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The AI Cast

Who are these names that keep showing up in the news? The recurring cast of the AI drama: who they are, why they matter, their signature moments. Tap a card to open it. More people get added over time.

Portraits are AI-generated illustrations, not photographs.

Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang

黃仁勳・Founder & CEO, NVIDIA

Who

Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, born in Tainan, moved to the US at nine. The black leather jacket is his trademark.

Why they matter

Nearly every chip used to train AI comes from his company, making him the arms dealer of the AI boom. Tech giants line up to buy from him, and every trip back to Taiwan sets off a frenzy, night-market crowds included.

Signature moments

  • 1993 Founded NVIDIA at thirty, starting from a corner booth at a Denny's in California.
  • 2023 Gave the 'Run, don't walk' commencement speech at National Taiwan University; all of Taiwan was quoting it the next day.
  • 2024 NVIDIA briefly became the world's most valuable company, a graphics-card maker turned the most valuable business on Earth.
Lisa Su

Lisa Su

蘇姿丰・CEO, AMD

Who

CEO of AMD, also born in Tainan, and the most influential woman in semiconductors. She and Jensen Huang are distant relatives, something even they only learned later.

Why they matter

When she took over, AMD traded at around two dollars and was written off by the market; a decade later it is one of the few companies able to challenge NVIDIA in AI chips. Nobody wants a one-company chip market, so a lot rides on her.

Signature moments

  • 2014 Took over as CEO with the company in crisis and few believers outside it.
  • 2022 AMD's market value overtook Intel's, completing an epic turnaround.
  • 2023 Launched the MI series of AI chips, taking the fight directly to NVIDIA.
Morris Chang

Morris Chang

張忠謀・Founder, TSMC

Who

Founder of TSMC and the godfather of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. He started the company at fifty-five and invented the foundry business model.

Why they matter

Nearly every advanced AI chip in the world passes through TSMC's fabs. Without his bet decades ago there would be no 'sacred mountain protecting Taiwan,' and a large part of the AI boom stands on Taiwanese ground.

Signature moments

  • 1987 Founded TSMC at fifty-five to make chips only for others, a model almost nobody understood at the time.
  • 2018 Retired at eighty-six, having taken TSMC to the top of the industry in process technology.
  • 2024 Published the second volume of his memoir to a rush of Taiwanese readers; his words still move the industry.
Sam Altman

Sam Altman

山姆.奧特曼・CEO, OpenAI

Who

CEO of OpenAI and the man behind ChatGPT. In his thirties, soft-spoken, yet the entire tech world leans in whenever he talks.

Why they matter

ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 pushed AI from the lab into everyone's phone, so this whole boom is a fire he lit. Every OpenAI update, price change, and boardroom drama directly touches hundreds of millions of users.

Signature moments

  • 2022 ChatGPT hit a million users in five days, the fastest ever at the time.
  • 2023 Fired overnight by his own board, then reinstated five days later under employee pressure, while the tech world watched like a drama series.
  • 2025 Championed mega data-center projects like Stargate, building AI infrastructure on the scale of national public works.
Elon Musk

Elon Musk

伊隆.馬斯克・Head of Tesla, SpaceX & xAI

Who

Head of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the AI company xAI. The loudest voice in tech, no contest.

Why they matter

He co-founded OpenAI, later fell out with Altman, built his own rival Grok, and took the feud to court. Half of the juiciest grudges in AI involve him.

Signature moments

  • 2015 Bankrolled the co-founding of OpenAI, originally to keep Google from monopolizing AI.
  • 2018 Split from OpenAI, ended up suing years later, with public jabs between the two now routine.
  • 2023 Founded xAI and launched Grok, pitched as the AI that answers anything, with controversy to match the buzz.
Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

馬克.祖克柏・Founder & CEO, Meta

Who

Founder and CEO of Meta, the parent company of the Facebook and Instagram you scroll every day.

Why they matter

He went the opposite way from everyone else, releasing his Llama models for free. Then he launched the most expensive talent war in tech history, dangling nine-figure pay packages that raised the price of every AI researcher.

