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The AI researchers who made a big impact in 2026, as nominated by their peers
9Dario Amodei
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic
9Tri Dao
Princeton computer science professor; co-founder and chief scientist of Together AI
9Percy Liang
Stanford professor; co-founder of Together AI, Simile and Marin
8Devvrit Khatri
Founding member at Mirendil; machine learning researcher
8Danqi Chen
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton
7John Schulman
Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Thinking Machines
7Diogo Almeida
Co-founder and CEO at TypeSafe AI
7Harsh Mehta
Co-founder at Mirendil
7Justin Johnson
Co-founder of World Labs
Alec Radford
AI researcher; co-creator of GPT and CLIP
6Yi Tay
Principal Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
6Demis Hassabis
Co-founder and Chair at Google DeepMind
6Will DePue
AI researcher and engineer; formerly OpenAI (Sora, post-training, and sample-efficient learning)
5Nathan Lambert
Co-founder and Executive Director of Trillium Labs
5Lucas Beyer
Researcher at Meta working on multimodal AI and vision-language models
5Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder and CEO at Safe Superintelligence
5Chris Olah
Co-founder and Interpretability Research Lead at Anthropic
5Rayan Krishnan
Co-founder and CEO of Vals AI
4Noam Brown
Research Scientist at OpenAI
4Sholto Douglas
Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
4Noam Shazeer
AI Scientist at OpenAI; co-founder of Character.AI
4Chelsea Finn
Co-founder at Physical Intelligence
4Vahab Mirrokni
Google Fellow and VP at Google Research, leading algorithms and optimization
3Thang Luong
Principal Scientist and Director of Research at Google DeepMind
3Ryan Greenblatt
AI safety researcher at METR; formerly Chief Scientist at Redwood Research
3Sergey Levine
Co-founder of Physical Intelligence
3Albert Gu
Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University; Chief Scientist at Cartesia
3Dmitry Lyalin
Member of Technical Staff at Google DeepMind, working on Google AI Studio
2Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer at OpenAI
2Jim Fan
Director and Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA
Simon Mo
Co-founder and CEO of Inferact; vLLM co-creator
2Yejin Choi
Stanford computer science professor and HAI Senior Fellow
1Jason Wei
AI Researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs
1Shunyu Yao
Chief AI Scientist at Tencent working on language agents and AI systems
Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist at OpenAI
1Dan Hendrycks
Executive Director at the Center for AI Safety; advisor to xAI and Scale AI.
1Gabriele Corso
Co-founder and CEO at Boltz | AI for biology, structural biology, and drug discovery
1Daphne Koller
Founder and CEO of insitro
1Samip
1Anastasis Germanidis
Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Runway
1Fergal Reid
Head of AI at Sierra
1Ishan Misra
0Sasha Rush
Machine learning researcher