Top AI Influencers to Follow
159 AI people worth following, grouped by what they actually do. Updated .
Lab Leaders & Founders
The people running the frontier labs and AI companies.
- Sam Altman
CEO of OpenAI, leading the development of ChatGPT and GPT series models.
- Dario Amodei
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude.
- Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc; former OpenAI chief scientist.
- Greg Brockman
Co-founder and President of OpenAI, leading product and the infrastructure behind ChatGPT.
- Demis Hassabis
Co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind, chief scientist of Alphabet and CEO of Isomorphic Labs; 2024 Nobel Prize laureate for AlphaFold.
- Mira Murati
Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab; former OpenAI CTO.
- Aravind Srinivas
CEO of Perplexity AI, building the future of AI-powered search.
- Emad Mostaque
Founder of Intelligent Internet and former CEO of Stability AI; vocal advocate for open and decentralized AI.
- Clément Delangue
Co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform that Nvidia agreed to buy in 2026.
- Logan Kilpatrick
Product lead for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API; former OpenAI developer relations lead.
- Thomas Wolf
Co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face, key architect of the open-source AI ecosystem.
- Alex Albert
Researcher at Anthropic who previously led Claude Relations, sharing news and insights on Claude.
- Jack Clark
Anthropic co-founder and Head of Public Benefit, leading the Anthropic Institute; writes the weekly Import AI newsletter.
- Mustafa Suleyman
CEO of Microsoft AI, leading Copilot, Microsoft's own MAI models and its superintelligence team; co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI.
- Alexandr Wang
Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads Meta Superintelligence Labs; founder of Scale AI.
- Jeff Dean
Co-founder and CEO of Discovery Loop, a new AI lab that wants to automate scientific research; former Google chief scientist and Gemini co-lead.
- Arthur Mensch
Co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, the Paris lab building open-weight and enterprise models.
- Junyang Lin
Founder of Pragmatik Labs, a new agent-focused AI startup; until March 2026 the technical lead of Alibaba's Qwen models.
- Soumith Chintala
CTO of Thinking Machines Lab and co-creator of PyTorch, after 11 years leading AI infrastructure work at Meta.
- Misha Laskin
Co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, a US lab building open-weight frontier models and coding agents; formerly worked on Gemini at Google DeepMind.
- Aidan Gomez
Co-founder and CEO of Cohere, which builds AI models for businesses; co-author of the original Transformer paper.
Researchers & Scientists
The minds shaping what models can actually do.
- Andrej Karpathy
OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI director who joined Anthropic's pre-training team in 2026, known for his from-scratch neural network video lectures.
- Yann LeCun
Turing Award winner who left Meta to chair AMI Labs, his world-model startup; NYU professor and outspoken AI commentator.
- Jim Fan
NVIDIA director of robotics and distinguished scientist who co-leads the GEAR lab, building the GR00T foundation models for humanoid robots.
- François Chollet
Creator of Keras and the ARC-AGI benchmark, co-founder of the AI research lab Ndea and the ARC Prize.
- Fei-Fei Li
Co-founder and CEO of World Labs, Stanford professor and co-director of Stanford HAI, and creator of ImageNet.
- Lilian Weng
OpenAI researcher leading work on recursive self-improvement and author of the widely read Lil'Log; co-founded Thinking Machines Lab before returning to OpenAI in 2026.
- Riley Goodside
Prompt engineering pioneer known for his chatbot experiments; formerly Scale AI's first Staff Prompt Engineer and later at Google DeepMind.
- Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, leading frontier model research.
- Jason Wei
Research scientist at Meta Superintelligence Labs (formerly OpenAI), known for chain-of-thought prompting.
- Nathan Lambert
Co-founder and executive director of Trillium Labs, a nonprofit for open frontier AI research; writes the Interconnects newsletter and formerly co-led Olmo at Ai2.
