People in AI

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.

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.

Partnering with OpenAI to develop AI devices including a smart speaker, glasses, voice recorder, and pin with first products targeted for late 2026 or early 2027.

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.

Nir Zicherman

Founder

CEO and Cofounder at Oboe

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

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.

Led Perplexity's $34.5 billion unsolicited all-cash offer for Google's Chrome browser to capitalize on the AI search race.

Noah Brier

Founder

Cofounder at Alephic

Pioneered using Claude Code as a research and thinking partner integrated with Obsidian, and leads AI strategy consulting for marketing organizations.

Google DeepMind talent recruited as Chief Engineer for xAI's AI team.

Co-founder of Cohere and author of the foundational 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that underlies modern AI.

Midjourney CEO confirmed the company remains independent with no outside investors

Spoke out against AI-generated videos of her late father Robin Williams on Instagram, criticizing the creation and consumption of deepfake content.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Matt Schlicht

Founder

Launched Moltbook, an internet forum designed exclusively for artificial intelligence agents, in January 2026.

Tom Tunguz

Founder

Shared nine observations from spending a year building AI agent systems.

Cofounder of Y Combinator-backed open-source billing company Lago who wrote about how AI made pricing hard again for AI startups.

CEO discussing free tier availability and future subscription tiers ranging from $5 to hundreds of dollars monthly

Swyx

Founder

Latent Space

Co-author testing GPT-5 as early-access OpenAI partner

Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Altana discussing how Claude Code accelerated development velocity 2-10x

Father of deceased teenager who alleges ChatGPT contributed to his son's suicide; filed wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI

Mother of deceased teenager; co-plaintiff in wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Built Kairos, an AI-powered reading companion that helps users read more deeply and understand complicated concepts.

Shiv Rao

Founder

CEO at Abridge

Cardiologist-turned-CEO who raised $250M for Abridge and claims to have never lost a head-to-head comparison against Microsoft in AI medical transcription.

Mike Mignano

Founder

Cofounder at Oboe

Former Spotify exec who ran Spotify's podcast team and cofounded Oboe with Nir Zicherman.

Zach Rash

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at Coco Robotics

Leading the startup's effort to use five years of robot data to accelerate automation and physical AI research.

Co-founded Mura, a seed-stage startup automating billing for commercial HVAC providers, and wrote about building their in-house LLM evaluation framework called BOLT.

Brandon Tseng

Founder

President and Co-founder at Shield AI

Explained that Shield AI's X-Bat combines AI piloting with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities in a next generation aircraft for the first time.

Brad Squicciarini

Founder

Co-founder at Coco Robotics

Co-founded Coco Robotics and donated one of their bots to UCLA's research lab.

Arvid Lunnemark

Founder

Co-founder at Cursor

One of the four co-founders of Cursor who has left the company.

Vik Bajaj

Founder

Co-CEO at Project Prometheus

Working with Jeff Bezos on Project Prometheus, a $6.2B AI venture focused on AI systems for manufacturing computers, cars, and spacecraft.

Connor Zwick

Founder

Co-founder & CEO at Speak

Leading Speak, an AI language tutor that teaches fluency through speaking out loud.

Paul Ford

Founder

Cofounder at Aboard

Building enterprise software with AI and discussed the paradigm-shifting impact of Claude Opus 4.5 on coding.

Dan Siroker

Founder

Co-founder and Former CEO at Optimizely

Co-founded Limitless, an AI hardware startup that pivoted to making AI pendants and was acquired by Meta.

Tomas Reimers

Founder

Co-founder at Graphite

Co-founded Graphite, a startup using AI to review and debug code that was acquired by Cursor.

Greg Foster

Founder

Co-founder at Graphite

Co-founded Graphite, a startup using AI to review and debug code that was acquired by Cursor.

Merrill Lutsky

Founder

Co-founder at Graphite

Co-founded Graphite, a startup using AI to review and debug code that was acquired by Cursor.

Co-founded Convogo, an AI tool for executive coaching, which was acquired by OpenAI in an acqui-hire deal.

