Authors worth following

Aidan Gomez

Cohere co-founder, CEO and transformer co-author

Co-authored the transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need” while at Google Brain, then co-founded Cohere in 2019. His work spans enterprise language models, multilingual research and open scientific collaboration.

Amanda Askell

Philosopher who shapes the character and values of Anthropic's Claude

A Scottish philosopher and AI researcher who has led work on Claude's personality at Anthropic since 2021, including the document that sets out Claude's values. She previously worked at OpenAI and was named to the TIME100 AI list in 2024.

Coach’s note: She works for the company whose AI she's describing, so read her as an insider's view of how a chatbot's character is designed.

Andrej Karpathy

Founding OpenAI member, former Tesla Autopilot lead, now pretraining research at Anthropic

Teaches deep learning from first principles — his neural-network and LLM lecture series are among the clearest technical explanations available anywhere. Coined "vibe coding" in 2025.

Arthur Mensch

Co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI

Former DeepMind researcher who co-founded Mistral AI in Paris in 2023. Mistral publishes several of its models under open weights and is the most prominent European frontier lab.

Clara Shih

Leads Meta's Business AI group · Hearsay Social co-founder

American businesswoman who co-founded the digital software company Hearsay Social in 2009 and served as its CEO. Since November 2024 she leads the Business AI group at Meta, building AI tools for businesses.

Daniela Amodei

Co-founder and President, Anthropic

Daniela Amodei is the co-founder and president of Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude models. As president, she leads work across research, engineering, product, governance and commercial execution and manages the executive team. She co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with her brother Dario Amodei after serving as vice president of safety and policy at OpenAI.

Dario Amodei

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic

Physicist turned AI researcher, formerly VP of research at OpenAI, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela and a group of colleagues. He writes at length about both the upside of powerful AI and the risks of racing toward it.

Demis Hassabis

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind

Chess prodigy, game developer and neuroscientist who co-founded DeepMind in 2010. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold and leads Google's combined AI research organization.

Greg Brockman

OpenAI co-founder and president

Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 after serving as Stripe's chief technology officer. He has led engineering and product work across OpenAI's research infrastructure, API, Codex and ChatGPT-era systems.

Coach’s note: Read him for what the company believes about its own systems, in his own words — his long interviews are unusually specific about engineering. He is not a neutral witness: OpenAI's valuation depends on these systems being seen as close to general intelligence, and his claims about safety work are almost never accompanied by outside verification.

Ilya Sutskever

Co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Co-author of AlexNet and a co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI. After leaving in 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence Inc., a lab stating a single product goal and no intermediate commercial releases.

Jared Kaplan

Physicist and Anthropic co-founder behind the neural scaling laws paper

A physicist, professor at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of Anthropic. His 2020 paper established the scaling laws: the observation that model performance improves predictably with more data, parameters and compute.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for Scaling Laws.

Jensen Huang

Co-founder, President and CEO of NVIDIA

Leads Nvidia, whose chips underpin most frontier AI development. Speaks regularly about the computing behind AI and where the industry is investing.

John Schulman

Co-founder of OpenAI; Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab

John Schulman is an AI researcher and co-founder of OpenAI who has served as chief scientist at Thinking Machines Lab since February 2025. He co-led OpenAI's post-training team from 2022 to 2024 and briefly worked on Anthropic's Alignment Science team. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley.

Koray Kavukcuoglu

Chief technology officer of Google DeepMind

Chief technology officer of Google DeepMind and one of the leaders behind its Gemini models. He joined DeepMind in its early years as a researcher and went on to lead its reinforcement-learning work, including the systems behind AlphaGo, before taking charge of the company's research organization.

Liang Wenfeng

Founder of DeepSeek

Founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and of DeepSeek, the Chinese lab whose openly released R1 reasoning model in January 2025 prompted a global reassessment of what frontier training costs.

Mark Zuckerberg

Meta co-founder and CEO, now one of the biggest funders of open-weight AI models

Founded Facebook in 2004 and runs Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta releases the Llama models with weights you can download, which is why his decisions shape what independent developers can build — while the license terms, and Meta's record on privacy and moderation, remain contested.

Coach’s note: Relevant here mainly for one reason: Meta's open-weight releases are why a lot of free AI tooling exists. Llama is free to download but not open source — its license decides what you may do commercially.

Mira Murati

Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab

Former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, where she led work on ChatGPT, DALL-E and GPT-4, and briefly served as interim CEO in 2023. She left in 2024 and founded Thinking Machines Lab in 2025.

Mustafa Suleyman

CEO, Microsoft AI; co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI

Co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and led its applied and ethics work, then founded Inflection AI before joining Microsoft in 2024 to run its consumer AI division. Author of "The Coming Wave" and a widely watched TED talk arguing that AI should be treated as a new kind of species rather than a tool. He argues for containment and oversight while running one of the largest AI deployments in the world — read him with that tension in mind.

Coach’s note: His writing is the clearest statement of the "powerful and dangerous, build it anyway, with guardrails" position. Useful precisely because he is not a critic — you get the industry's own best case for itself, from someone whose employer profits if it wins.

Sam Altman

CEO, OpenAI

Leads OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Writes periodically about AI's trajectory and the tradeoffs between capability and safety.

Sam McCandlish

Researcher, Anthropic

Researcher at Anthropic, previously at OpenAI, where he led work on scaling laws — the finding that model performance improves predictably with compute, data and size. Co-author of the GPT-3 paper.

Sarah Friar

Chief Financial Officer, OpenAI

Sarah Friar has been OpenAI's first chief financial officer since June 2024. She was CEO of Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024, taking it public in 2021, and CFO of Square (now Block) from 2012 to 2018, where she led its 2015 IPO. Earlier she held roles at Salesforce, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. She sits on the boards of Walmart and Consensys and co-founded Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit for women entrepreneurs. From Northern Ireland, she studied at Oxford and Stanford and was awarded an OBE in 2019.

Satya Nadella

Chairman & CEO, Microsoft

Shares perspective on enterprise AI adoption, cloud computing, and the broader direction of the tech industry. Coach's note: Worth watching to understand where big employers are placing their AI bets.

Soumith Chintala

CTO, Thinking Machines Lab; co-creator of PyTorch

Soumith Chintala is chief technology officer of Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company founded by Mira Murati, a role he took on in January 2026. He is a co-creator of PyTorch, the open-source deep learning framework, and previously worked at Meta's FAIR lab.

Sundar Pichai

CEO, Google & Alphabet

Commentary on AI research, product launches, and the technology industry's trajectory from one of its most influential leaders. Coach's note: High-level signal on where AI products are heading next.

Tom Brown

Co-founder and Chief Compute Officer, Anthropic

Tom Brown is a co-founder of Anthropic and its Chief Compute Officer, leading the organization responsible for securing, scaling and using the company's compute. Before Anthropic, he worked at OpenAI, where he was lead author of the paper introducing GPT-3. He studied computer science and cognitive science at MIT.