- Pranav Rajpurkar
Harvard associate professor who built CheXNet (AI chest X-ray diagnosis) and co-founded a2z Radiology AI, now researching clinical AI agents and medical foundation models.
- Blake Richards
McGill/Mila associate professor and Google Research Scientist whose lab works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and deep learning, studying biologically plausible learning rules.
- Frank Willett
Stanford assistant professor of neurosurgery who builds brain-computer interfaces that turn brain signals into text and speech for people with paralysis.
- Noam Brown
Research scientist at OpenAI working on reasoning; co-created the o-series reasoning models and the Libratus, Pluribus and CICERO game AIs.
- Chris Olah
Anthropic co-founder who leads its interpretability team, studying how neural networks work on the inside.
- Tri Dao
Assistant professor at Princeton and chief scientist at Together AI; creator of FlashAttention and co-creator of Mamba.
- Omar Khattab
Assistant professor at MIT CSAIL and creator of DSPy and ColBERT, tools for programming and optimizing LLM pipelines.
- Shreya Shankar
Researcher on LLM evals and data pipelines who created DocETL; incoming assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon.
Educators & Explainers
Learn how AI works — from first principles to frontier papers.
- freeCodeCamp
Full-length free courses on Python, ML, deep learning, and AI engineering.
- 3Blue1Brown — Grant Sanderson
Animated explainers of math and AI ideas, made with his own open-source animation engine, Manim.
- NetworkChuck — Chuck Keith
IT educator covering networking, cybersecurity, and local AI model deployment.
- Fireship — Jeff Delaney
Fast-paced '100 seconds' tech explainers covering AI, web dev, and programming trends.
- DeepLearning.AI
Structured AI courses, expert interviews, and MLOps tutorials from Andrew Ng.
- The Coding Train — Daniel Shiffman
Creative coding with p5.js covering neural networks, genetic algorithms, and AI art.
- Two Minute Papers — Károly Zsolnai-Fehér
Short, easy-to-follow videos that explain new AI and computer graphics research papers.
- Krish Naik
Founder of KrishAI Technologies, making tutorials and roadmaps on machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and AI engineering.
- sentdex — Harrison Kinsley
Python and machine learning educator with hands-on AI programming tutorials.
- Tech With Tim — Tim Ruscica
Python programming and AI project tutorials including agents and ML models.
- Corey Schafer
In-depth Python tutorials essential for AI and data science development.
- StatQuest — Josh Starmer
Making statistics, machine learning, and neural network math friendly and intuitive.
- Andrew Ng
Co-founder of Coursera, former head of Google Brain and Baidu AI, DeepLearning.AI founder.
- Siraj Raval
Entertaining AI education inspiring developers to build with ML and neural networks.
- AI Explained
Deeply researched, nuanced analysis of AI capabilities, benchmarks, and safety research.
- Welch Labs
Animated deep dives into AI, math, and neural networks, plus the book The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI.
- Nicholas Renotte
IBM data scientist creating hands-on ML and computer vision tutorials.
- Tina Huang
Ex-Meta data scientist and founder of the Lonely Octopus learning platform, making videos on AI tools, coding, and teaching yourself AI.
- Ken Jee
Former data science career YouTuber who now documents getting ready for AI changing work, including building his own AI SaaS products.
- Yannic Kilcher
In-depth paper reviews and commentary on ML research and industry drama.
- Jeremy Howard
Co-founder of fast.ai and the AI lab Answer.AI, teaching practical deep learning and coding with AI through free courses and the Solveit course.
- Daniel Bourke
Self-taught ML engineer sharing learn-in-public tutorials on PyTorch and deep learning.
- Sebastian Raschka
ML researcher and author, writing detailed LLM and deep learning tutorials and guides.
- What's AI — Louis-François Bouchard
Co-founder of Towards AI, making short videos and guides that explain AI research, techniques, and tools in simple terms.
- Bycloud
Clear explainers of new frontier AI research papers and the ideas behind them.