Co-founded Convogo and joined OpenAI as part of the acqui-hire to work on AI cloud efforts.

Evan Cater

Founder

Co-founder at Convogo

Co-founded Convogo and joined OpenAI as part of the acqui-hire to work on AI cloud efforts.

Alex Rattray

Founder

Founder at Stainless

Built a company creating a platform for high-quality APIs and discussed how MCP servers enable AI to plug into systems.

Co-founded Q.ai, an AI startup specializing in imaging and machine learning acquired by Apple for nearly $2 billion.

Avi Barliya

Founder

Co-founder at Q.ai

Co-founded Q.ai, an AI startup specializing in imaging and machine learning acquired by Apple for nearly $2 billion.

Edouard

Founder

Koyeb

Co-founder who helped build Koyeb's serverless GPU platform before joining Mistral AI's infrastructure division.

Bastien

Founder

Koyeb

Co-founder who helped build Koyeb's serverless GPU platform before joining Mistral AI's infrastructure division.

Maitreya Wagh

Founder

Co-founder at Bolna

Co-founder of voice AI start-up Bolna who complained about logistical issues at India's AI summit.

Brett Bejcek

Founder

Limitless

Co-founded Limitless (formerly Rewind), an AI startup that created an AI-powered pendant to record conversations, which was acquired by Meta.

Rob Cochran

Founder

Co-founder and CEO at Fauna Robotics

Led development of Sprout, a 3.5-foot humanoid robot designed to be physically safe and socially approachable for research purposes.

Stella Garber

Founder

Cofounder at Hoop

Led her startup through a data crisis when Slack cut off data access and pivoted the company to become AI-native.

Sergiy Nesterenko

Founder

Founder at Quilter

Founded Quilter in 2019 as a former SpaceX engineer to use AI for developing software for printed circuit boards.

Sari Azout

Founder

Founder at Sublime

Argues that AI shifts focus from productivity to creativity and that original creative work matters more than speed.

Partnered with AI company Distillery to produce first AI-powered professional sporting event.

Founded alternative legal service provider acquired by Eudia to create AI-augmented workforce serving major corporations.

Commented on the automation shift with millions of unmanned systems expected to operate across air, sea, land, and space.

Announced restructuring and layoffs at Brex while emphasizing building high-velocity company focused on AI-native operations.

Co-founded Oshen as an electrical engineer to build fleets of autonomous micro-robots for ocean data collection.

Founded Oshen in 2022 to build autonomous micro-robots that collect ocean data after realizing ocean data collection was a major gap.

Entrepreneur who has spent his career on context curation problems, now applied to AI agents and customer knowledge.

Co-founder and CTO of RunSybil who validated Big Sleep as a legitimate AI bug-hunting project

Co-founder of Windsurf who was hired by Google as part of the $2.4 billion licensing and talent acquisition deal.

Ben Hylak

Founder

Latent Space

Co-author testing GPT-5 as early-access OpenAI partner

Alexis Gauba

Founder

Latent Space

Co-founder who assisted in putting together the GPT-5 review

Co-founder and CEO featured in Friday interview in the publication's editorial lineup

Co-founder of Character.AI who rejoined Google to work on Gemini after leaving the startup last September.

Co-founder of Character.AI who rejoined Google to work on Gemini after leaving the startup last September.

16-year-old founder who created Shield Seniors, an AI-powered platform to help seniors identify and report online scams after her grandfather nearly fell victim to one.

Founder and CEO discussing funding round and the company's inflection point in software and hardware.

Mentioned as part of Figure's humanoid robot development with reference to F.02 robot doing laundry tasks

Director of 'What Jennifer Did,' a Netflix documentary that faced backlash for using AI-generated images instead of archival photos.

Co-founder of Chroma discussing the evolution from RAG to context engineering and vector database challenges.

Founded MiniMax in 2022 after working at SenseTime

Late Black Sabbath frontman whose likeness was AI-generated in Rod Stewart tribute

Performance artist who created a 1990s Russian talk show segment about Lenin being a mushroom, used as historical precedent for understanding how misinformation spreads.

