Modern AI Industry Leaders
Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, and Henry Ford revolutionized the world, leaving behind legacies that still shape daily life. Today, we stand at a similar turning point, where leaders in artificial intelligence are doing for the 21st century what Bell and Ford did for their own time. Here are the emerging architects of the AI era.
Founders of Major Research Labs
Sam Altman – Chances are if you recognize one name on this list, it will be Sam Altman’s. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI and is known for his influential role in the AI boom. Altman guided the development of ChatGPT, the company’s AI chatbot application that launched in 2022 and is considered a significant milestone in the evolution of AI.
Demis Hassabis – Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis is co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, an acquired subsidiary of Google. He is known for his pioneering work with AlphaGo, a computer program that beat the world champion at Go, and AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts a protein’s 3D structure. Hassabis is currently CEO of Isomorphic Labs, which is using AI to accelerate drug discovery and development.
Dario Amodei – Dario Amodei is CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. A former OpenAI employee, Amodei specializes in the development of large, reliable language models. Amodei is known for his work regarding AI safety, testifying before Congress on the risks AI poses in military, weapon, and intelligence applications.
Alexandr Wang – Alexandr Wang is Meta’s Chief AI Officer and the co-founder and former CEO of Scale AI, which helped accelerate AI development through high-quality data labeling services. In 2021, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 24. Press accounts note Wang and Sam Altman were roommates during the pandemic, when the earliest stages of ChatGPT were beginning to take shape.
Lucy Guo – Lucy Guo is co-founder of Scale AI. Though she is no longer with the company, Guo’s equity stake in the $29 billion company made her the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, according to Forbes. Guo founded her second start-up, Passes, in 2022.
Aravind Srinivas – Aravind Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity AI. A former employee of OpenAI and DeepMind, Srinivas is known for work to provide a more conversational and source-based approach to AI. He made headlines in August 2025 after offering $34.5 billion to buy Google Chrome, an offer more than double Perplexity’s $14 billion valuation.
These leaders are at the forefront of the AI boom, shaping a future once only imaginable in science fiction. As AI continues to evolve at an unprecedented speed, the list of innovators driving breakthroughs that will define this era will certainly continue to grow.