People in AI

Author of the article

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.

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.

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.

Blue Origin founder whose company is also developing a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter design

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.

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.

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.

Andrew Ng

Founder

Founder at DeepLearning.AI

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

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.

Jonathan Ross

Founder

CEO and Founder at Groq

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

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.

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.

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.

Reid Hoffman

Founder

Co-founder at Prentis

Co-founded Prentis, an AI research lab focused on computer use models, in talks to raise $100 million.

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

Inventor who independently developed usable light bulbs in the late 1870s and built early electricity generating stations.

Jack Ma

Founder

Alibaba

Met with Masayoshi Son for six minutes in 2000, leading to $20 million investment that grew to $150 billion by 2020

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'

Kiana Ehsani

Founder

Vercept

Co-founder of Vercept, acquired by Anthropic to advance Claude's computer use capabilities

Luca Weihs

Founder

Vercept

Co-founder of Vercept, acquired by Anthropic to advance Claude's computer use capabilities

Co-founder of Vercept, acquired by Anthropic to advance Claude's computer use capabilities

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

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.

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.

Serial entrepreneur operating an AI newsroom that uses synthetic agents to find, draft, edit, fact-check, and publish news stories autonomously.

Edward Hughes

Founder

Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Inherent

Led development of Faraday, an AI agent that outperformed larger models from Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research findings.

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.

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.

31-year-old co-founder and CEO demonstrating AI agents trained on video games that power robotics.

Co-founder and CEO of Etched, an AI chip startup that hit $5 billion valuation and has booked $1 billion in contract orders for its frontier inference clusters.

Co-founder and president of Etched, an AI chip startup, who dropped out of Harvard to found the company.

Co-founder and CEO of SambaNova discussing the company's AI chip strategy, scaling efforts, and IPO plans for 2027.

Co-founder of microchip firm Etched, which has raised over $1 billion to meet growing demand for AI components, describing the infrastructure buildout as the largest in human history.

Grace Li

Founder

Co-founder at Intelligence

Founded Design Arena, an AI feedback platform used by 5.3 million people that helps models improve through human judgment on visual outputs.

Ege Erdil, co-founder of Mechanize, a startup building environments and evals for frontier coding agents, won second place in the Big Questions About AI essay contest.

Mark Pincus

Founder

Co-founder at Prentis

Co-founded Prentis, an AI research lab focused on computer use models, alongside Reid Hoffman.

Serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Prentis AI research lab focused on computer use models.

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

Led successful flight test of Quarterhorse Mk 2.1, the company's largest unmanned aircraft built for hypersonic speeds.

Scale AI founder since 2016 who appears to be helping Meta attract top AI talent following Meta's $14B investment

Immigrant from Burkina Faso who leads a soccer team for under-18 immigrants and was quoted about wanting to be part of something

CEO and founder of Nfinite, a company that produces technology, mentioned in context of retail being a physical business

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

Referenced as someone bound to a single project (Python) for decades, contrasted with Chintala's desire for change

Referenced as someone bound to a single project (Linux) for decades, contrasted with Chintala's desire for change

Developers at Phaser Studio built Beam, an AI-driven game generation platform using File Search Tool in early access program

Co-founder of Thinkers50 moderating the webinar on AI in management

Inventor who independently developed usable light bulbs in the late 1870s alongside Thomas Edison.

Founder of Queen Jewels describes the significance of the coin discovery and its historical importance.

WeWork co-founder whom Masayoshi Son fell 'in love' with, leading to overvalued $47 billion valuation and failed IPO

Behance founder leaving tech for Hollywood, discusses AI usage

Signed letter urging PM to cap ticket resale prices

Quoted expressing support for price caps on ticket resales

Signed letter urging government action on ticket resale prices

Signed letter urging government action on ticket resale prices

Signed letter urging government action on ticket resale prices

Mysterious figure credited as creator of AI music project Breaking Rust, with no verifiable human identity.

Henrik Werdelin

Founder

Prehype, Audos

Founding partner of startup studio Prehype and cofounder of Audos, discussing AI agents for launching businesses and entrepreneurship principles.

Nicholas Thorne

Founder

Audos

Cofounder of Audos, previously appeared on the podcast in March 2024.

Co-founder of Sakana AI, the Japanese AI startup that reached unicorn status

Co-founder of Sakana AI, the Japanese AI startup that reached unicorn status

Vik Bajaj

Founder

Project Prometheus

Co-founder and co-CEO of Project Prometheus, physicist and chemist who previously worked at Google

Named as an example of a creator who protects time to think big while building an independent media business.

Named as an example of a creator who pushes boundaries in independent media.

Named as an example of a creator excelling in independent media at the edge of innovation.

Uses Metronome for monetization infrastructure

Torch CEO quoted on acquisition and vision to integrate technology with ChatGPT's health user base

Korean-American actress who voiced main character Rumi and shared how the film's themes of self-acceptance mirrored her own life experience.

Zhipu founder and keynote speaker at AGI-Next summit discussing Chinese AI landscape

Co-founder of Black Forest Labs, formerly helped create Stability AI's Stable Diffusion models.

Co-founder of Black Forest Labs, formerly helped create Stability AI's Stable Diffusion models.

Co-founder of Black Forest Labs, formerly helped create Stability AI's Stable Diffusion models.

Slack cofounder who left within years of Salesforce acquisition

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

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

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.

Co-founder and early investor who expressed disappointment about the shutdown despite positive financial return.

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

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.

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