Co-founder and CEO discussing Robomart's autonomous marketplace model and $3 flat delivery fee strategy

Bitcoin address in the ransomware prompts allegedly belongs to Bitcoin's creator

North Carolina pharmacist who invented the original Pepsi Cola formula in 1893 and named the drink

Author who joined lawsuit against Meta regarding use of copyrighted books for LLM training.

CEO of Manus commenting on the acquisition and Meta partnership

Portfolio founder whose perspective shaped predictions about AI trends

Portfolio founder whose perspective shaped predictions about AI trends

Portfolio founder whose perspective shaped predictions about AI trends

Portfolio founder whose perspective shaped predictions about AI trends

Portfolio founder whose perspective shaped predictions about AI trends

Pebble founder building an AI ring expected to debut in 2026 with voice interaction capabilities.

Co-founder of The Software Toolworks and played an integral role in creating the Mavis Beacon persona.

Co-founder of The Software Toolworks.

Co-founder of The Software Toolworks and contributor to program development.

Pioneered the Oystermouth Railway, the first tramway in the world to carry fare-paying passengers in 1807.

American entrepreneur who introduced street railways to Britain, opening the first street tramway in Birkenhead in 1860.

Founded Orchard Robotics in 2022 as a former Cornell student and Thiel fellow; quoted on farming data being the core problem to solve.

Founder discussing China's economic collaboration initiatives and peace efforts

Founder of Nervous System Mastery boot camp, shares structured protocol for using LLMs as personal AI coaches via codex vitae

Founder of Downshift deaccelerator, uses ChatGPT for Jungian dreamwork and active imagination exercises

Creator of Dark Souls whose design philosophy has been challenged by FromSoftware's subsequent entries.

Co-author presenting framework on AI application development approaches

Co-author presenting framework on AI application development approaches

Wearable AI startup founder who alleged that products were stolen from his company's stall at the venue.

Healthcare-focused AI founder who criticized security-driven session closures and operational lapses that prevented broad participation.

Windsurf CEO discussing the startup's multi-cloud strategy and cloud provider usage.

Cofounder of LMArena who started the leaderboard as a research project at UC Berkeley

Cofounder of LMArena who started the leaderboard as a research project at UC Berkeley

Filmmaker whose Nazi propaganda film Olympia was controversially awarded the Mussolini Cup at the 1938 Venice Mostra.

Directing the upcoming Rocky making-of drama 'I Play Rocky' without Stallone's involvement.

Directing the Rambo prequel origin story currently in development.

Rocket Lab CEO discusses the company's capability to handle NASA's Mars Sample Return mission and expresses enthusiasm about potential Martian biosignature discovery.

19-year-old founder of mobile retro computer museum charity who was inspired to create a traveling museum after visiting a computer history museum

Luke's father and co-founder who helped convert the school bus and emphasizes the educational mission to inspire young people in computing

Founder/leader of Walk the Talk Lab who oversees deployment of AI Co-Thinkers and supervises client projects

Co-founder and CEO arguing that trust requires transparency about training datasets and model biases

Subject of deepfake video featuring celebrities responding to his antisemitic comments.

Had a deepfake used in a scam ad falsely promoting erectile dysfunction medication.

Founder of ARC Prize, creator of the ARC-AGI benchmark for measuring general reasoning ability in AI systems

Founder of AI watchdog group who also received subpoenas from OpenAI requesting lists of journalists and contacts.

Actor in Lord of War (2005) whose character serves as metaphor for Jensen Huang's role in GPU distribution

Referenced as exception to OpenAI acquisition pattern; his company's product roadmap continues post-acquisition

Cofounder and CEO discussing Starcloud's vision for space-based data centers and cost/environmental benefits

Co-Founder and CEO of Sky quoted on joining OpenAI to expand AI desktop integration vision

Bestselling fantasy author whose works are published by Bloomsbury; her absence of new titles contributed to revenue decline in consumer division.

Harry Potter author signed by Newton in the 1990s; example of major author brand that drives Bloomsbury's success.

Built a software company to multi-billion dollar exit and now works on carbon removal and steel at Charm Industrial, discussing regulatory barriers in hardware.