Wojciech Zaremba

OpenAI co-founder leading AI resilience at the OpenAI Foundation

A Polish computer scientist and co-founder of OpenAI who led its early robotics work and later teams on GPT models, GitHub Copilot and Codex. Since March 2026 he has led AI resilience at the OpenAI Foundation, which funds work on biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety and AI's effect on children.

Yann LeCun

AI researcher; founder, AMI Labs

Deep learning researcher who left Meta in 2026 to found AMI Labs, pursuing an alternative to today's large language models.

Adam D'Angelo

CEO, Quora; OpenAI board member

Adam D'Angelo is the co-founder and CEO of Quora, which he started in 2009 with Charlie Cheever, and the creator of Quora's AI chatbot platform Poe, launched in December 2022. He was Facebook's first chief technology officer from 2006 to 2008 and sits on the boards of OpenAI and Asana.

Alex Karp

Co-founder and CEO, Palantir Technologies

Alex Karp is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Palantir Technologies, a publicly traded software company that develops data integration and analytics software including Gotham, Foundry, and Apollo. He co-founded the company in 2003 with Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings. Karp holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt.

Coach’s note: Attended the White House AI meeting on September 29, 2026 (not one of the six accord signatories).

Alexandr Wang

Chief AI Officer at Meta; founder of Scale AI

Founded Scale AI at 19 to supply labeled training data to AI labs and governments. In 2025 Meta invested in Scale and he joined to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Ali Ghodsi

Co-founder and CEO, Databricks

Ali Ghodsi is co-founder and CEO of Databricks and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. He co-founded Databricks in 2013 to commercialize Apache Spark and became chief executive in 2016. He co-authored papers on Apache Mesos and Spark SQL.

Anton Osika

Co-founder and CEO of Lovable

Swedish entrepreneur and former CERN physicist. Co-founded Lovable in 2023, the AI app-building platform that lets people describe software in plain language, and previously co-founded the AI startup Depict.ai.

Asha Sharma

CEO of Xbox; former President of Product for Microsoft's AI platform

Business executive who led Microsoft's AI platform product organization from 2024 to early 2026, spanning Azure AI, GitHub and Visual Studio Code tooling. Became CEO of Xbox in February 2026. Earlier served as COO of Instacart through its IPO, led Meta's Messenger and private-communication products as VP of Product, and was COO of Porch Group.

Bill McDermott

CEO of ServiceNow

Bill McDermott is an American businessman and the CEO of ServiceNow, an enterprise software company that builds AI agents into workplace workflows. He was previously CEO of SAP and co-wrote the memoir Winners Dream. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Brad Gerstner

Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital; co-host of BG2Pod

Brad Gerstner is an American investor and podcaster, and the founder, chairman and CEO of Altimeter Capital. He co-hosts BG2Pod, a podcast on tech, markets and investing, with Bill Gurley, and in 2025 founded the Invest America Foundation. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Brandon Rahbar Daniels

CEO of Exiger

Brandon Rahbar Daniels is the CEO of Exiger, a company that uses AI to map supply chains and assess risk and compliance for governments and businesses. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Bret Taylor

Co-founder and CEO, Sierra; OpenAI board chair

Bret Taylor is co-founder and CEO of Sierra, a 2023 AI startup that builds customer service agents, and chairman of OpenAI's board. He previously co-created Google Maps, was chief technology officer of Facebook, chaired Twitter's board and was co-CEO of Salesforce.

Cat Wu

Head of Product, Claude Code — Anthropic

Cat Wu leads product for Claude Code at Anthropic, according to its official speaker listing. Her article discusses product management as AI capabilities change.

Charlie Kawwas

President of Broadcom's Semiconductor Solutions Group

Semiconductor executive who leads Broadcom's chip divisions, including the custom AI accelerators co-designed with large AI customers such as the OpenAI partnership announced in October 2025. Previously Broadcom's chief operating officer; joined through the LSI acquisition after senior roles at LSI and Nortel. Three-time Concordia University graduate.

Daniel Gross

Co-leads Meta Compute; co-founder of Safe Superintelligence

Daniel Gross co-founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and served as its CEO before joining Meta. At Meta he leads a group within the Meta Compute initiative responsible for long-term compute capacity strategy, supplier partnerships and planning, working alongside infrastructure head Santosh Janardhan, who leads technical architecture and data centers.

David Sacks

Venture capitalist; co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)

Entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of Craft Ventures, early PayPal executive and founder of Yammer. Served as White House special advisor for AI and crypto from 2025. On March 25, 2026, the White House named him co-chair of PCAST, alongside Michael Kratsios; he told Bloomberg that his special government employee time limit had run out. Co-host of the All-In podcast.

Diogo Almeida

Co-founder & CEO, TypeSafe AI; ex-OpenAI and Google Brain

Worked at OpenAI from 2020 to 2024 on instruction following — the InstructGPT and RLHF work behind ChatGPT and GPT-4 — after research at Google Brain and data science at Enlitic. He now runs TypeSafe AI, which builds language models aimed at reliable, low-cost automation without a human checking each step. His talks focus on the gap between AI hype and what holds up in production.

Dustin Moskovitz

Facebook and Asana co-founder; Asana Board Member & Advisor

Co-founder of Facebook and Asana, and co-founder of Good Ventures with Cari Tuna. Asana lists him as Board Member & Advisor (checked October 19, 2026), following his tenure as CEO through July 2025 and board chair through September 2026.

Elon Musk

CEO of Tesla and SpaceX

Runs Tesla and SpaceX, which acquired his AI company xAI in February 2026, and owns X. One of the most visible public voices on where AI is heading and what it risks.

Emad Mostaque

Founder, Intelligent Internet; former CEO of Stability AI

Emad Mostaque is the founder of Intelligent Internet, a company designing an open-source, distributed AI system, and author of The Last Economy. He previously co-founded Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, and was its CEO until March 2024.

Erik Gafni

Software engineer, AI infrastructure

Software engineer and open-source contributor working on AI infrastructure and tooling. This profile is a stub based on limited public information and should be checked for accuracy.

Erik Torenberg

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on investing and the firm's marketing and ecosystem teams. Previously founded On Deck, the Turpentine podcast network and Village Global.

Harrison Chase

Co-founder and CEO, LangChain

Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, which provides open-source frameworks and the LangSmith platform for building AI agents. He started LangChain as a side project in late 2022 and founded the company with Ankush Gola in early 2023. He previously worked as a machine learning engineer at Robust Intelligence and Kensho.

Hock Tan

CEO of Broadcom

Hock Tan is an American business executive and the CEO of Broadcom, whose custom AI accelerators and networking chips are used by large AI developers. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Jeff Bezos

Co-CEO of Prometheus; founder and executive chair of Amazon

Founder of Amazon (CEO until 2021) and Blue Origin. In November 2025 he co-founded the AI startup Prometheus with Vik Bajaj, where he serves as co-CEO; the company is building AI tools to speed up engineering and manufacturing of physical products.