- Umar Jamil
Detailed code-along implementations of transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, and diffusion models.
- Abhishek Thakur
World's first quadruple Kaggle Grandmaster, creating practical ML and NLP tutorials.
- Code Emporium
Visual explainers of transformers, attention mechanisms, and deep learning.
- Arxiv Insights
Clear visual walkthroughs of influential ML and AI research papers.
- Jay Alammar
Known for his widely used illustrated guides to transformers, BERT, and GPT; co-author of the book Hands-On Large Language Models; works at Cohere.
- Jordan Harrod
Harvard-MIT researcher covering AI ethics, brain-computer interfaces, and algorithmic impact.
- David Ondrej
Hands-on videos on building AI agents and coding with AI tools, plus talks on working in the AI era.
- IndyDevDan
Teaches agentic engineering: planning, prompting and running AI coding agents on real software.
- Leon van Zyl
Step-by-step tutorials on building AI agents, automation workflows and apps with agentic coding tools.
- Matt Pocock
TypeScript teacher who now runs AI Hero, with practical lessons on building with LLMs and AI coding for working engineers.
- 1littlecoder
Practical AI news and short tutorials, with a focus on open-source models you can run and test yourself.
- NeuralNine — Florian Dedov
Python and machine learning tutorials, now with many videos on LLM APIs, AI coding tools and new model releases.
- Jeff Su
Product marketer who teaches how to use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI tools to work faster.
- Alex Ziskind
Developer who tests local AI hardware, from Macs to DGX Spark boxes, and benchmarks running LLMs on them.
- Liam Ottley
Founder of Morningside AI who teaches how to build AI automations and agents for real businesses.
AI Engineering & Open Source
Builders shipping the tools, frameworks, and open models.
- Aleksa Gordić
Works on scaling NVIDIA's Nemotron models; former Google DeepMind and Microsoft engineer, known for his paper walkthroughs and llm.c work.
- AI Jason — Jason Zhou
Product designer Jason Zhou shares hands-on AI agent experiments and runs the AI Builder Club community.
- Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering techniques, LLM application development, and AI automation workflows.
- James Briggs
Founder of Aurelio AI, making tutorials on RAG, AI agents, vector databases and production LLM apps.
- Simon Willison
Creator of Datasette, prolific blogger covering LLM tools, prompt engineering, and practical AI.
- Cole Medin
Building AI agents, n8n automations, and local AI tool integrations with hands-on tutorials.
- Dave Ebbelaar
AI engineer and founder of Datalumina, teaching developers how to take AI agents and LLM apps from prototype to production.
- Corbin Brown
AI coding tutorials on building real software without learning to code.
- AssemblyAI
Developer-focused tutorials on speech AI, NLP, and building with LLMs.
- Shawn Wang (swyx)
Editor and co-host of the Latent Space podcast and co-founder of the AI Engineer conference; also works at Cognition.
- Peter Steinberger
Founder of PSPDFKit and creator of the open-source agent OpenClaw; joined OpenAI in 2026 to bring AI agents to more people.
- Maxime Labonne
Head of Post-Training at Liquid AI and author of the popular open-source LLM Course and the LLM Engineer's Handbook.
- Harrison Chase
Co-founder and CEO of LangChain, the open-source framework and company for building LLM apps and agents.
- Sam Witteveen
Co-founder and CEO of Red Dragon AI and Google Developer Expert, making tutorials on AI agents, Google AI tools and LLM apps.
- Eric Hartford
Open-source LLM fine-tuner known for uncensored model variants and the Dolphin series.
- Elvis Saravia
Creator of the Prompt Engineering Guide, a widely used free guide to LLM prompt techniques.
- Georgi Gerganov
Creator of llama.cpp and GGML for fast local LLM inference; his ggml.ai team joined Hugging Face in 2026.
- Hamel Husain
ML engineer (ex-GitHub, Airbnb) who runs Parlance Labs and teaches a popular course on AI evals with Shreya Shankar.