Signature moments

  • 2021 Renamed the company Meta to bet on the metaverse and got mocked across the internet for two years.
  • 2023 Released the Llama models openly, making free AI models an industry norm.
  • 2025 Set up a superintelligence lab and poached talent with sky-high packages; everyone in AI feared the raid and secretly hoped to be raided.
Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei

達里歐.阿莫代・CEO, Anthropic

Who

CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude (one of the AIs I use every day). A physics PhD who talks like a professor.

Why they matter

He left OpenAI with a group of colleagues to build a safety-first lab that still ships frontier models, proving the two can coexist. He is also the CEO most willing to warn publicly about AI hitting jobs, in blunter terms than anyone.

Signature moments

  • 2021 Led a team out of OpenAI to found Anthropic.
  • 2024 Published the long essay 'Machines of Loving Grace,' sketching the optimistic version of where AI could go.
  • 2025 Warned that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs, setting off a global media debate.
Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis

德米斯.哈薩比斯・CEO, Google DeepMind

Who

CEO of Google DeepMind. A British former chess prodigy who designed video games before turning to AI research.

Why they matter

His team built AlphaGo, the previous AI shockwave. He then used AI to crack protein structures and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, making him the face of AI-for-science.

Signature moments

  • 2016 AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, the first time the whole world collectively felt AI's power.
  • 2024 Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold.
  • 2025 Leads the Gemini effort, carrying Google's counteroffensive in the AI race.
Sundar Pichai

Sundar Pichai

桑德爾.皮查伊・CEO, Google & Alphabet

Who

CEO of Google and its parent Alphabet. Born in India, he rose from product manager to running the whole company.

Why they matter

Nobody had more to lose from ChatGPT than Google, whose lifeblood is search. He has to push Gemini to the frontier while protecting a search-ads business worth hundreds of billions, making him the defending general under the most pressure.

Signature moments

  • 2015 Became CEO of Google, then of Alphabet four years later.
  • 2023 The rushed Bard launch stumbled, forcing a company-wide emergency mobilization.
  • 2025 Gemini fought its way back to the front of the pack, proving the elephant can turn.
Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella

薩蒂亞.納德拉・CEO, Microsoft

Who

CEO of Microsoft, the man who took a company mocked as past its prime back to the top of the world.

Why they matter

The best bettor of the AI boom: he put big money into OpenAI long before ChatGPT blew up, buying the right to wire the strongest AI into Windows and Office. The Copilot at your workplace is that wager paying out.

Signature moments

  • 2014 Became CEO and pivoted Microsoft to the cloud, growing its value nearly tenfold.
  • 2019 Made the first billion-dollar investment in OpenAI while most of the world wasn't looking.
  • 2023 Brokered through OpenAI's board crisis week, widely called the calmest person in the whole saga.
Tim Cook

Tim Cook

提姆.庫克・CEO, Apple

Who

CEO of Apple and Steve Jobs's successor, who built Apple into one of the most profitable companies on Earth.

Why they matter

The most conspicuous laggard of the AI race: Siri stagnated for a decade and Apple Intelligence kept slipping. But he controls two billion devices, so the moment Apple gets AI right the whole board could flip, which is why everyone keeps watching.

Signature moments

  • 2011 Took over from Steve Jobs amid doubt and drove Apple past a three-trillion-dollar value.
  • 2024 Unveiled Apple Intelligence, Apple's long-awaited answer to the AI wave.
  • 2025 The new Siri slipped again and again, a rare subject of open criticism of Apple.
Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever

伊利亞.蘇茨克維・Founder of SSI, ex-Chief Scientist of OpenAI

Who

Co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, regarded by many peers as the person who understands deep learning best.

Why they matter

A large part of this AI revolution's technical foundation is his work, from the field-shaking AlexNet in 2012 to the GPT series. He now runs Safe Superintelligence, which promises no interim products, just a straight line toward safe superintelligence.

Signature moments

  • 2012 Co-authored AlexNet, the starting gun of the deep learning revolution.
  • 2023 Joined the board's move to oust Altman, then publicly said he regretted it.
  • 2024 Left OpenAI to found SSI, raising billions with no product at all.
Mira Murati

Mira Murati

米拉.穆拉提・Founder of Thinking Machines, ex-CTO of OpenAI

Who

Former CTO of OpenAI, born in Albania. When ChatGPT and DALL-E shipped, she was the one carrying the engineering side.

