Leaders

Brief profiles

People who were key to the frontier labs: their roles, work and moves between labs, each from sources. Grouped by the lab they are most associated with.

Anthropic

• Daniela Amodei Co-founder and President, Anthropic Co-founded Anthropic with her brother Dario in 2021; as president she runs the company and chairs its board.
• Tom Brown Co-founder and Chief Compute Officer, Anthropic Led the engineering of GPT-3 and was first author of its paper; now runs Anthropic's compute.
• Jack Clark Co-founder and Head of Public Benefit, Anthropic Former tech reporter who ran policy at OpenAI and Anthropic; now leads The Anthropic Institute and writes Import AI.
• John Jumper Researcher, Anthropic Led the AlphaFold team at DeepMind and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; left for Anthropic in June 2026.
• Jared Kaplan Co-founder, Chief Science Officer and Responsible Scaling Officer, Anthropic Physicist who led the 2020 scaling-laws paper, then co-founded Anthropic and now oversees its Responsible Scaling Policy.
• Andrej Karpathy Researcher, pre-training team, Anthropic OpenAI founding member, Tesla's head of AI, coiner of "vibe coding," and since May 2026 a researcher at Anthropic.
• Mike Krieger Member of technical staff, co-leading Anthropic Labs Instagram co-founder who became Anthropic's first chief product officer in 2024 and moved to its Labs incubator in 2026.
• Jan Leike Alignment researcher, leading a new research project, Anthropic Co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team and quit in May 2024 saying safety had "taken a backseat to shiny products."
• Chris Olah Co-founder and Interpretability Research Lead, Anthropic Leads Anthropic's interpretability research, the effort to reverse-engineer what happens inside neural networks.

Google DeepMind

• Jeff Dean Co-founder and Chief Executive, Discovery Loop Built much of Google's infrastructure, co-founded Google Brain and co-led Gemini; left Google in August 2026.
• Koray Kavukcuoglu Senior Vice President, Google DeepMind, and Chief AI Architect, Google Built DeepMind's deep learning team behind DQN and WaveNet, and has run Google DeepMind day to day since August 2026.
• Pushmeet Kohli Vice President of Research, Google DeepMind, and Chief Scientist, Google Cloud Leads Google DeepMind's AI for Science unit, whose work spans AlphaFold, AlphaTensor, SynthID and AlphaEvolve.
• Shane Legg Co-founder and Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind Co-founded DeepMind, proposed the name "artificial general intelligence" and has given AGI even odds by 2028 since 2011.
• Oriol Vinyals Co-founder, Discovery Loop Co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning, led AlphaStar and co-led Gemini before co-founding Discovery Loop in 2026.
• Barret Zoph Vice President of Research, Google DeepMind Automated network design at Google Brain, led OpenAI post-training, co-founded Thinking Machines; now at Google DeepMind.

Meta

• Rob Fergus Head of FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), Meta Co-founded Facebook AI Research with Yann LeCun, spent five years at DeepMind, and returned to run FAIR in 2025.
• Nat Friedman Head of Product, Meta Superintelligence Labs Ran GitHub when it launched Copilot, co-funded the Vesuvius Challenge, and has led Meta's AI products since 2025.
• Daniel Gross Co-lead of Meta Compute Co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever and was its first CEO, then left for Meta in June 2025.
• Joëlle Pineau Chief AI Officer, Cohere Ran Meta's FAIR lab from 2023 to 2025 and pushed its open releases; now chief AI officer at Cohere.
• Andrew Tulloch Former researcher, TBD Lab, Meta Training-systems engineer who helped train GPT-4o and o3 at OpenAI, then co-founded Thinking Machines Lab.
• Alexandr Wang Chief AI Officer, Meta Founded the data-labeling company Scale AI at 19, then became Meta's first chief AI officer in June 2025.
• Shengjia Zhao Chief Scientist, Meta Superintelligence Labs OpenAI researcher on ChatGPT, GPT-4 and o3 who became chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs in 2025.
• Mark Zuckerberg Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Meta Founded Facebook, hired Yann LeCun to start FAIR, backed open-weight Llama, then rebuilt Meta's AI effort in 2025.

Microsoft

• Reid Hoffman Co-founder, Manas AI; partner, Greylock; Microsoft director until the 2026 annual meeting LinkedIn co-founder who funded and sat on OpenAI's board, co-founded Inflection AI and was a Microsoft director.
• Satya Nadella Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Microsoft's chief executive since 2014, who made the 2019 bet on OpenAI and later built Microsoft's own frontier lab.
• Kevin Scott Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of AI, Microsoft Microsoft's CTO since 2017, who made the internal case for the 2019 OpenAI investment and runs its AI strategy.
• Karén Simonyan Chief Scientist, Microsoft AI; chief scientist of the MAI Superintelligence Team Co-created the VGG networks, worked on AlphaZero at DeepMind, co-founded Inflection; now Microsoft AI's chief scientist.

Mistral AI

• Timothée Lacroix Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Mistral AI Meta engineer and LLaMA co-author who co-founded Mistral AI in 2023 and runs its engineering as CTO.
• Guillaume Lample Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Mistral AI FAIR researcher behind unsupervised translation and the first LLaMA models, now Mistral AI's chief scientist.
• Arthur Mensch Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Mistral AI DeepMind co-author of the Chinchilla scaling paper who co-founded Mistral AI in 2023 and runs it as CEO.

NVIDIA

• Ian Buck Vice President, Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing, NVIDIA Created CUDA after a Stanford PhD on GPU programming; now runs NVIDIA's data-center AI products for cloud buyers.
• Bryan Catanzaro Vice President, Applied Deep Learning Research, NVIDIA Wrote the prototype that became cuDNN, co-created Megatron and now leads NVIDIA's open Nemotron models.
• Bill Dally Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research, NVIDIA Parallel-computing architect who has run NVIDIA Research since 2009 and made the GPU case for deep learning inside it.
• Jim Fan Distinguished Scientist; co-lead of the GEAR lab and Project GR00T, NVIDIA OpenAI's first intern, then builder of Minecraft and robot-learning agents who co-leads NVIDIA's humanoid robot models.

OpenAI

• Greg Brockman Co-founder and President, OpenAI Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and, as president, now runs its products, go-to-market teams and compute buildout.
• Jakub Pachocki Chief Scientist, OpenAI OpenAI's chief scientist since May 2024, who led GPT-4 and in September 2026 called for industry-wide slowdowns.
• Alec Radford Independent researcher Lead author of the original GPT paper, CLIP and Whisper at OpenAI; since 2026 co-builds talkie, a model of 1930.
• Noam Shazeer Researcher, OpenAI Co-wrote the transformer paper, co-founded Character.AI, co-led Gemini at Google, then joined OpenAI in 2026.
• Lilian Weng Research leader, OpenAI Built OpenAI's Safety Systems team, co-founded Thinking Machines Lab, and writes the Lil'Log research blog.

Safe Superintelligence Inc.

• Daniel Levy Co-founder and President, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Led OpenAI's optimization team and co-led vision for GPT-4, then co-founded Safe Superintelligence as its president.

Thinking Machines Lab

• Mira Murati Co-founder and CEO, Thinking Machines Lab OpenAI's CTO through ChatGPT and GPT-4, interim CEO in November 2023, then founder of Thinking Machines Lab.
• John Schulman Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab OpenAI co-founder who invented PPO and led the reinforcement learning behind ChatGPT; now at Thinking Machines Lab.