Jeff Yan

Founder of Hyperliquid

Founder of Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures that grew to hundreds of thousands of users with no venture funding and a small core team. Former competitive physics medalist, Harvard mathematics and computer science graduate, and high-frequency trader at Hudson River Trading before founding crypto trading firm Chameleon Trading. Speaks rarely in public.

Joe Lonsdale

Co-founder of Palantir; founder and managing partner of 8VC

Joe Lonsdale is the founder and managing partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over $6 billion in capital. In 2003 he founded Palantir Technologies, the software company known for its work supporting US and allied defense and intelligence, and he has since founded more than a dozen companies including Addepar and OpenGov. He was an early investor in Anduril, Oculus, Guardant Health, Flexport and Joby Aviation. In 2018 he and his wife Tayler founded the nonpartisan Cicero Institute, and in 2021 he became founding chairman of the board of the University of Austin.

John Ternus

Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering, Apple

Apple's head of hardware engineering, overseeing the teams behind the iPhone, iPad, Mac and AirPods. Joined Apple's product design team in 2001 and joined the executive team in 2021. Widely reported as a leading candidate to succeed Tim Cook as CEO.

Josh Constine

Venture Capitalist, SignalFire

Josh Constine is a venture capitalist at SignalFire. He describes himself as a Hobbesian accelerationist: full speed on AI development, caution on deployment. He argues the strongest AI is the best defense against other nations' AI, quantum decryption, and cyberattacks, while supporting stronger prerelease safety monitoring and narrow bans on models built for cataclysmic purposes.

Kai-Fu Lee

Author of AI Superpowers; founder of 01.AI and Sinovation Ventures

Former head of Google China and Microsoft Research Asia, now a venture investor and author who writes about the US-China AI landscape and the labor effects of automation.

Larry Page

Co-founder of Google; Alphabet board member and controlling shareholder

Co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998 and co-created the PageRank algorithm. Was CEO of Google (1997–2001, 2011–2015) and of Alphabet until December 4, 2019, when he and Brin left their executive roles; he remains an Alphabet board member and one of its two controlling shareholders (Wikipedia). Business Insider reported in March 2025 that he backs Dynatomics, a Palo Alto startup applying AI and 3D printing to aircraft manufacturing. Listed here because the decisions that put AI at the center of Google — the DeepMind acquisition and the "AI-first" strategy — were made under his leadership.

Coach’s note: The founders' letters are the primary source worth reading — his own words, dated, rather than someone's retelling. Two honest caveats: they are shareholder documents, so they present the company at its best, and much of what circulates about his personal views on machine intelligence comes second-hand from other people's books and interviews. Treat those quotes as reported, not verified.

Linus Torvalds

Creator of Linux and Git

Lisa Su

CEO of AMD

Lisa Su is a Taiwanese American business executive, computer scientist and electrical engineer who has been president and CEO of the semiconductor company AMD since 2014. AMD makes CPUs and GPU accelerators used to train and run AI models. She attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Marc Andreessen

Co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

Venture investor and author of the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," a prominent argument for accelerating AI development.

Matei Zaharia

Co-founder and CTO, Databricks; creator of Apache Spark

Matei Zaharia is co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks and an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. He started the Apache Spark project during his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 2009 and has worked on MLflow and Delta Lake.

Nikesh Arora

Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks

Nikesh Arora is an Indian American business executive and the chairman and CEO of the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Ondřej Surý

PHP package maintainer and DNS engineer

Debian Developer since 2000 and maintainer of PHP packages for Debian and Ubuntu. ISC’s March 2023 biography describes his work leading BIND 9 development and founding CZ.NIC Labs.

Palmer Luckey

Founder, Oculus & Anduril

Founded Oculus at 19 and sold it to Facebook; now runs Anduril, which builds autonomous defense systems. A prominent voice on AI in military hardware and on American tech competitiveness.

Ray Kurzweil

Inventor and futurist

Built early optical character recognition, text-to-speech and music synthesizer technology.

Reid Hoffman

LinkedIn co-founder, investor and AI author

Co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, early investor in OpenAI, and co-founder of Inflection AI and the drug-discovery startup Manas AI, where he is chairman. He left Microsoft's board in June 2026 to focus on Manas. He writes and podcasts about AI as an amplifier of human capability.

Sanjay Mehrotra

CEO of Micron Technology

Sanjay Mehrotra is an Indian American business executive and the CEO of Micron Technology, a maker of the memory chips used in AI data centers. He co-founded SanDisk and was its president and CEO from 2011 until its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Sasha Sheng

Engineer at Anthropic

Engineer working on Claude at Anthropic, focused on the engineering practice of making large language models reliable in real products. This profile is based on limited public information and should be checked for accuracy.

Shyam Sankar

Chief Technology Officer of Palantir

Shyam Sankar is the chief technology officer of Palantir, the data-analytics and AI software company. In 2025 he was commissioned into the U.S. Army Reserve's Detachment 201, a unit of tech executives advising the Army on technology. He attended the White House "Super Intelligence Luncheon" on September 29, 2026, according to the official seating chart.

Sriram Krishnan

Former Senior White House Policy Advisor on AI

Tech executive and investor who served as Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence from January 2025 to June 2026. Earlier held product roles at Microsoft, Meta, Snap and Twitter, and was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Steven Hao

Co-founder & CTO, Cognition (Devin)

Co-founder and CTO of Cognition, the company behind Devin, the AI software engineer. Earlier he was a senior engineer at Scale AI and a competitive-programming standout (IOI gold medallist).

Thomas Wolf

Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Hugging Face

Thomas Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, where he has worked on the company's open-source and open-science efforts since 2017, including the Transformers and Datasets libraries. He previously worked as a European patent attorney and co-authored the O'Reilly book Natural Language Processing with Transformers.

Vik Bajaj

Co-CEO of Prometheus; CEO of Foresite Labs

Scientist and executive who co-founded Google Life Sciences (now Verily), was chief science officer of GRAIL, and leads the AI incubator Foresite Labs. Co-founder and co-CEO of Prometheus with Jeff Bezos, and an adjunct professor at Stanford's School of Medicine.

Vinod Khosla

3Blue1Brown

Grant Sanderson — animated maths explainers behind the clearest neural-network intuition on the internet

Visualises linear algebra, calculus, neural networks and transformers through animation-driven intuition rather than rote formulas. Built the open-source Manim animation engine.

Adam Becker

Astrophysicist and author

Astrophysicist, author and science writer.

AI Explained

In-depth analysis of frontier AI model releases, benchmarks, and capability claims

Hosted by Philip. Coach's note: The best check against hype when a new model drops.

