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Voices in AI

The field of artificial intelligence is shaped not just by algorithms and data, but by the people who build, critique, regulate, and reimagine it. These 25 voices represent a diverse cross-section of perspectives: from pioneering researchers and safety advocates to ethics champions and public educators.

Whether you are just starting your AI journey or deepening your expertise, following these leaders will keep you informed, challenged, and inspired.

Ethics & Safety Advocates​

Tristan Harris​

Co-founder, Center for Humane Technology

The person The Atlantic called "the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience." Harris rose to prominence after his 141-slide presentation on attention ethics went viral inside Google. He starred in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and has testified before the U.S. Congress multiple times. His work now focuses on closing the "wisdom gap" between the pace of AI development and society's ability to respond.

Timnit Gebru​

Founder, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

Co-founder of Black in AI and former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team. Gebru's landmark Gender Shades research exposed racial and gender bias in facial recognition systems. Named one of Time's most influential people (2022) and Nature's ten people who shaped science (2021). She founded DAIR to study AI's impact on marginalized communities, with a focus on Africa and African immigrants.

Joy Buolamwini​

Founder, Algorithmic Justice League

The "Poet of Code" whose MIT research revealed that facial recognition systems misidentified darker-skinned women at rates up to 34.7%, compared to 0.8% for lighter-skinned men. Her work directly prompted IBM and Microsoft to improve their algorithms. Featured in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias and author of Unmasking AI. She advised the Biden administration on the 2023 Executive Order on AI (rescinded in January 2025) and continues to push for federal accountability standards on algorithmic systems.

Aza Raskin​

Co-founder, Center for Humane Technology

Son of computing pioneer Jef Raskin (creator of the Macintosh project at Apple), Aza co-founded the Center for Humane Technology alongside Tristan Harris. He coined the concept of "infinite scroll" and later became one of its most vocal critics. He now focuses on AI's societal risks and co-hosts the Your Undivided Attention podcast.

Meredith Whittaker​

President, Signal

Co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, one of the first organizations dedicated to studying the social implications of AI. Whittaker is a leading voice on AI governance, surveillance, and the concentration of power in the tech industry. She left Google after helping organize employee walkouts. As president of Signal, she champions privacy as a fundamental right in the age of AI.

Rumman Chowdhury​

CEO, Humane Intelligence

Founder and CEO of Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit building the practice of algorithmic evaluation. Previously the U.S. Science Envoy for AI at the State Department, and Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability at Twitter before the team was dissolved in the 2022 layoffs. She organized the first-ever algorithmic bias bounty at DEF CON, has been named to the TIME AI 100 list, and remains one of the field's most cited voices on making AI accountability actionable for organizations.

Pioneering Researchers​

Geoffrey Hinton​

Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto | Former VP, Google

Known as the "Godfather of Deep Learning," Hinton's work on neural networks and backpropagation laid the foundation for modern AI. He won the 2018 Turing Award (with Bengio and LeCun) and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2023, he left Google to speak openly about the existential risks of AI, warning that machines could become more intelligent than humans sooner than expected.

Yoshua Bengio​

Professor, Université de Montréal | Scientific Director, Mila

Co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award and the most-cited computer scientist in the world. Bengio has become one of AI's most prominent safety advocates, leading the international scientific report on AI safety for the UK AI Safety Summit. In 2025, he launched LawZero, a nonprofit developing "honest" AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by autonomous agents.

Yann LeCun​

Executive Chair, AMI Labs (formerly VP & Chief AI Scientist, Meta)

The third "Godfather of AI" and co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award. LeCun's pioneering work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) transformed computer vision and image recognition. LeCun left Meta in November 2025 after twelve years leading its AI research to found Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, betting that world-model architectures — trained on video and spatial data rather than text alone — are a more promising path to human-level AI than continuing to scale large language models. He remains a vocal counterpoint to AI doomerism, arguing that current systems are far from human-level intelligence.

Fei-Fei Li​

Professor, Stanford University | Co-director, Stanford HAI

Creator of ImageNet, the massive visual database that catalyzed the deep learning revolution. Li co-founded AI4ALL to increase diversity in AI and co-directs Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute. Named one of Time's Person of the Year "Architects of AI" (2025) and awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. In 2024, she founded World Labs, a startup focused on spatial intelligence and large world models.

Andrew Ng​

Founder, DeepLearning.AI | Co-founder, Coursera

One of AI's most important educators. Ng's Stanford machine learning course (and its Coursera version) has been taken by millions worldwide, democratizing access to AI education. He co-founded Google Brain, served as Chief Scientist at Baidu, and founded Landing AI. His focus on making AI accessible and practical has shaped how an entire generation learns machine learning.

Demis Hassabis​

CEO, Google DeepMind

Co-founder of DeepMind, the lab behind AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and Gemini. Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's breakthrough in protein structure prediction. A former child chess prodigy and video game designer, he brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to AI research, pursuing artificial general intelligence while advocating for responsible development.

Stuart Russell​

Professor, UC Berkeley | Author, Human Compatible

Co-author of the most widely used AI textbook (Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach) and a leading voice on AI alignment. Russell argues that current AI development approaches are fundamentally flawed because they optimize for objectives that may not align with human values. His proposed solution: machines that are uncertain about human preferences and defer to human judgment.

