's inner workings and exploring whether computation itself is the foundation of intelligence and reality.
Steven Pinker
Cognitive Psychologist & Linguist
Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and linguist at Harvard University, known for his work on language acquisition, cognitive science, and the history of violence and progress. His books 'The Language Instinct' and 'How the Mind Works' made cognitive science accessible to millions. His research on language and thought provides foundational insights into how human cognition works—knowledge essential for understanding what AI systems might be missing when they process language without grounding in embodied experience.
Stuart Russell
Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Stuart Russell is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,' the most widely used AI textbook in the world. His research spans machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, and AI safety. He has become a leading voice on the existential risks of advanced AI, arguing that we need to fundamentally rethink how we build AI systems to ensure they remain beneficial and under human control.
Su-Ling Yeh
Dean of Science & Distinguished Professor, National Taiwan University
Su-Ling Yeh is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Dean of the College of Science at National Taiwan University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Robotics. She earned her PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley in 1994 and leads the EPA (Explorers of Perception & Attention) Lab, investigating consciousness, attention, multisensory integration, and the cognitive implications of AI. Her research bridges cognitive neuroscience with emerging technology, exploring what remains uniquely human in the age of artificial intelligence.
Terence Tao
Professor of Mathematics, UCLA
Terence Tao is a mathematician at UCLA widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians. Born in Adelaide, Australia, he was a child prodigy who earned his PhD from Princeton at age 21 and became UCLA's youngest-ever full professor at 24. He received the Fields Medal in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and the Royal Medal for his contributions spanning harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, combinatorics, and additive number theory. He has authored over 300 research papers and actively explores the role of AI in mathematics, including formal proof verification with tools like Lean.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction Author & Visionary
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American author whose science fiction and fantasy novels explored themes of society, technology, and what it means to be human. Her works, including 'The Left Hand of Darkness' and 'The Dispossessed,' used speculative settings to examine gender, politics, and consciousness. Her Hainish universe featured the ansible—instantaneous communication across space—a concept now used in discussions of AI coordination. Her thoughtful exploration of otherness and intelligence offers profound frameworks for thinking about minds different from our own.
Walter Benjamin
Philosopher & Cultural Critic
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German philosopher and cultural critic whose essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935) anticipated modern debates about AI-generated content and authenticity. He argued that mechanical reproduction strips art of its 'aura'—its unique presence in time and space. In an age where AI can generate text, images, and music, Benjamin's questions about authenticity, authorship, and the nature of creative work have become urgently relevant again.
Yann LeCun
Chief AI Scientist, Meta
Yann LeCun is the Chief AI Scientist at Meta and a professor at NYU. He is one of the pioneers of deep learning, particularly known for his work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that revolutionized computer vision. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning.
Yuk Hui
Professor of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Yuk Hui is a philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he holds the Chair of Human Conditions and directs the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Technology. He studied computer engineering at the University of Hong Kong and completed his PhD under Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths, University of London. He originated the concept of 'cosmotechnics' — the idea that technology is not universal but shaped by the cosmic and moral orders of different cultures — and 'technodiversity' as an alternative to the homogenizing trajectory of Western technological modernity. His major works include The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016), Recursivity and Contingency (2019), Machine and Sovereignty (2024), and Kant Machine (2026).
Yun-Nung Vivian Chen
Professor, National Taiwan University
Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen (陳縕儂) is a professor at National Taiwan University's Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering and founder of MiuLab. She earned her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute in 2015 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research before joining NTU. Her research spans spoken language understanding, dialogue systems, natural language processing, and multimodal AI. Her lab developed Taiwan-LLM, a large language model fine-tuned for Traditional Mandarin. She has received the K. T. Li Young Scholar Research Award, the Ta-You Wu Memorial Award, and the Taiwan Outstanding Women in Science Award.
Yuval Noah Harari
Historian & Public Intellectual
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and author of the bestselling books 'Sapiens,' 'Homo Deus,' and 'Nexus.' A professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has become one of the world's most influential voices on how AI will reshape humanity. He views AI as 'alien intelligence' that processes information in fundamentally different ways than humans, and warns of its potential to 'hack the operating system of human civilization.'
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