Voices That Shape AI

Geoffrey HintonCautious

Professor Emeritus · Nobel Laureate (Physics 2024)

University of Toronto · ex-Google

Often called the "Godfather of Deep Learning". Co-invented backpropagation and deep neural networks. Left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI existential risks. One of the most cited researchers in history.

Yoshua BengioCautious

Scientific Director · Turing Award 2018

MILA · Université de Montréal

Turing Award winner and pioneer of deep learning. Leads MILA, the world's largest academic AI lab. Has become increasingly vocal on AI governance, calling for international safety standards and treaty-level coordination.

Yann LeCunCritic

Chief AI Scientist · Turing Award 2018

Meta AI · NYU

Inventor of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Turing Award winner. Fiercely skeptical that current LLMs can lead to AGI, arguing for a fundamentally different architectural approach based on world models.

Fei-Fei LiCautious

Co-Director, Stanford HAI · Professor

Stanford University

Creator of ImageNet, which ignited the deep learning revolution in computer vision. Co-founder of AI4ALL. Her work focuses on human-centered AI, spatial intelligence, and ensuring AI benefits humanity broadly.

Nick BostromCautious

Professor · Director, FHI

University of Oxford

Author of "Superintelligence" (2014), which first brought existential AI risk to mainstream attention. Director of the Future of Humanity Institute. His work on existential risk and the orthogonality thesis shaped today's AI safety field.

Stuart RussellCautious

Professor · Author

UC Berkeley

Co-author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", the definitive AI textbook used in universities worldwide. Author of "Human Compatible" (2019). A leading advocate for AI alignment research and redefining AI's objective functions.

Max TegmarkCautious

Professor · Co-founder, FLI

MIT · Future of Life Institute

MIT physicist and AI safety advocate. Co-founded the Future of Life Institute, which organized the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments. Author of "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence".

Gary MarcusCritic

Professor Emeritus · Author

NYU

Cognitive scientist and NYU professor who is one of the most prominent critical voices on LLM limitations. Founded Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber). Author of "Rebooting AI". Argues current LLMs are sophisticated pattern matchers, not genuine reasoners.

François CholletCritic

AI Researcher · Creator of Keras

Google · ARC Prize Foundation

Creator of Keras (the most widely-used deep learning API) and the ARC-AGI benchmark, which tests abstract reasoning abilities. Argues that current LLMs lack systematic generalization and that true intelligence requires efficient program synthesis.

Sam AltmanOptimist

CEO

OpenAI

CEO of OpenAI and the public face of the ChatGPT era. Former Y Combinator president. Believes AGI is coming within years and advocates for a combination of rapid development and proactive safety research.

Dario AmodeiCautious

CEO & Co-founder

Anthropic

Former VP of Research at OpenAI who co-founded Anthropic to pursue safer AI development. Author of "Machines of Loving Grace", a landmark essay arguing that transformative AI could compress decades of scientific progress into years.

Jensen HuangOptimist

CEO & Co-founder

NVIDIA

CEO of NVIDIA, the company whose GPUs became the computational backbone of the AI revolution. Known for bold predictions on AI's trajectory, he calls AI "the next industrial revolution" and has consistently delivered on hardware promises.

Demis HassabisCautious

CEO · Nobel Laureate (Chemistry 2024)

Google DeepMind

Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized AlphaFold's revolutionary prediction of protein structures. Believes AGI will be the most transformative technology in human history.

Emad MostaqueCritic

ex-CEO · Open Source Advocate

ex-Stability AI

Founded Stability AI and launched Stable Diffusion as open-source, democratizing image generation. Stepped down in 2024 to advocate for open, decentralized AI development as an alternative to big-tech control.

Mustafa SuleymanCautious

CEO, Microsoft AI · DeepMind Co-founder

Microsoft AI

DeepMind co-founder who sold the company to Google, then co-founded Inflection AI before joining Microsoft to lead its AI division. Author of "The Coming Wave" (2023), arguing AI will be the most disruptive technology ever built.

Andrew NgOptimist

Founder · ex-Google Brain / Baidu AI

DeepLearning.AI · Landing AI

One of AI's most influential educators and practitioners. Founded Coursera, Google Brain, and Baidu AI Lab. Publishes "The Batch" weekly newsletter. Advocates that AI will be as transformative as electricity.

Andrej KarpathyOptimist

Founder · ex-Tesla / OpenAI

Eureka Labs

Former Director of AI at Tesla (Autopilot) and co-founder of OpenAI. Now building AI-native education at Eureka Labs. Known for deeply technical yet accessible explanations of how modern AI systems work.

Ilya SutskeverCautious

CEO & Co-founder

Safe Superintelligence (SSI)

OpenAI co-founder and former Chief Scientist who led the GPT series and RLHF development. Founded SSI in 2024 with a singular focus on building safe superintelligence. One of the most technically respected figures in AI.

Eliezer YudkowskyCritic

Co-founder · Rationalist Writer

Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)

The most prominent voice warning that misaligned superintelligence could lead to human extinction. Founder of LessWrong and author of the sequences on rationality and AI alignment. Has argued current AI development timelines are dangerously fast.

Jeff DeanOptimist

Chief Scientist

Google DeepMind

Technical architect of Google's AI infrastructure, including TensorFlow and Google Brain. Now Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind. A key figure in scaling deep learning systems to production at global scale.

Meredith WhittakerCritic

President

Signal Foundation

AI Now Institute co-founder and Signal president. A leading critic of corporate AI power concentration. Former Google employee who co-organized the 2018 Google Walkout. Argues that AI hype obscures real labor and surveillance harms.

Author of "Atlas of AI" (2021), a landmark critique of AI's material and political costs. Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Studies how AI systems reproduce power asymmetries, environmental harm, and labor exploitation.

Reid HoffmanOptimist

Co-founder · Partner

LinkedIn · Greylock

LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist at Greylock. Early OpenAI board member. Wrote "Impromptu" with GPT-4. Advocates that AI is a force multiplier for human potential and pushes for responsible AI policy in Washington.