- Armin Ronacher
Creator of Flask and co-founder of Earendil, which now builds the open-source Pi coding agent; writes widely read posts on working with coding agents.
- Addy Osmani
Works on Claude Code at Anthropic after 14 years at Google; writes practical guides on coding agents and AI-assisted development.
- Eugene Yan
Member of technical staff at Anthropic, formerly at Amazon; his blog is a go-to source on LLM evals, recommender systems and building AI products.
- Philipp Schmid
Works on agents and the Gemini API developer experience at Google DeepMind; ex-Hugging Face tech lead who shares hands-on guides and AI news.
Tools, Demos & Creators
Keep up with the newest AI tools, apps, and workflows.
- Guillermo Rauch
CEO of Vercel and creator of v0, pioneering AI-assisted web development.
- Kevin Stratvert
Ex-Microsoft PM teaching AI tools, productivity software, and automation workflows.
- Matt Wolfe
AI tools curator running FutureTools.io, covering the latest AI products, news, and workflows.
- Skill Leap AI — Saj Adib
Fast-paced tutorials on the latest AI tools, APIs, and generative AI workflows.
- Nate Herk
AI automation educator teaching n8n workflows and no-code AI agents; runs the AI Automation Society community.
- The AI Advantage — Igor Pogany
Practical AI tool tutorials and workflow automation for productivity and business.
- Matthew Berman
Hands-on reviews of the latest LLMs, AI tools, and local model setups.
- The AI Grid
Daily coverage of the newest AI tools with in-depth demos and breakdowns.
- Curious Refuge
Online school and channel for AI filmmaking, covering AI video generation and AI art tools.
- Ruben Hassid
Writes How to AI, a free newsletter of step-by-step AI guides, and founded EasyGen, an AI tool for LinkedIn posts.
- All About AI
Practical AI tool tutorials, local LLM setups, and AI-powered creative workflows.
- World of AI
Covering the latest open-source AI models, tools, and step-by-step installation tutorials.
- AI Foundations — Drake Surach
Simplifies AI for creators and entrepreneurs with vibe coding and agent tutorials.
- Riley Brown
Teaches vibe coding and building with AI agents; hosts the A New Vibe podcast with the team behind the Vibecode app builder.
- Alex Finn
Vibe coding tutorials on Claude Code and Codex; built the AI app Creator Buddy without writing code by hand.
- AI Andy — Andy Hafell
AI tool reviews, tutorials, and practical guides for generative AI products.
- Boris Cherny
Creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic; author of Programming TypeScript.
- Thibault Sottiaux
Head of Codex at OpenAI, also working across ChatGPT; posts Codex updates and plans directly.
- Michael Truell
Co-founder of Cursor, the AI code editor, now building at SpaceXAI after SpaceX bought Cursor in 2026.
- Amjad Masad
Co-founder and CEO of Replit, whose AI agent builds and deploys apps from plain-language prompts.
- Scott Wu
Co-founder and CEO of Cognition, maker of the Devin coding agent and owner of Windsurf.
- Mario Zechner
Creator of Pi, a popular open-source coding-agent toolkit that he now builds at Earendil; earlier created the libGDX game framework.
- Daniel Han
Co-founder of Unsloth, the open-source tool for fast, low-memory fine-tuning and running of open LLMs; often among the first to fix bugs in new open models.
- Steve Yegge
Veteran engineer and blogger who created Gas Town, an open-source manager for many coding agents, and Beads, a memory tool for coding agents.
Podcasts, Newsletters & Analysts
The best signal on where AI is headed.
- Matt Shumer
Founder and former CEO of HyperWrite, now an AI investor and writer known for his viral 2026 essay "Something Big Is Happening".
- Lukas Biewald
Co-founder of Weights & Biases, now SVP of AI initiatives at CoreWeave after its 2025 acquisition, and host of the Gradient Dissent podcast.