Why they matter

During OpenAI's five-day meltdown in 2023 she served as interim CEO. She then struck out on her own with Thinking Machines Lab, raising two billion dollars before showing a product, one of the largest seed rounds ever, and the world is waiting for her reveal.

Signature moments

  • 2022 As CTO shipped ChatGPT, changing how everyone talks to computers.
  • 2023 Was thrust into the interim CEO seat during the board crisis, stepped aside days later, and kept her composure throughout.
  • 2025 Thinking Machines raised a two-billion-dollar seed round at a valuation above ten billion.
Greg Brockman

Greg Brockman

格雷格.布羅克曼・President, OpenAI

Who

Co-founder and president of OpenAI, famously the hardest-grinding engineer in the building.

Why they matter

Altman is the face; he is the engine. Nearly every big OpenAI launch has him behind it, and when Altman was fired in 2023 he quit first in solidarity, the loyalty bellwether of the whole saga.

Signature moments

  • 2015 Left the CTO seat at Stripe to join OpenAI when it was still a nonprofit.
  • 2023 Resigned the night Altman was fired and returned with him five days later.
  • 2024 Came back from a sabbatical to keep working the front lines of OpenAI engineering.
Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman

穆斯塔法.蘇萊曼・CEO, Microsoft AI

Who

CEO of Microsoft AI and a co-founder of DeepMind, London-born, author of the bestseller The Coming Wave.

Why they matter

His career is the AI industry in miniature: co-founded DeepMind and sold it to Google, founded Inflection, then was scooped up team-and-all by Microsoft. He now runs consumer AI there, shaping the personality of Copilot.

Signature moments

  • 2010 Co-founded DeepMind, sold to Google four years later for six hundred million dollars.
  • 2022 Founded Inflection AI and built Pi, a chatbot pitched on warmth and companionship.
  • 2024 Microsoft absorbed the Inflection team wholesale and he became CEO of Microsoft AI.
Daniela Amodei

Daniela Amodei

丹妮拉.阿莫代・President, Anthropic

Who

Co-founder and president of Anthropic, and Dario's younger sister. The siblings led the exodus from OpenAI together and built the company behind Claude.

Why they matter

Her brother steers the research; she runs the company. A frontier AI lab operated by siblings is nearly unprecedented in tech history, and Anthropic's growth from dozens to thousands of people rests on her side of the house.

Signature moments

  • 2021 Co-founded Anthropic with her brother Dario: he takes the models, she takes the company.
  • 2023 Claude launched, giving the safety-first approach its first mass-market product.
  • 2025 Anthropic's valuation passed one hundred billion dollars; the sibling shop became a giant.
Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang

亞歷山大.王・Head of Meta Superintelligence Labs

Who

Dropped out of MIT at nineteen to found Scale AI, becoming one of the youngest self-made billionaires by labeling the industry's data.

Why they matter

In 2025 Zuckerberg paid 14.3 billion dollars for nearly half of Scale AI largely to get him, installing the twenty-eight-year-old atop Meta Superintelligence Labs. The single priciest move of the AI talent war was for this one person.

Signature moments

  • 2016 Founded Scale AI at nineteen, doing the least glamorous and most needed job in AI: labeling data.
  • 2024 Scale AI passed a ten-billion-dollar valuation, serving everyone from self-driving firms to the Pentagon.
  • 2025 Recruited by Zuckerberg at a record price to run Meta Superintelligence Labs at twenty-eight.
Liang Wenfeng

Liang Wenfeng

梁文鋒・Founder, DeepSeek

Who

Founder of DeepSeek, an engineer-boss who came out of Chinese quant finance and almost never appears in public.

Why they matter

In early 2025 his team built a near-frontier model at a fraction of the usual cost, shaking the faith that AI must burn mountains of money. NVIDIA plunged in a day and Silicon Valley lost sleep. He is the face of the China variable in the AI race.

