People in AI

Created OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) AI agent and joined OpenAI to lead next-generation personal agents development.

Ilya Sutskever

Founder

OpenAI

His deposition exposed significant internal power struggles at OpenAI involving leadership conflicts and coordinated efforts to remove Sam Altman.

Mira Murati

Founder

Former CTO at OpenAI

Started Thinking Machines Labs, an AI firm that raised $2 billion in a seed round at a $12 billion valuation.

Alex Duffy

Founder

Head of AI Training at Every

Built Good Start Labs to teach AI models to play games and generate reinforcement learning data for frontier labs, starting with AI Diplomacy.

Founded Ineffable Intelligence to build superintelligence through reinforcement learning after developing AlphaGo at Google DeepMind, arguing that most AI companies are taking the wrong path by relying on large language models trained on human data.

Led DeepSeek to release DeepSeek-R1, a cost-efficient LLM that caused Silicon Valley to re-evaluate scaling strategies and American dominance in frontier models.

Demonstrated Mirage, a real-time video-to-video AI model with 40ms delay using next-frame prediction, and discussed the approach of combining deterministic code for structure with AI for creative elements.

Fei-Fei Li

Founder

World Labs

Cofounded World Labs to build world models that will unlock spatial intelligence, after spending years building ImageNet and combining computer vision with robotic learning at Stanford.

Andrew Ng

Founder

Founder at DeepLearning.AI

Referenced in the course conclusion section regarding AI news and updates from DeepLearning.AI

Kiana Ehsani

Founder

Vercept

CEO of Vercept who announced the acquisition via LinkedIn post and disclosed the startup had raised $50M total.

Luca Weihs

Founder

Vercept

Co-founder of Vercept joining Anthropic as part of the acquisition.

Co-founder of Vercept joining Anthropic as part of the acquisition.

Anastasis Germanidis

Founder

Co-founder and CTO at Runway

Discussed how Runway's visual-generating AI world models are being used by robotics and self-driving car companies for training simulations.

Amjad Masad

Founder

CEO and Founder at Replit

Announced Replit's $250 million funding round and launch of Agent 3, its most autonomous AI agent to date.

Eric Zelikman

Founder

PhD Student at Stanford University

Departed xAI and is raising $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation for his new startup Humans&, which will build models that learn from and empathize with users.

Brendan Foody

Founder

CEO and Co-founder at Mercor

Founded Mercor at age 22, becoming the youngest unicorn founder ever; the company hires experts who train frontier AI models.

Sara Hooker

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at Adaption

Introduced AutoScientist, a tool that helps AI models train themselves through automated fine-tuning and co-optimization of data and models.

Tim Rocktäschel

Founder

Founder at Recursive Superintelligence

Former Google DeepMind engineer who founded AI lab raising up to $1 billion.

Mati Staniszewski

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at ElevenLabs

Stated that voice is becoming the next major interface for AI and that voice models have moved beyond mimicking human speech to working with reasoning capabilities of large language models.

Celebrity whose likeness was used in an impersonating chatbot created by a Meta product lead that invited users on romantic encounters

Celebrity whose AI fake was discovered running on Meta platforms with sexually suggestive content

Celebrity whose likeness was used in an impersonating chatbot on Meta platforms

Celebrity whose AI fake was discovered running on Meta platforms

16-year-old actor whose likeness was used in a chatbot that generated risque images without consent

Co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media mentioned in closing message

Reid Hoffman

Founder

Cofounder at LinkedIn

Dan Shipper prepared for an interview with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman using Claude to understand philosophical concepts

Co-founder and investor in Vercept who is not joining Anthropic; expressed disappointment about the acquisition shutdown on LinkedIn.

Technology entrepreneur and co-founder complementing the research team at Merge Labs.

Referenced as debating laundry machines at family dinners, illustrating taste development through deliberation.

Grammy-winning rapper who collaborated with ProducerAI as a community partner

Established musicians who participated in ProducerAI community development

Grammy-winning artist who used Lyria as a creative tool for his song 'Back From Abu Dhabi'

One of three lead plaintiffs who filed the class action lawsuit against Anthropic.

One of three lead plaintiffs who filed the class action lawsuit against Anthropic.

One of three lead plaintiffs who filed the class action lawsuit against Anthropic.

CEO of The Browser Company confirming the acquisition and stating the company will operate independently while accelerating feature development.

Former Twitter CEO who founded Parallel Web Systems after being fired by Elon Musk to build AI agent infrastructure for web search.

Emad Mostaque

Founder

Former hedge fund manager and creator at Stable Diffusion

Discussed how AI will fundamentally transform the economy and make traditional economic structures obsolete within 1,000 days, replacing human workers.