- Wes Roth
AI commentary covering AGI developments, safety, and societal implications of artificial intelligence.
- Lex Fridman
MIT researcher hosting long-form interviews with leading minds in AI, science, and technology.
- Zain Kahn
Co-founder of Superhuman AI, a daily newsletter with short, practical updates on AI news and tools for work.
- Ethan Mollick
Wharton professor who studies how AI changes work and education; writes the One Useful Thing newsletter and wrote the books Co-Intelligence and Co-Existence.
- Rowan Cheung
Founder of The Rundown AI, a daily AI newsletter with an online learning platform for using AI at work.
- Kevin Roose
Tech journalist and former New York Times columnist who co-hosts Machine Gods, a new AI podcast made with NPR, after four years hosting Hard Fork.
- Pascal Bornet
AI and automation author and keynote speaker whose books include Intelligent Automation, Irreplaceable and Agentic Artificial Intelligence.
- Allie K. Miller
CEO of Open Machine, an AI advisory firm, and former AWS head of machine learning for startups; writes about AI business strategy.
- Casey Newton
Founder of the Platformer tech newsletter who co-hosts Machine Gods, a new AI podcast made with NPR, after four years hosting Hard Fork at The New York Times.
- Robert Scoble
Tech futurist covering AI, spatial computing, and emerging tech trends.
- Dwarkesh Patel
Host of Dwarkesh Podcast with in-depth AI leader interviews.
- David Shapiro
YouTuber and author who talks about AI acceleration and post-labor economics, the idea of an economy where machines do most work.
- Elad Gil
Investor and author of High Growth Handbook who co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo.
- Sarah Guo
Founder of Conviction VC and co-host of No Priors podcast covering AI startups.
- Ben Tossell
Founder of Ben's Bites, a daily AI newsletter for builders, and head of developer relations at the AI coding company Factory.
- Nathaniel Whittemore
Host of The AI Daily Brief, a daily podcast and newsletter on AI news, and founder of the AI training company Superintelligent.
- Michael Spencer
Author of AI Supremacy newsletter covering AI industry trends and future of work.
- Alessio Fanelli
Founder of Kernel Labs, which builds tools for early-stage startups, and former lead co-host of the Latent Space podcast for AI engineers.
- Sam Charrington
Host of TWIML AI Podcast covering machine learning and AI.
- Dan Faggella
CEO of Emerj and host of AI in Business podcast.
- Craig S. Smith
Former New York Times correspondent who hosts the Eye on AI podcast, with interviews of AI researchers and founders.
- Eric Topol
Scripps Research cardiologist and executive vice president, author of Deep Medicine, who writes Ground Truths, a weekly newsletter and podcast on new biomedical and medical AI research.
- Theo - t3.gg — Theo Browne
Developer and creator of T3 Chat with fast, opinionated takes on new models, AI coding tools and AI lab news.
- Nate B Jones
Product leader with a daily video and newsletter on AI news and what it means for strategy and work.
- MattVidPro AI
AI news and hands-on tests, with a focus on image, video and creative generation models.
- Machine Learning Street Talk — Tim Scarfe
Deep, technical podcast with AI researchers on intelligence, reasoning, cognitive science and philosophy of mind.
- Peter H. Diamandis
XPRIZE founder whose Moonshots podcast covers frontier AI, robotics and the race between AI labs.
- Greg Isenberg
Host of The Startup Ideas Podcast, with episodes on new AI tools, agent workflows and AI business ideas.
- Nathan Labenz
Host of The Cognitive Revolution, a weekly podcast interviewing AI builders and researchers.
- Gary Marcus
Cognitive scientist and NYU professor emeritus who writes Marcus on AI, a newsletter that pushes back on LLM hype.
- Zvi Mowshowitz
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, long weekly roundups of AI news with careful analysis of models, labs and AI risk.
- Azeem Azhar
Former journalist who writes Exponential View, a newsletter and podcast on how AI changes the economy and society.