As AI enters its post-hype execution phase, the signal is shifting from demos and deckware to teams that actually ship, scale, and shape ecosystems. Whether you’re investing, building, or tracking strategic moves, these are the 30 people defining where AI is headed in 2025.
We’ve broken them down across infrastructure, enterprise tools, frontier research, open source, and AI-native applications — with quick notes on what makes each one worth following.
🔧 Infrastructure & Model Builders
1. Clement Delangue – CEO, Hugging Face
The connective tissue of open AI. Hugging Face’s influence on model access, training, and distribution keeps growing.
2. Guillaume Lample – Co-founder, Mistral
Pushing the boundaries of open-weight model performance with Mixtral and next-gen architectures from Europe.
3. Karén Simonyan – Chief Scientist, Inflection AI
Ex-DeepMind researcher behind Inflection’s foundation models. Technical depth meets product ambition.
4. Luis Ceze – CEO, OctoAI
Quietly powering faster, cheaper AI deployment through model optimization. Flying under the radar — but not for long.
5. Sarah Nagy – CEO, Seek AI
Bridging SQL and LLMs to enable true self-serve analytics. A rising name in enterprise-facing infrastructure.
🧠 Applied AI & Enterprise Tools
6. Aravind Srinivas – CEO, Perplexity
Reimagining search with conversational, citation-first AI. A new interface for web-scale knowledge retrieval.
7. Soroush Salehian – Founder, Aeva Inc
Bringing the next wave of perception to a broad range of applications from automated driving to industrial robotics, consumer technology, security and beyond.
8. Daniela Amodei – President, Anthropic
Instrumental in making Claude a reliable, safe alternative to GPT. A key voice in both governance and capability scaling.
9. Varun Mohan – CEO, Windsurf
Reinventing software development with Windsurf Editor — the first agentic IDE. Powered by advanced AI, it's the modern coding superpower.
🧬 Research & Frontier Innovation
10. Ilya Sutskever – Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Now operating independently from OpenAI, Sutskever’s SSI is focused on safety-first AGI research.
11. Sara Hooker – Head, Cohere for AI
Championing open research and representation in frontier model work. Big on inclusive progress.
12. Pushmeet Kohli – VP Research, DeepMind
A bridge between cutting-edge AI and its real-world impact. DeepMind’s science + product lens owes a lot to him.
13. Sasha Luccioni – Climate lead, Hugging Face
Driving research into AI’s environmental impact and sustainable modeling practices.
14. Percy Liang – Director, Stanford CRFM
Key academic voice on model evaluation, transparency, and responsible deployment.
📂 Open Source & Community Builders
15. Harrison Chase – Creator, LangChain
Still powering thousands of RAG-based apps. LangChain isn’t just a tool — it’s a mental model for LLM devs.
16. Jerry Liu – Co-founder, LlamaIndex
Essential for anyone doing retrieval + structured data + LLMs. The “middleware” layer for many AI-native products.
17. Simon Willison – Open data & tooling advocate
Creator of tools like Datasette and sqlite-utils. Prolific, clear-headed, and practical about LLM dev.
18. Yannic Kilcher – YouTuber, Research Simplifier
Brings technical papers to life with digestible summaries and demos. A must-follow for staying current.
19. Chip Huyen – Founder, Claypot AI (Voltron Data)
Writes and builds at the intersection of real-time ML and product. Great thinker on deployment patterns.
🚀 AI-Native Products
20. Prafulla Dhariwal – Head of Multimodal, OpenAI
21. Mohammad Norouzi – CEO, Ideogram
Making image generation both realistic and creative, with a strong emphasis on text rendering in images—a notoriously difficult problem in generative models.
22. Mira Murati – Thinking Machines Lab
Developing AI models that enhance collaboration between humans and machines.
23. Scott Wu – Co-founder, Cognition AI
Developing Devin AI, an AI software developer designed to perform tasks of a software engineer.
24. Bilawal Sidhu – AR/AI creator & product thinker
One of the most articulate voices at the intersection of spatial computing, AI, and user experience.
25. Cristóbal Valenzuela – Co-founder, Runway ML
Pushing the frontier of text-to-video, with roots in design and accessibility for creators.
🧭 Policy, Ethics, and Ecosystem Shapers
26. Rumman Chowdhury – Responsible AI advocate, founder of Humane Intelligence
At the forefront of community-based model evaluations and AI red-teaming.
27. Fei-Fei Li – Professor, Stanford HAI
A continued force in human-centered AI and bridging academia, policy, and industry.
28. Jack Clark – Co-founder, Anthropic; publisher of Import AI
Still one of the sharpest observers of AI progress, governance, and geopolitical dynamics.
29. Amba Kak – Executive Director, AI Now Institute
Influential voice on AI regulation, surveillance, and rights-focused governance frameworks.
30. Alex Cardinell – Founder, Papers with Code (acq. by Meta)
Empowering reproducible research and benchmarking across the open AI ecosystem.
Final Word
The future of AI isn’t shaped by hype — it’s built by people with conviction, clarity, and follow-through. The 30 leaders above are defining what gets funded, released, regulated, and adopted in 2025.