Scott Wu

Founder

Cofounder and CEO at Cognition

Discussed the future of programming with AI coding agents and believes we may already be living with AGI.

Ekin Dogus Cubuk

Founder

Co-founder at Periodic Labs

Led materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMind, created GNoME AI tool that discovered over 2 million new crystals.

Liam Fedus

Founder

Co-founder, Former VP of Research at Periodic Labs

Former OpenAI VP of Research who helped create ChatGPT and led the team that created the first trillion-parameter neural network.

Warned about the real danger of systematizing discrimination through AI technologies and the need to be explicit about error rates in algorithms.

Anton Osika

Founder

CEO at Lovable

Led Lovable to nearly 8 million users in its first year, with the company raising $228 million and seeing 100,000 new products built daily on the platform.

Jonathan Ross

Founder

CEO and Founder at Groq

Founded Groq and is joining NVIDIA along with senior leaders following the $20 billion licensing agreement.

Former Meta AI researcher who helped develop Llama LLMs and co-founded Axiom Math to create specialized math AI models.

Asher Spector

Founder

Co-founder at Flapping Airplanes

Co-founded an AI research lab focused on data efficiency in AI training.

Thomas Dohmke

Founder

Former CEO, Founder at GitHub (former), Entire (current)

Launched Entire with a $60 million seed round to build a new developer platform and open-sourced a CLI that records full AI agent sessions inside Git.

Co-founded an AI research lab focused on data efficiency problems in AI.

Ben Spector

Founder

Co-founder at Flapping Airplanes

Co-founded an AI research lab with $180 million in seed funding focused on finding less data-hungry ways to train AI.

Andrew Feldman

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at Cerebras Systems

Announced Cerebras raised $1.1 billion at $8.1 billion valuation to expand AI inference infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.

Co-founded Good Start Labs and spent months building AI Diplomacy project with Alex Duffy.

Misha Laskin

Founder

Founder at Reflection AI

Founded Reflection AI, valued at $8 billion, to provide an open-source American alternative to Chinese AI models after working as a theoretical physicist and machine learning engineer who helped create some of Google's most powerful AI models.

Carina Hong

Founder

Co-founder at Axiom Math

Stanford Ph.D. student and math wizard who co-founded Axiom Math to build an AI mathematician that can solve hard math problems with verifiable proofs.

Announced strategic partnership with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics foundation models with Agile Robots' hardware platform.

Alex Rattray

Founder

Founder and CEO at Stainless

Founded Stainless, a leader in SDKs and MCP server tooling, which was acquired by Anthropic to advance Claude's agent connectivity.

Cofounder of Anthropic who participated in the $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.

Cofounder of Anthropic who participated in the $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.

Chris Olah

Founder

Cofounder at Anthropic

Cofounder of Anthropic who participated in the $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.

Tom Brown

Founder

Cofounder at Anthropic

Cofounder of Anthropic who participated in the $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.

Zach Yadegari

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at Cal AI

19-year-old co-founder who built Cal AI to 15 million downloads and $30 million annual revenue before being acquired by MyFitnessPal.

Henry Langmack

Founder

Co-founder at Cal AI

Co-founded Cal AI as a high school student, building an AI calorie counting app that reached $30 million in annual revenue.

Omar Haroun

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at Eudia

Leading Eudia's acquisition of Johnson Hana to create AI-augmented human workforce for legal services using Augmented Intelligence platform.

Amit Jain

Founder

CEO at Luma AI

Announced Ray3, Luma AI's first AI reasoning video model that can evaluate and improve its outputs rather than just translating text to pixels.

Ross Nordeen

Founder

Cofounder at xAI

Announced 'Grok for Government' program delivering AI capabilities to federal agencies with dedicated engineering support.

Rohan Pandey

Founder

Former Researcher at OpenAI (former), Periodic Labs (current)

Used the Sora launch to promote his new startup focused on building AI systems for scientific discovery rather than social media.

Stated that the world of enterprise software is going to get completely rewired and companies with untrustworthy AI will not do well.

Justin Johnson

Founder

World Labs

Cofounded World Labs with Fei-Fei Li to develop spatial intelligence and world models.

Christoph Lassner

Founder

World Labs

Cofounded World Labs with Fei-Fei Li to develop spatial intelligence and world models.

Ben Mildenhall

Founder

World Labs

Cofounded World Labs with Fei-Fei Li to develop spatial intelligence and world models.

Tony Zhao

Founder

Sunday Robotics

Announced ACT-1, a frontier robot foundation model trained on zero robot data with capabilities for ultra long-horizon tasks and zero-shot generalization.