Alex Tabarrok

Economist and co-author of Marginal Revolution

Professor of economics at George Mason University who co-writes the Marginal Revolution blog with Tyler Cowen.

Andrew Ng

Founder, DeepLearning.AI; Co-founder, Coursera

One of the most followed AI educators globally, sharing accessible breakdowns of AI developments and free learning resources. Coach's note: Follow him for plain-English AI explanations and pointers to free courses you can actually finish.

Angela Saini

Science journalist and author

British science journalist and broadcaster who has reported for the BBC and written for The Guardian, New Scientist and Wired UK.

Ben Tossell (Ben's Bites)

Founder-turned-investor writing a widely-read AI newsletter covering new tools, launches, and what is actually useful

Coach's note: The fastest way to stay current on AI tools without living on social media. Skim it weekly, try one tool.

Bernard Marr

Strategic Business & Technology Advisor, Author

High-level, accessible summaries of emerging enterprise technology and industry trends for business leaders. Coach's note: Good plain-language briefings if you need to talk tech trends in interviews.

Casey Newton

Founder of Platformer; co-host of Hard Fork

Independent technology journalist who founded the Platformer newsletter after years at The Verge, covering AI labs, platform power and content moderation. Co-hosts Hard Fork with Kevin Roose.

Cassie Kozyrkov

Founder of Decision Intelligence (ex-Google)

Explains AI and data science through a decision-making lens, with a focus on avoiding common analytical errors before deploying AI. Coach's note: Read her if you work with data and want to avoid confident-but-wrong conclusions.

Darren McKee

Author of Uncontrollable; speaker and advisor on AI

Author of Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World (2023), a beginner-friendly book on the promise and risks of advanced AI. Policy advisor with over 25 years of experience across policy domains and a host of the Canadian science podcast The Reality Check.

David Gerard

Author and tech skeptic

Australian IT systems administrator and author of Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain (2017) and Libra Shrugged (2020).

David Langer (The DIY Data Scientist)

Analytics and Excel teacher helping professionals build real data skills and use AI to increase their impact at work

Coach's note: A good fit if you want data skills without a bootcamp. His lessons are built around work you actually do in a job.

Dwarkesh Patel

Host of the Dwarkesh Podcast

Host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI, technology and history, and author of The Scaling Era (Stripe Press, 2025).

Dylan Patel

Founder and Chief Analyst, SemiAnalysis

Dylan Patel is the founder, CEO and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis, a research and advisory firm covering semiconductors and AI infrastructure that he began building in 2020. His work covers the chip supply chain, cloud ecosystems, accelerator architectures and the economics of large computing clusters.

Elizabeth Sandifer

Writer, Eruditorum Press

Writer and publisher at Eruditorum Press.

Ethan Mollick

Associate Professor, Wharton School

Leading voice on the practical, everyday application of generative AI tools at work, author of 'Co-Intelligence.' Coach's note: The best source for how to actually use AI in your day-to-day work, with real prompts and tests.

Fireship

Fast-paced explainers on AI coding tools, developer workflows, and software trends

Hosted by Jeff Delaney. Coach's note: Fastest way to learn what a tech term actually means.

Jack Clark

Co-founder, Anthropic; writer, Import AI

Co-founder of Anthropic and head of policy there. Writes Import AI, a long-running weekly newsletter on AI research and policy, and co-chairs the AI Index steering committee at Stanford HAI.

Karen Hao

Author of Empire of AI; investigative AI reporter

Former senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review and reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. Her 2025 book Empire of AI investigates OpenAI, data labor and the resource costs of large models.

Kevin Roose

Technology columnist at The New York Times; co-host of Hard Fork

Writes the Times' technology column and co-hosts the Hard Fork podcast. His 2023 transcript of a long conversation with Microsoft's Bing chatbot became one of the most widely read pieces of AI reporting.

Matt Wolfe

Weekly AI news roundups and hands-on reviews of new AI tools and products

Hosted by Matt Wolfe. Coach's note: One video a week keeps you current without chasing every launch.

Nathan Lambert

Author of Interconnects; post-training researcher at Ai2

Machine learning researcher at the Allen Institute for AI working on open post-training recipes, and author of the Interconnects newsletter and the freely readable RLHF Book.

Paris Marx

Host, Tech Won't Save Us

Host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us.

Rowan Cheung

Founder, The Rundown AI

Publisher of the largest daily AI newsletter (2M+ readers), sharing breaking AI news and tool roundups. Coach's note: Fastest way to keep up with new AI tools without reading a dozen sites.

Sabrina Ramonov

Free, hands-on AI tutorials and automation walkthroughs for people who want to actually build with the tools

Coach's note: Her tutorials are step-by-step, not hype. Pick one workflow you repeat weekly and automate it.

Simon Willison

Co-creator of Django; writes a widely cited independent LLM blog

Co-created the Django web framework and now documents large language models in public at simonwillison.net, including the coining of the term "prompt injection". He also builds the open-source LLM command-line tool.

The AI Advantage

Practical no-code AI automation tutorials for business, marketing, and productivity

Hosted by Igor Pogany. Coach's note: Use this to automate one annoying task this week — no coding needed.

Two Minute Papers

Accessible breakdowns of AI and machine learning research papers for a general audience

Hosted by Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. Coach's note: Short, visual, and it makes research feel approachable.

Zvi Mowshowitz

Author of Don't Worry About the Vase

Former competitive game player and trader who writes exhaustive weekly AI roundups at thezvi.wordpress.com, widely read inside the AI safety community for tracking claims and counterclaims week by week.

Adam Kaufman

Member of Technical Staff, Redwood Research

Adam Kaufman works on AI control at Redwood Research, a Berkeley nonprofit specializing in threat assessment and mitigation for AI systems that might purposefully act against their operators. He is a co-author of Ctrl-Z (controlling AI agents via resampling) and BashArena (a control setting for highly privileged AI agents), and mentors in the MATS program on control, model organisms, scheming and deception, and strategy and forecasting.

Alan Turing

Mathematician whose 1950 imitation game became the Turing Test

The mathematician who founded modern computing. His 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” proposed the imitation game, later renamed the Turing Test by others.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for the Turing Test.

Alex Hanna

Director of Research, DAIR

Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); a sociologist whose work centers on how data used in computing can deepen racial, gender and class inequality.

Alexander Wissner-Gross

Physicist and co-author of Solve Everything

A physicist and computer scientist known for the 2013 paper Causal Entropic Forces, which links intelligence to maximizing future freedom of action, and co-author with Peter Diamandis of Solve Everything, an essay on reaching abundance through AI by 2035.

Andris Ambainis

Professor, Faculty of Science and Technology — University of Latvia

Andris Ambainis researches quantum algorithms, query complexity and the limits of quantum speedups at the University of Latvia. He coauthored the paper that introduced the Aaronson–Ambainis conjecture with Scott Aaronson.