Public Intellectuals & Critics​

Gary Marcus​

Professor Emeritus, NYU | Author, Rebooting AI and Taming Silicon Valley

One of AI's most prominent and persistent skeptics. Marcus has consistently argued that deep learning alone cannot achieve true intelligence, advocating instead for hybrid approaches that combine neural networks with symbolic reasoning. He co-founded Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber) and Robust.AI, and publishes the widely-read Substack newsletter The Road to AI We Can Trust.

Kai-Fu Lee​

Chairman, Sinovation Ventures | Founder & CEO, 01.AI | Author, AI Superpowers

Former president of Google China and a leading voice on AI's global impact. Lee's book AI Superpowers provided a groundbreaking comparison of US and Chinese AI ecosystems. He brings a rare cross-cultural perspective to discussions about AI governance, competition, and the economic disruption AI will cause to the global workforce.

Cathy O'Neil​

Author, Weapons of Math Destruction

Mathematician and data scientist who sounded the alarm on algorithmic bias before it was a mainstream concern. Her 2016 book showed how opaque, unaccountable mathematical models reinforce inequality in hiring, lending, policing, and education. O'Neil demonstrated that "algorithms are opinions embedded in code" and helped launch public awareness of algorithmic accountability.

Kate Crawford​

Research Professor, USC | Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

Co-founder of the AI Now Institute and author of Atlas of AI, which examines AI not as a neutral technology but as a system embedded in politics, labor, and the environment. Crawford's work reveals the hidden human and ecological costs of AI, from the miners extracting lithium for data center batteries to the click workers labeling training data.

Safiya Umoja Noble​

Professor, UCLA | Author, Algorithms of Oppression

Noble's landmark book demonstrated how search engine algorithms perpetuate racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. Her research on how Google's search results reinforced harmful stereotypes about Black women became a touchstone in the field of critical algorithm studies. She co-founded the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

Ruha Benjamin​

Professor, Princeton University | Author, Race After Technology

Benjamin's work examines how technology can reinforce and deepen racial hierarchies, even when designed with the best intentions. Her concept of the "New Jim Code" describes how emerging technologies can encode discrimination under a veneer of objectivity. She directs the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton.

Industry Leaders & Builders​

Sam Altman​

CEO, OpenAI

The public face of the generative AI revolution. Under Altman's leadership, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and the GPT model family (through GPT-5.6), along with GPT Image (since superseded by GPT Image 2) and the Codex coding agent, bringing AI capabilities to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. A former president of Y Combinator, Altman has become one of the most influential (and debated) figures in tech, navigating the tension between rapid AI deployment and safety.

Dario Amodei​

CEO, Anthropic

Former VP of Research at OpenAI who left to co-found Anthropic with a focus on AI safety research. Anthropic's Claude models are built with "Constitutional AI," a technique for training AI systems to be helpful, harmless, and honest. Amodei has published extensively on the responsible scaling of AI capabilities and advocates for a measured approach to AI development.

Cassie Kozyrkov​

CEO, Kozyr (formerly Data Scientific) | Former Chief Decision Scientist, Google

Google's first-ever Chief Decision Scientist, where she pioneered the field of Decision Intelligence and helped over 20,000 Googlers make better data-driven decisions. Kozyrkov is known for making complex AI and statistics concepts accessible through engaging explanations and analogies. She is one of the most effective AI communicators working today.

AI Safety & Alignment Researchers​

Max Tegmark​

Professor, MIT | Co-founder, Future of Life Institute

Physicist turned AI safety advocate. Tegmark co-founded the Future of Life Institute, which organized the influential open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments (signed by over 30,000 people). His book Life 3.0 explores what it means for humanity to co-exist with increasingly powerful AI systems.

Eliezer Yudkowsky​

Co-founder, Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)

One of the earliest and most vocal thinkers on the existential risk posed by artificial superintelligence. Yudkowsky has been writing about AI alignment since the early 2000s, long before it entered mainstream discourse. His Sequences essays on LessWrong are foundational reading in the rationalist and AI safety communities. He advocates for extremely cautious approaches to advanced AI development. In 2025, he and MIRI colleague Nate Soares published If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, arguing for an international halt to frontier AI development — the clearest recent statement of the extremely cautious position he has long advocated.

Nick Bostrom​

Founder, Macrostrategy Research Initiative | Author, Superintelligence

Philosopher whose 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies brought the concept of existential risk from AI into mainstream academic and policy discourse. Bostrom founded and directed the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford for nearly two decades until its closure in 2024; he has since left Oxford to lead the independent Macrostrategy Research Initiative, continuing his work on long-term AI risk.

How to Follow These Voices​

Staying informed about AI means hearing from a diversity of perspectives, not just the builders, and not just the critics. Here are some ways to engage:

  • Podcasts: Your Undivided Attention (Harris & Raskin), The Batch (Andrew Ng), Hard Fork (NYT)
  • Newsletters: Gary Marcus's Substack, Andrew Ng's The Batch, Import AI
  • Books: Start with Unmasking AI, Human Compatible, or AI Superpowers depending on your interest area
  • Social media: Many of these leaders are active on X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and Mastodon
  • Conferences: NeurIPS, ICML, the AI Safety Summit, and TED regularly feature these voices
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This content was developed with AI assistance and is regularly reviewed for accuracy. The individuals listed represent a snapshot of influential voices as of mid-2026 and is not an exhaustive list.

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