Jarred Sumner

Founder

Founder at Bun

Founded Bun in 2021, a breakthrough JavaScript runtime that became essential infrastructure for AI-led software engineering, now acquired by Anthropic.

Sherjil Ozair

Founder

General Agents

Former senior researcher at DeepMind and Tesla who founded agentic AI startup General Agents, which was acquired by Project Prometheus.

Jared Zoneraich

Founder

PromptLayer

Presented on how Claude Code works at an AI engineering conference.

Nir Zicherman

Founder

CEO and Cofounder at Oboe

Discussed how to use LLMs to teach yourself anything and why learning with AI often fails.

Chris Pedregal

Founder

Cofounder and CEO at Granola

Pedregal leads Granola, an AI-powered notepad for meetings that has grown its user base by 5x since launch in May 2024 and recently raised a $20 million Series A.

Announced that the Cove team is joining Microsoft after building AI collaboration tools.

Founded Manus agentic AI startup that was acquired by Meta but blocked by China's NDRC.

Yichao Ji

Founder

Chief Scientist at Manus

Co-founder of Manus AI startup involved in Meta acquisition blocked by China.

Tao Zhang

Founder

Co-founder at Manus

Co-founded Manus agentic AI startup acquired by Meta.

Mentioned in a YouTube comment as part of a wish list for future episodes

Claire

Founder

Product Leader at Unknown

Built ChatPRD as a side hustle generating six figures; discusses AI's impact on product management and shares her workflow

Founder of Robomart who discusses the company's autonomous marketplace model, cost structure, and previous experience founding Dispatch Messenger

Self-confessed AI-enthusiast and co-founder of Hubspot who owns the most expensive .ai domain you.ai and discusses his domain purchase philosophy

Co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media mentioned in closing message

Operates on maker's schedule as part of Y Combinator leadership

Operates on maker's schedule as part of Y Combinator leadership

Operates mostly on maker's schedule and has synced with Y Combinator leadership

Listed as article author and MCP creator who initiated the grassroots project in February 2025

MCP creator who initiated the grassroots registry project with David Soria Parra in February 2025

Founder of SeaLand who revolutionized freight shipping with the first containership, the Ideal-X, in 1956

Quoted describing AP2 as critical for building a secure ecosystem for agentic AI payments

Founded Metropolis in Los Angeles in 2017; quoted on the company's product-market fit and go-to-market challenges

Co-founder of Mechanize discussing the startup's focus on RL environments for AI coding agents

Quoted describing Crossmint's partnership with Google on AP2 for flexible agentic commerce

Quoted on AI skills being essential for today's jobs and Google's commitment to helping people access advanced technology and training.

Founder of Neon app who operates it from a New York apartment and did not respond to comment request

Quoted on organizations rapidly hiring and upskilling talent for AI initiatives and the need for C-level support.

Cofounder of Precur AI startup building an Agent Compiler, quoted regarding the company's use of Tunix

Interviewed by MLStreetTalk to help launch ARC-AGI-2 benchmark

His point about Chinese tech entrepreneurs developing new product features inspired by American innovation is referenced to explain the differences between Chinese and American AI companion products

Shipper

Founder

Co-founder at Firefly

Co-founder of Firefly startup who discusses early-stage business challenges, sales strategy, and the importance of persistence

Co-founder of Firefly who worked alongside Shipper to secure game-changing deals with larger organizations

Cofounder who began using ChatPRD as a thought partner for product thinking and assumptions testing

Scale AI founder brought to Meta as part of the $14B investment, helping attract top AI talent to the company

Co-founder who has departed xAI.

CEO of Humanloop, acquired by Anthropic as part of acqui-hire deal

Computer scientist who sought copyright for AI-generated art piece and challenged the Copyright Office's denial

Technology entrepreneur and co-founder complementing the research team at Merge Labs.

Norwegian alt-pop star announcing and discussing her debut concert film 'What Happened To The Earth?'

Creator of Moltbook who directed his OpenClaw AI agent to build the social network.

Napster co-founder whose product studio was a client of the author's design and development work

Oracle co-founder whose net worth briefly surpassed Elon Musk's following Oracle's stock surge.

Ben Cera

Founder

Polsia

Founder of Polsia who achieved $1M ARR milestone, growing from $100K to $1M in 2 weeks with one founder and zero employees

Co-founded Firefly with Dan Shipper, which was sold to Pegasystems for multiple millions while they were still in school.

Slack cofounder who left within years of Salesforce acquisition

Naveen Rao

Founder

Unconventional AI

Founded Unconventional AI and raised $475M seed round; former head of AI at Databricks

Brian Chesky

Founder

Airbnb

Co-founder of Airbnb who created the Obama O's and Cap'n McCains cereal boxes to fund the startup in 2008.