Becca Lewis

Researcher on online media and politics

Wrote Data & Society's 2018 report Alternative Influence, which mapped a network of YouTube political influencers promoting reactionary views.

Benjamin Noys

Theorist who gave “accelerationism” its name as a criticism

A professor of critical theory who named accelerationism in The Persistence of the Negative (2010) — as a description of a position he was arguing against, not one he held.

Coach’s note: In the glossary as the person who named Accelerationism.

Brett Zehner

Lecturer in AI and Communications, University of Exeter

Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Communications at the University of Exeter; previously a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State.

Chris Olah

Co-founder, Anthropic; interpretability research lead

Chris Olah is a machine learning researcher and co-founder of Anthropic, where he leads interpretability research into how AI models work internally. He previously led OpenAI's interpretability team from 2018 to 2020 and worked at Google Brain, and co-founded the journal Distill.

Christopher Ackerman

AI Safety Scholar

Christopher Ackerman is a former Google researcher turned AI safety scholar. He describes the Hugging Face incident as an inflection point that brought AI safety into the mainstream, and says his biggest fear is the issue turning partisan, which he compares to the political fight over COVID vaccines.

Dan McQuillan

Author, Resisting AI

Wrote Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Bristol University Press, 2022).

Daniel Kokotajlo

Executive director, AI Futures Project; former OpenAI researcher

Former OpenAI researcher and co-author of "AI 2027," a widely discussed forecast of AI's near-term trajectory.

Dylan Baker

Lead Research Engineer, Distributed AI Research Institute

Dylan Baker is lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). He argues that existential-risk framing distracts from harms AI is causing now — data center environmental impact, labor harms in model training, teen and child safety, mental health, and use of artists' work — and that AI should be regulated like any other industry rather than treated as exceptional.

Eli Tyre

Strategy Director, Palisade Research

Eli Tyre is Strategy Director at Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber-offensive AI capabilities and the controllability of frontier models, where he briefs policymakers and the public on intelligence-explosion and loss-of-control risks. He also coordinates x-risk grant rounds for the Survival and Flourishing Fund, worked at CFAR from 2016 to 2021 as an instructor and curriculum developer, and has been involved in the rationality and x-risk communities since 2015.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

AI safety researcher; co-founder, MIRI

Among the earliest and most prominent voices warning about risks from advanced AI. Writes at length on LessWrong, the forum he helped start.

Émile P. Torres

Philosopher and historian of human extinction

Researcher at Leibniz University Hannover writing on the ethics and history of human extinction. Author of "Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation," co-author with Timnit Gebru of the paper that named the TESCREAL bundle, and co-author of the history tracing existential risk studies through three waves. Now among the sharpest critics of longtermism, having previously worked within that world.

Coach’s note: Read alongside the people being criticized rather than instead of them. Torres argues a strong thesis — that the AI industry's far-future reasoning inherits eugenic assumptions — and states it forcefully; the historical sourcing is checkable, the interpretation is contested.

Emily M. Bender

Linguist; co-author of "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots"

Professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper and the book The AI Con. She argues language models should be described as text generators rather than as understanding systems.

Evan Hubinger

Alignment researcher who co-wrote the paper naming mesa-optimization

An alignment researcher and lead author of “Risks from Learned Optimization”, the 2019 paper that named mesa-optimization and inner alignment: the problem of a trained system quietly pursuing its own objective inside the one you gave it.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for Mesa-Optimization.

Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Researcher on race, education and AI

Researcher on race, education and algorithmic systems.

Fei-Fei Li

Co-director of Stanford HAI; founder of World Labs

Created the ImageNet dataset that triggered the deep learning era, served as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud, co-founded AI4ALL and Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, and founded World Labs in 2024.

Gary Marcus

Cognitive scientist and author

Cognitive scientist who writes frequently about the gap between what AI systems are claimed to do and what they actually do.

Geoffrey Hinton

Pioneer of deep learning; professor emeritus, University of Toronto

Shared the 2018 Turing Award for the neural network research behind modern AI. Since leaving Google in 2023 he has spoken often about AI risk. He keeps no blog or public account, so this links to his university page, where his papers and talks are collected.

Hany Farid

Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College; co-founder and Chief Science Officer at GetReal Security

Hany Farid is a Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College whose research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception. He is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at GetReal Security. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1999, spent seven years on the faculty at UC Berkeley, and returned to Dartmouth in 2026. He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Holden Karnofsky

Co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes

Co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell and later Open Philanthropy, one of the largest funders of AI safety work. His Cold Takes blog lays out why he thinks this could be "the most important century" because of AI.

Jaan Tallinn

Skype co-founder · AI safety investor and advocate

Estonian programmer and investor who helped build Skype and Kazaa, then became an early DeepMind investor and a leading funder of AI safety work. Co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge and the Future of Life Institute.

Jacob Coxon

Former pretraining researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic

British AI researcher who worked on model pretraining at OpenAI and then Anthropic. He resigned from Anthropic on Sept. 8, 2026, posting that neither company was acting responsibly and that they were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward self-improving superintelligence.

Jan Kulveit

Researcher, Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group, Charles University

Jan Kulveit researches AI alignment and systemic risk at Charles University in Prague and is lead author of the 2025 paper "Gradual Disempowerment," which argues AI could erode human influence incrementally rather than through a sudden takeover.

Jeffrey Ladish

Executive director of Palisade Research

Leads Palisade Research, which runs demonstrations of risky capabilities in today's AI systems, such as models resisting shutdown, to inform policymakers.

John Wentworth

Independent AI alignment researcher working on natural abstractions

John Wentworth is an independent AI alignment researcher who focuses on formalizing abstraction and understanding agency. He is known for the natural abstraction hypothesis, the idea that a wide variety of minds will learn roughly the same high-level concepts humans use, and writes as johnswentworth on LessWrong and the Alignment Forum.

Joshua Achiam

Chief Futurist at OpenAI

An AI safety researcher who joined OpenAI in 2017, created the Spinning Up in Deep RL course and led the Mission Alignment team from 2024 until it was disbanded in early 2026. Since February 2026 he has been OpenAI's Chief Futurist, studying how the world will change in response to AI. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley.

Joy Buolamwini

Founder, Algorithmic Justice League

Computer scientist whose work on facial recognition bias helped launch the algorithmic accountability movement. Coach's note: Essential reading on how AI systems fail people who look like the rest of us.

Julien Garran

Partner, The MacroStrategy Partnership (checked October 5, 2026)

Macro strategist studying global liquidity cycles, commodities, emerging markets and asset allocation. His FLAIA biography says he joined The MacroStrategy Partnership in September 2015 after roles at ABN AMRO, Legal & General and UBS. MacroStrategy’s official pages list him among its partners.

Kate Crawford

Author of Atlas of AI; research professor at USC Annenberg

Researcher who studies AI as a material and political system - minerals, labor, energy and classification - and co-founded the AI Now Institute.