Signature moments

  • 2015 Founded the quant fund High-Flyer and stockpiled GPUs, quietly banking the capital for AI.
  • 2023 Started DeepSeek, committed to open weights and a low-cost path.
  • 2025 The R1 model shocked global markets, dubbed AI's Sputnik moment.
Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas

阿拉溫德.斯里尼瓦斯・CEO, Perplexity

Who

CEO of the AI search startup Perplexity, an Indian-born founder around thirty and a former OpenAI researcher.

Why they matter

His mission is bluntly to reinvent search with AI, stepping straight onto Google's turf. Famously audacious, he has bid for Chrome and TikTok as a startup quoting giants. If you've seen search that just answers you, he helped set that trend.

Signature moments

  • 2022 Founded Perplexity, AI search that answers with sources attached.
  • 2025 Launched the Comet AI browser, aiming to replace the doorway to the web itself.
  • 2025 Bid tens of billions for Chrome, leaving the world asking where the money would come from.
Noam Shazeer

Noam Shazeer

諾姆.沙齊爾・Co-lead, Google Gemini

Who

A co-author of the Transformer paper, part of the technical foundation under every chat AI today.

Why they matter

His story is the defining footnote of the AI talent war: Google wouldn't ship his chatbot, so he left to found Character.AI, and a few years later Google paid 2.7 billion dollars to bring him back to co-lead Gemini. Same person, one trip out the door, valuation up a few hundredfold.

Signature moments

  • 2017 Co-authored the Transformer paper, 'Attention Is All You Need.'
  • 2021 Left Google after it declined to launch his chatbot and founded Character.AI.
  • 2024 Google struck a 2.7-billion-dollar deal to bring him back to co-lead Gemini.
Jony Ive

Jony Ive

強尼.艾夫・Designer, leading OpenAI's hardware

Who

The design soul behind the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch, and the designer Steve Jobs trusted most. British.

Why they matter

He has teamed up with Altman to build the iPhone of the AI era: OpenAI bought his startup io for about 6.5 billion dollars, betting the next thing everyone carries won't be a phone. The man who changed everyone's pocket wants to do it again.

Signature moments

  • 2007 Led the design of the first iPhone, redefining what a phone is.
  • 2019 Left Apple to found LoveFrom, with clients lining up at the door.
  • 2025 His startup io was acquired by OpenAI to build a mysterious AI device with Altman.
Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son

孫正義・Founder, SoftBank Group

Who

Founder of SoftBank Group and the biggest gambler in Japanese tech, forever betting on the next big wave.

Why they matter

He turned twenty million dollars in Alibaba into a legendary hundred-billion return; now he has bet the whole group on AI, committing tens of billions to OpenAI, backing the Stargate data-center project, and holding Arm, the chokepoint of chip design. Much of the astronomical money AI needs is money he moved.

Signature moments

  • 2000 Put twenty million dollars into Alibaba, one of the highest-returning investments ever.
  • 2016 Bought Arm, which nearly every phone and AI chip now depends on.
  • 2025 Poured tens of billions into OpenAI and the Stargate project, declaring superintelligence within a decade.
Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton

傑弗瑞.辛頓・Godfather of deep learning, Nobel laureate

Who

The godfather of deep learning, a British-born scholar at the root of today's AI, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in physics.

Why they matter

He spent forty years on a path nobody believed in until the whole world followed. Then, at the peak, he quit Google so he could freely warn that AI might spin out of control. The founding father turned whistleblower, and that turn itself made headlines.

Signature moments

  • 2012 With his students, Ilya among them, built AlexNet and set off the deep learning revolution.
  • 2023 Quit Google to warn openly about AI risk, making headlines worldwide.
  • 2024 Received the Nobel Prize in Physics and used the stage to repeat his warning.
Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun

楊立昆・AI scientist, Turing Award laureate

Who

French Turing Award laureate and Meta's longtime chief AI scientist, the elder statesman most willing to contradict everyone.

Why they matter

While the world hypes chat AI, he throws cold water daily, insisting large language models will never reach human intelligence. He argues with peers online as prolifically as he publishes, the best opposition debater in AI.

Signature moments

  • 1989 Used neural networks to read handwritten zip codes, one of deep learning's first practical wins.
  • 2018 Shared the Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio, the deep learning trio.
  • 2025 Announced his departure from Meta to start a company betting on world models over chat AI.
Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio

約書亞.班吉歐・AI researcher, Turing Award laureate

Who

One of the deep learning trio, a Turing Award laureate and Université de Montréal professor, among the most cited computer scientists alive.