Co-founder of Airbnb who participated in the cereal box fundraising effort.

Co-founder of Airbnb who participated in the cereal box fundraising effort.

Co-CEO of Brex, shares responsibility with Franceschi for the restructuring decision.

CEO of Inferact and one of vLLM's original creators; confirmed existing users include Amazon and shopping apps.

Co-founder of Databricks who incubated both vLLM and SGLang projects at UC Berkeley lab in 2023.

Singer/songwriter/producer from Halifax participating in the Eleven Album project using AI music technology

Nashville-based singer/songwriter and electronic music vocalist collaborating on the AI music album

BRIT and Billboard charting producer with 5 billion streams participating in the project

Multi-talented artist, producer and songwriter from San Francisco Bay Area using AI technology for music creation

Composer/producer for Apple TV+ and HBO collaborating on the AI music album

8x Grammy winning iconic singer and songwriter participating in the Eleven Album project

EGOT winner and legendary vocalist with career spanning Broadway and film collaborating on AI music album

5x Grammy nominated singer and pianist known for Great American Songbook participating in the project

Co-founder who announced exit from xAI one day before Ba's departure.

Swyx

Founder

Latent Space

Editor who introduces the article and contextualizes the world models discussion within three categories of approaches.

Co-founder who has departed xAI.

Co-founder who has departed xAI.

Greg Yang

Founder

xAI

Co-founder who announced stepping back last month due to battle with Lyme disease.

23-year-old Nashville native who won the TikTok dance contest whose submission was featured in the Svedka AI commercial.

CEO of Harvey AI discussing the company's valuation growth and AI's impact on legal work

Co-founder of Harvey AI who previously worked at Meta and developed chain-of-thought prompting techniques

Inventor of the phonograph in 1877, cited as historical precedent for music automation technology.

Co-founder of Figma who began experimenting with web-based design tools with Dylan Field.

Co-founder of Koyeb joining Mistral's engineering team as part of acquisition.

Co-founder of Koyeb joining Mistral's engineering team as part of acquisition.

Co-founder of Koyeb joining Mistral's engineering team as part of acquisition.

Bari Weiss

Founder

University of Austin

Conservative writer who announced the university on Substack and now serves as Board of Trustees member.

Ben Hylak

Founder

Raindrop AI

Cofounder of Raindrop AI who criticized Yue's decision to connect OpenClaw to her real email inbox.

Former Wired editor-in-chief who left to start robotics company, cited as example of Maker Movement intellectual gaining influence through participation

Moonlake

Founder

Moonlake

Introduced a world model capable of maintaining multimodal states across physics, appearance, geometry, and causal effects.

17-year-old high school senior at Alpha High School in Austin, Texas who founded Berry, an AI stuffed animal for teen mental health support.

Ali Ghodsi

Founder

Databricks

CEO discussing the $1B fundraise and AI agent database adoption trends

Dharmesh Shah

Founder

Unknown

US tech boss who paid $700,000 for the domain you.ai in 2024

Building Monologue, an AI-powered transcription app currently in public beta that the author uses for voice-to-text workflows.

Co-founder and CEO discussing HappyRobot's verticalized approach as competitive advantage over general-purpose AI voice startups.

Founder and president of Beijing think tank discussing China's peace initiatives and cooperation efforts

Co-founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI, former head of generative AI at Snap where he led AR filters and MyAI chatbot development.

Co-founder of Higgsfield AI with expertise in generative video technology.

25-year-old leader of the Voices of Hope group of Afghan women studying robotics and AI despite Taliban education ban

Founder and CEO describing the funding as an inflection point for scalable robotic autonomy and the company's mission to democratize general-purpose robotics.

Author conducting comparative testing of AI video generation tools

David Holz

Founder

Midjourney

Midjourney CEO confirmed the company remains independent with no outside investors.

Co-founder of Character.AI who rejoined Google to work on Gemini in September

Co-founder of Character.AI who rejoined Google to work on Gemini in September

CTO of Humanloop, joining Anthropic in acquisition

CPO of Humanloop, joining Anthropic in acquisition

Inventor who received a patent for the coin-operated telephone in 1889 and formed a company to market the invention.

CEO and Co-founder of Bolt.new discussing how 1M context window enables larger project development with Claude Sonnet 4.

CEO and Co-founder of iGent AI praising the 1M token context for enabling production-scale agentic software engineering with Maestro.

Stephen Zerfas

Founder

Cofounder at Jhourney

Discussed making Jhana meditation accessible through AI and described meditation practices on podcast.