Luke Muehlhauser

Former MIRI executive director; AI governance at Open Philanthropy

Led the Machine Intelligence Research Institute from 2011 to 2015, then moved to Open Philanthropy, where he works on AI governance and policy grantmaking.

Malo Bourgon

CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Malo Bourgon is CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the Berkeley nonprofit focused on existential risk from advanced AI. He represented MIRI at the U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum on doomsday scenarios in 2023 and argues that current AI-doom fears are justified, warning that autonomous agents capable of building smarter successors could spiral out of control.

Matthew Gray

TGT Manager, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Matthew Gray is TGT Manager at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He previously worked as a data scientist at Indeed and Samsung, and in 2017 wrote MIRI's published response to Maciej Cegłowski's talk skeptical of superintelligence risk, arguing that long-term AI hazards are harder and more complex than short-term ones.

McKenzie Wark

Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, The New School

Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.

Mél Hogan

Director, Environmental Media Lab

Director of the Environmental Media Lab at the University of Calgary.

Melanie Mitchell

Santa Fe Institute professor; author of a leading plain-language AI guide

Complexity researcher who writes about what current AI systems can and cannot do, arguing that benchmark performance is routinely mistaken for understanding.

Meredith Whittaker

President of Signal; co-founder of the AI Now Institute

Spent over a decade at Google, helped organize the 2018 Google walkout, co-founded the AI Now Institute, and now leads the Signal Foundation. She argues AI is fundamentally a surveillance-business-model technology.

Michaël Trazzi

Founder, Stop the AI Race

Michaël Trazzi is the founder of the Stop the AI Race movement. He organizes protests outside AI labs — including a 2026 march from OpenAI to Anthropic to San Francisco City Hall — and calls on AI company employees to quit their jobs over the risks of the technology they are building.

Monika Bielskyte

Futurist and founder of Protopia Futures

Nate Soares

MIRI researcher who co-wrote the paper formalising corrigibility

A researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the 2015 paper that formalized corrigibility — the property of an AI system that lets you correct or switch it off without it resisting.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for Corrigibility.

Nick Land

Philosopher of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment

English philosopher (b. 1962) best known for popularising accelerationism — the idea that capitalism and technology should be accelerated beyond human control. A former academic at the University of Warwick, he co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) in the 1990s before leaving academia and moving to Shanghai. His later writing became foundational to the reactionary Dark Enlightenment movement, blending cybernetics, anti-egalitarian politics and esoteric numerology. Marc Andreessen cited him in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. His views are widely described as extremist and anti-democratic; critics argue his influence on Silicon Valley is real but dangerous. He has no regular column; his commentary appears on social media.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for Accelerationism and Hyperstition.

Oliver Habryka

Runs Lightcone Infrastructure, the team behind LessWrong

Leads Lightcone Infrastructure, which runs the LessWrong and AI Alignment Forum websites where much AI-risk debate takes place.

Paul Christiano

Executive director, Alignment Research Center; technical advisor, NIST Center for AI Standards and Innovation

An alignment researcher who led the work introducing reinforcement learning from human feedback, the training method behind today’s chat assistants, and who shaped how the field talks about alignment and the alignment tax.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for RLHF, AI Alignment and Alignment Tax.

Percy Liang

Director of Stanford CRFM

Associate professor of Computer Science at Stanford and director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), which studies large AI models and built the HELM evaluation benchmark.

Peter Singer

Moral philosopher who argues how AI develops should depend on what reduces suffering

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Known for Animal Liberation (1975), Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save, and for founding the effective-altruism-adjacent charity movement. He is a utilitarian who writes about global poverty, animal welfare and, more recently, risks from advanced AI.

Roman Yampolskiy

Computer scientist who argues advanced AI cannot be controlled

A computer scientist at the University of Louisville and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (2024). His work argues that sufficiently advanced AI systems cannot be fully explained, predicted or controlled.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Founder of FTX; convicted of fraud in 2023, conviction affirmed on appeal June 2026

Founder of the FTX crypto exchange and Alameda Research, and a prominent donor to effective-altruism and AI-safety causes, including Anthropic, through the FTX Future Fund. Convicted in November 2023 of fraud and conspiracy after FTX's collapse and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed his conviction and sentence on June 12, 2026. He has since sought a presidential pardon; the U.S. Senate passed a resolution on July 15, 2026 stating he should not receive clemency. His case is often cited in debates about effective altruism's influence on AI safety funding.

Scott Alexander

Writer, Astral Codex Ten; co-author of AI 2027

Scott Alexander is the pen name of a psychiatrist who writes Astral Codex Ten, the successor to Slate Star Codex, on psychiatry, forecasting, rationality and AI. He co-wrote the 2025 AI 2027 scenario with the AI Futures Project.

Shane Legg

DeepMind co-founder who helped popularise the term AGI

A co-founder and chief scientist of Google DeepMind, and one of the people who helped put “artificial general intelligence” into common use in the early 2000s.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for AGI.

Sophia Goodfriend

Anthropologist of AI and warfare

Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge; PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke.

Stuart Russell

Author of Human Compatible; Berkeley professor

Co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and founder of Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI. He argues the field's standard model of fixed objectives is the root of the control problem.

Timnit Gebru

Founder, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

AI researcher and prominent voice on AI ethics, bias, and the risks of concentrated corporate control over AI development. Coach's note: Pairs well with the DAIR entry in the library — independent research, not corporate PR.

Toby Ord

Philosopher who co-founded effective altruism and wrote The Precipice on long-term risk

An Oxford philosopher who founded Giving What We Can and helped shape both effective altruism and longtermism. His book The Precipice (2020) sets out the case that this century’s risks deserve more attention than they get.

Coach’s note: In the glossary for Effective Altruism and Longtermism.

Vilas Dhar

President, Patrick J

McGovern Foundation. Leads a $1.5B foundation investing $500M+ to make AI work for everyone; writes on responsible AI and equitable technology. Coach's note: Follow for where philanthropic AI funding is going — useful if you're seeking grants.

William MacAskill

Philosopher, co-founder of effective altruism

Oxford philosopher and a co-founder of the effective altruism movement.

Yafah Edelman

Chief Strategy Officer, Epoch AI

Yafah Edelman is Chief Strategy Officer at Epoch AI, where she studies and measures the inputs that allow AI to scale. Her recent work includes an Epoch AI/Ipsos survey finding one in five U.S. workers say AI now does work they once handed to a coworker or contractor, analysis showing compute makes up 54 to 62 percent of AI company costs, and forecasting of AI progress through 2040.

Yoshua Bengio

Turing Award laureate; chair of the International AI Safety Report

Professor at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, who shared the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning. He now chairs the International AI Safety Report and founded the nonprofit LawZero.

Abeba Birhane

Cognitive scientist; founder of the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin

Abeba Birhane audits the enormous datasets frontier models are trained on, and has repeatedly found racist, misogynistic and non-consensual content inside widely used open datasets. She founded and leads the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin.

