People | AI Infrastructure Database

Field notes

Institutions build the machines, but a surprisingly small cast of people set the direction. Follow the connections on these pages — who founded what, who left where — and the industry's family tree draws itself.

Start with these three

JH Jensen Huang Thirty years from Denny's booth to the center of the world economy. LS Lisa Su The turnaround artist who built the credible alternative. GH Geoffrey Hinton Built the field, won the Nobel, then became its loudest warning.

Founders & executives

JH Jensen Huang Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA — the defining executive of the AI era. SA Sam Altman OpenAI's CEO — the industry's chief fundraiser, evangelist and lightning rod. DA Dario Amodei Anthropic's CEO — scaling believer, safety insister, essayist of both. EM Elon Musk xAI, Tesla, OpenAI co-founder turned rival — the industrialist of the race. LS Lisa Su AMD's chair and CEO — architect of one of tech's great turnarounds. AG Aidan Gomez 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author; Cohere's CEO. AW Alexandr Wang Scale AI's founder, now leading Meta Superintelligence Labs. AS Aravind Srinivas Perplexity's CEO — taking the answer-engine fight to Google. AM Arthur Mensch Mistral's co-founder-CEO — Europe's frontier standard-bearer. BG Bill Gates Microsoft's founder — and, via TerraPower, a nuclear player in the AI power story. BA Brett Adcock Figure's founder — humanoids on an automotive schedule. CW C.C. Wei TSMC's chairman and CEO through the AI supercycle. DA Daniela Amodei Anthropic's co-founder and president — the operator of the safety lab. GB Greg Brockman OpenAI co-founder and president — the engineer of its scaling machine. JK Jim Keller The industry's legendary chip architect — now open-sourcing the stack at Tenstorrent. JR Jonathan Ross Started Google's TPU as a side project; founded Groq to beat it. LE Larry Ellison Oracle's founder — late to cloud, early to the AI compute trade. LW Liang Wenfeng DeepSeek's founder — the quant who embarrassed the compute maximalists. MZ Mark Zuckerberg Meta's founder — open-weights strategist turned superintelligence spender. MS Masayoshi Son SoftBank's founder — a career of all-in bets, now all on AI. MM Mira Murati Former OpenAI CTO; founder of Thinking Machines Lab. MC Morris Chang Founder of TSMC — inventor of the foundry model itself. SN Satya Nadella Microsoft's CEO — the OpenAI bet and the Jevons argument. SP Sundar Pichai Alphabet's CEO — steering the only full-stack AI company.

Researchers

DH Demis Hassabis DeepMind's founder-CEO — chess prodigy, Nobel laureate, AGI's steady hand. GH Geoffrey Hinton The 'godfather of AI' — Nobel laureate turned risk whistleblower. IS Ilya Sutskever AlexNet co-author, OpenAI's scientific soul, now betting everything on SSI. AT Alan Turing The founder of the question — computation, and whether machines can think. AK Andrej Karpathy The field's teacher — OpenAI founding member, Tesla Autopilot lead, YouTube professor. AN Andrew Ng Educator of the field — Google Brain founder, Coursera co-founder, pragmatist voice. CO Chris Olah Interpretability's founding figure — Anthropic co-founder. FF Fei-Fei Li ImageNet's creator — the data insight that started the deep-learning era — now World Labs' founder. JD Jeff Dean Google's chief scientist — the systems engineer behind TPUs and Gemini's lineage. NS Noam Shazeer Transformer co-author, MoE pioneer — bought back by Google for $2.7B. YL Yann LeCun CNN pioneer, Meta's longtime chief scientist — the loyal opposition to LLM orthodoxy. YB Yoshua Bengio The most-cited AI scientist — now building the safety case full time.