Why they matter

The most academic of the trio: no company, no big-tech post, he stayed a professor. He now puts his full weight behind AI safety, chairing the international AI safety report and founding a nonprofit to install the brakes before it's too late. The conscience-of-science role is simply who he is.

Signature moments

  • 2018 Shared the Turing Award with Hinton and LeCun.
  • 2024 Chaired the first International AI Safety Report, framing the risks for governments.
  • 2025 Founded the nonprofit lab LawZero to research AI that cannot deceive.
Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li

李飛飛・Stanford professor, founder of World Labs

Who

Stanford professor known as the godmother of AI. She emigrated from China at sixteen and worked her family's laundromat while studying her way to Princeton.

Why they matter

The deep learning revolution owes half its spark to her ImageNet dataset; without that library of images there is no 2012 breakout. She now runs World Labs, chasing the next problem of spatial intelligence, teaching AI to understand the 3D world.

Signature moments

  • 2009 Released ImageNet, fourteen million images that taught AI to see the world.
  • 2024 Founded World Labs, valued above a billion dollars within a year.
  • 2025 Shipped generative 3D world models, moving AI from viewing images to entering scenes.
Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng

吳恩達・AI educator, founder of DeepLearning.AI

Who

The world's most famous AI teacher, co-founder of Google Brain and of Coursera, born to Hong Kong immigrant parents.

Why they matter

Millions of people worldwide took their first AI class from him. While others race to build the strongest model, he builds the biggest classroom, preaching that AI is the new electricity and everyone should learn to use it. If someone near you is self-learning AI, odds are the trail leads back to him.

Signature moments

  • 2011 Co-founded Google Brain, bringing deep learning into Google.
  • 2012 Put his Stanford machine learning course online, taught a million students with one class, and Coursera was born.
  • 2017 Founded DeepLearning.AI, the common starting point for AI self-learners everywhere.
Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy

安德烈.卡帕西・AI researcher and educator

Who

A founding member of OpenAI and former head of Tesla Autopilot, now AI's favorite internet tutor with millions watching his YouTube lectures.

Why they matter

With a resume that could run any lab, he chose to teach: his build-it-from-scratch videos are shared curriculum for engineers worldwide. Words he coins casually become industry language, including 'vibe coding' for letting AI write your code on vibes.

Signature moments

  • 2017 Became Tesla's AI director, leading the vision system behind Autopilot.
  • 2023 Rejoined OpenAI, left a year later, and went all-in on AI education.
  • 2025 Casually coined 'vibe coding,' which swept the world and made it into dictionaries.
Jeff Dean

Jeff Dean

傑夫.迪恩・Chief Scientist, Google

Who

Google's chief scientist, an engineer there since 1999 and a legend with his own genre of internet jokes about his superhuman coding.

Why they matter

Half the foundation under Google's scale is his work: core search infrastructure, TensorFlow, and the TPU chip program. The computing muscle behind Gemini still rests on this veteran.

Signature moments

  • 2004 Co-invented MapReduce, teaching the world to crunch big data on piles of cheap machines.
  • 2015 Led the open-sourcing of TensorFlow, once the world's most used AI framework.
  • 2023 Named chief scientist after the Brain-DeepMind merger, anchoring the back end of Gemini.
Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee

李開復・Chairman of Sinovation Ventures, founder of 01.AI

Who

A Taiwan-born AI veteran who held senior posts at Apple, Microsoft, and Google before founding Sinovation Ventures in Beijing.

Why they matter

Much of the Chinese-speaking world met AI through his books; AI Superpowers on the US-China race became a crossover bestseller. Past sixty he founded 01.AI to build open models himself, and a life spanning the US, China, and Taiwan makes him a rare interpreter both sides can hear.

Signature moments

  • 1998 Founded Microsoft Research China, later called the West Point of Chinese AI.
  • 2018 Published AI Superpowers, one of the most read AI primers in the Chinese-speaking world.
  • 2023 Founded 01.AI at sixty-two; its open models briefly ranked near the top of global leaderboards.