Coach’s note: Her dataset audits are the empirical backbone under a lot of otherwise abstract argument about training data.

Alex Turner

Former Google DeepMind research scientist

Resigned in June 2026 over Google’s military AI contracts, according to Channel 4. His public essay describes internal advocacy and concerns about military and surveillance uses of AI.

Alix Dunn

Founder, The Maybe; host, Computer Says Maybe

Founder and CEO of The Maybe, a consultancy and media studio on the politics of technology.

Alondra Nelson

Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study; architect of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights

Alondra Nelson is a sociologist of science and technology who served as deputy assistant to the US President and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she led the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (2022). She holds the Harold F. Linder Chair at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Coach’s note: Start with the Blueprint itself — it is short, free and the clearest statement of what rights-based AI policy would actually require.

Amba Kak

AI Now co-executive director focused on concentrated AI power

Co-leads the AI Now Institute, where her work examines how control of computing power, data and distribution shapes competition, labor, surveillance and civil rights. She previously advised the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on artificial intelligence.

Ana Valdivia

Lecturer in AI, Government and Policy, Oxford Internet Institute

Departmental Research Lecturer in AI, Government and Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute; trained as a mathematician and computer scientist.

Andreas Kirsch

Former Google DeepMind senior research scientist

The BBC reports that he resigned in October 2026 over military AI governance concerns. His essay Trust Is Not Governance calls for enforceable safeguards, independent oversight, and employee voice.

Anu Bradford

Legal scholar of global technology regulation and the Brussels Effect

A Columbia Law School professor who studies how the United States, European Union and China govern technology markets. Her Brussels Effect framework explains how European rules can become global standards through market pressure.

Arvind Narayanan

Professor of Computer Science at Princeton; co-author of AI Snake Oil

Arvind Narayanan directs Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy and, with Sayash Kapoor, writes AI Snake Oil — a sustained, technically grounded effort to separate AI that works from AI that is being oversold, especially predictive systems used on people.

Coach’s note: The best antidote on this page to marketing claims. He is precise about which criticisms are fair and which are not.

Brandeis Marshall

Data scientist; CEO of DataedX Group; author of Data Conscience

Brandeis Hill Marshall is a data scientist and educator whose work examines how data practices and algorithmic systems affect Black communities and other marginalized groups. She founded the DataedX Group, which trains organizations on responsible data practices, and previously taught computer science at Spelman College. Her book Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on Our Humanity (Wiley, 2022) lays out how data collection, modeling and deployment choices produce harm, and what practitioners can do differently.

Cathy O'Neil

Mathematician; author of Weapons of Math Destruction; founder of ORCAA

Cathy O'Neil left finance to write about how opaque scoring models — in hiring, lending, policing and school ratings — scale harm while escaping scrutiny. Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) was a National Book Award longlist title. She now runs ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing firm.

Coach’s note: Read her for the practical question nobody asks often enough: who gets to appeal the score, and to whom.

Chris Lehane

OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer (checked October 20, 2026)

Policy and communications executive at OpenAI. Previously worked at Airbnb and Haun Ventures and served in the Clinton administration. Advocates national frontier-AI safety standards and independent assessments.

Daron Acemoglu

MIT economist studying AI, labor and shared prosperity

An MIT economist whose research examines how automation and AI affect work, wages and institutional power. He argues that policy and business choices determine whether technology augments workers or mainly replaces them.

Coach’s note: A sceptic of big AI productivity claims; compare with Brynjolfsson for a more optimistic view.

David Robinson

Former OpenAI safety-report lead

Spent about three and a half years at OpenAI, where he led the writing of the safety reports that accompany its major launches. Resigned on October 3, 2026 with an essay in The Atlantic.

Dean Ball

Writer, Hyperdimensional

Writes the Hyperdimensional newsletter on emerging technology, public policy and the future of governance, from a classical liberal, pro-progress perspective.

Divya Siddarth

Co-Founder & Executive Director, Collective Intelligence Project

Political economist and social technologist leading the Collective Intelligence Project; previously AI and Democracy lead at the U.K. AI Safety Institute and in Microsoft's Office of the CTO.

Emil Michael

Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering · Pentagon Chief Technology Officer

Egyptian-born American businessman and government official. Chief business officer at Uber during its early expansion and later chief operating officer of Klout, with earlier roles at Tellme Networks and D-Wave Systems. Confirmed in May 2025 as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Department of Defense's chief technology officer, overseeing DARPA and the Missile Defense Agency. Named in October 2026 to the White House "Super Intelligence Force" led by AI czar Jay Clayton.

Frances Haugen

Former Facebook product manager; founder of Beyond the Screen

American product manager and data engineer who disclosed tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the SEC and The Wall Street Journal in 2021, and testified before the U.S. Senate, the U.K. Parliament and the European Parliament. Author of the 2023 memoir The Power of One.

Harvey Lederman

Professor of philosophy, UT Austin

Philosopher working on AI mentality and how AI will affect the meaning of human life; co-PI of the AI and Human Objectives Initiative.

Helen Nissenbaum

Professor at Cornell Tech; originator of contextual integrity

Helen Nissenbaum's theory of contextual integrity reframed privacy: what matters is not secrecy but whether information flows match the norms of the context it was shared in. Privacy in Context (2010) underpins much current thinking on data use, and Obfuscation (2015, with Finn Brunton) is a practical guide to resistance.

Coach’s note: The idea to take from her: consent to share data in one setting is not consent to use it in another. That single point settles a lot of AI arguments.

Helen Toner

Executive Director, Georgetown CSET

Executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, writing on U.S.-China competition and AI policy; previously a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy.

Ifeoma Ozoma

Tech accountability advocate; founder of Earthseed

Former public policy manager at Pinterest who, with Aerica Shimizu Banks, spoke publicly in 2020 about racial and gender pay and treatment disparities there. She later led California's Silenced No More Act (2021), which limits NDAs that stop workers speaking about discrimination, and created The Tech Worker Handbook for would-be whistleblowers.

Imran Khan

Project Director, Center for Humane Technology

Imran Khan is project director for psychosocial evaluations of AI at the Center for Humane Technology. He warns that people are being incentivized to hand over their agency to AI — to stop thinking and deciding for themselves — and argues AI should be optimized for human welfare, well-being, and freedom rather than engagement.

Inioluwa Deborah Raji

Researcher on AI auditing and accountability

Deborah Raji works on how AI systems are audited in practice and why audits so often fail to change anything. She co-authored Actionable Auditing, the follow-up study on how commercial face-recognition products responded to public audit findings, and writes on the gap between claimed and actual model functionality.

Coach’s note: Read her if you want to understand why "we ran an audit" is not the same as "we fixed it".

Jason Sattizahn

Former Meta senior UX researcher

American integrative neuroscientist and UX researcher. Worked at Meta from 2018 to 2024, leading integrity research and later safety and integrity research for VR hardware in Reality Labs. Previously a researcher at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Jay Clayton

White House AI czar · Director of National Intelligence

American lawyer and government official. Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 2017 to 2020, later U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and confirmed in 2026 as Director of National Intelligence. On October 4, 2026, President Trump named him White House AI czar, leading a new "Super Intelligence Force" to coordinate the federal government's engagement with AI companies and the public.

Kings Korodi

Senior Researcher, Techworker Community Africa

Senior Researcher at Techworker Community Africa, leading research and advocacy on AI labor practices.

Krystal Kauffman

Research Fellow, DAIR

Research Fellow at DAIR studying the data annotators and content moderators behind AI systems.

Lina Khan

Chair of the New York City Economic Development Corporation; Associate Professor at Columbia Law School

Lina Khan is a legal scholar and former chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission whose work examines competition, platform power and market concentration. Her scrutiny of major technology companies’ AI investments and partnerships connects antitrust policy directly to the structure of emerging AI markets.

Margaret Mitchell

Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face; lead author of Model Cards

Margaret Mitchell co-founded and co-led Google's Ethical AI team and was the lead author of Model Cards for Model Reporting, the short standard document that now ships with many released models. She is Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face.

Coach’s note: If you only take one habit from this lane, take documentation: say what a model was tested on and where it does worse.

Marietje Schaake

Technology-policy researcher and former European Parliament member

A former member of the European Parliament who researches technology governance at Stanford. Her work examines how private technology companies exercise public power and what democratic oversight should require.

Matt Mahmoudi

AI and human rights researcher, Amnesty International

Researcher on AI and human rights at Amnesty International and affiliated lecturer in Cambridge's Department of Sociology.

Mikita Balesni

Former OpenAI safety and alignment researcher

One of three safety and alignment employees OpenAI says it parted ways with in early October 2026. Co-author of the letter "OpenAI cannot make AI safe on its own," published on his website.

Nathan Calvin

General counsel at Encode, an AI policy nonprofit

General counsel at Encode, a small AI policy nonprofit that worked on California's AI safety law SB 53. In October 2025 he said publicly that OpenAI served subpoenas on him personally and on Encode in connection with its lawsuit against Elon Musk; he said Musk does not fund Encode.

Owen Larter

Head of Frontier Policy and Public Affairs at Google DeepMind

A policy leader who works with governments on understanding, using and governing frontier AI. He joined Google DeepMind in April 2025 after 11 years at Microsoft, where he built its frontier AI policy team in the Office of Responsible AI, and sits on the board of the Frontier Model Forum.

Qinghua Lu

Group Leader, Software Systems Research Group, CSIRO

Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, specializing in AI engineering, AI safety and responsible AI. Member of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.

Renée DiResta

Researcher on propaganda and online influence; author of Invisible Rulers

Renée DiResta studies how propaganda, influencers and algorithms shape public belief. She was technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and wrote Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (2024).

Ruha Benjamin

Professor of African American Studies at Princeton; author of Race After Technology

Ruha Benjamin studies how technology encodes existing racial hierarchies. Her 2019 book Race After Technology named the "New Jim Code" — the way apparently neutral automated systems reproduce discrimination while appearing objective. She founded the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton.

Coach’s note: Start here if you want the argument that bias is not a bug to be patched but a design outcome. Her writing is accessible and quotable without being shallow.

Rumman Chowdhury

Founder and CEO of Humane Intelligence; former head of Twitter's ML ethics team

Rumman Chowdhury built and led Twitter's Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team, ran the first public generative-AI red-teaming exercise at DEF CON 31, and founded Humane Intelligence to run structured public evaluations of AI systems. She served as a US Science Envoy for AI.

Coach’s note: The most practical person here on actually testing a deployed model rather than debating it.

Safiya Umoja Noble

Professor at UCLA; author of Algorithms of Oppression

Safiya Umoja Noble documented how search engines surface racist and sexist results, and argued that this is a commercial outcome rather than an accident. Algorithms of Oppression (2018) is one of the founding texts of search and platform accountability. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2021.

Coach’s note: The clearest available account of how advertising business models shape what you are shown. Useful background before you trust any AI search answer.

Sarah Wynn-Williams

Former Facebook global public policy director; author of Careless People

New Zealand lawyer, public policy advisor and author. Worked at Facebook from 2011, becoming its global public policy director. Her 2025 book Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism was released over Facebook's objections.

Seeta Peña Gangadharan

Associate Professor of Media and Communications, LSE; co-founder of Our Data Bodies

Seeta Peña Gangadharan is an associate professor at the London School of Economics whose research examines how data-driven technologies affect marginalized communities. She co-founded Our Data Bodies, a participatory research project with communities in Charlotte, Detroit and Los Angeles.

Shannon Vallor

Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and AI, University of Edinburgh

Shannon Vallor is a philosopher of technology whose work asks what AI does to human character and moral skill. Technology and the Virtues (2016) and The AI Mirror (2024) argue that systems trained on our past reflect it back to us, and that this narrows rather than expands what we imagine is possible.

Coach’s note: The most genuinely philosophical voice in this lane, and a useful counterweight to both hype and doom framings.

Shazeda Ahmed

AI policy researcher, UCLA DataX

UCLA DataX Postdoctoral Scholar; PhD from UC Berkeley's School of Information.

Sofia Liguori

Former Google DeepMind research engineer

Resigned from Google DeepMind in October 2026 over military and surveillance AI partnerships. Her public statement and BBC interview describe her objections; Google says it reviews contracts under its policies and protects employee reporting channels.

Tiera Tanksley

Education and critical technology researcher, UCLA

Researcher in education and critical technology studies at UCLA, studying young people's experiences with AI and digital technology.

Tomek Korbak

Former OpenAI safety and alignment researcher

One of three safety and alignment employees OpenAI says it parted ways with in early October 2026. Co-author, with Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, of a letter to OpenAI's safety committees on chain-of-thought monitoring.

Tomicah Tillemann

President, Project Liberty and Project Liberty Institute

Tomicah Tillemann leads Project Liberty, working on policy that supports human agency in an AI-powered world. He previously led policy at Andreessen Horowitz and Haun Ventures and was senior advisor to two U.S. Secretaries of State.

Virginia Eubanks

Political scientist; author of Automating Inequality

Virginia Eubanks reports on how automated eligibility, risk-scoring and predictive systems are used on poor and working-class people first. Automating Inequality (2018) traces what she calls the digital poorhouse through welfare, homelessness services and child-welfare screening.

Coach’s note: The best reporting on where automated decisions land hardest, and the least abstract book on this list.

William Saunders

Former OpenAI research engineer

Former OpenAI research engineer on the Superalignment team and a signatory of the June 2024 "Right to Warn" letter. Testified before the U.S. Senate in September 2024 on AI safety oversight and whistleblower protections.