Key people in AI: 12 names to watch in artificial intelligence

In the Global AI Index 2024, Tortoise makes sense of the international contest for supremacy in a technology that changes everything. Here are some of the key people shaping how artificial intelligence is developed, used and regulated:

1. Fei-Fei Li, professor and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Known as ‘the godmother of AI’ who invented computer vision, this year she launched World Labs, an AI startup built in just four months and the latest to secure billions in investments following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT.
2. Yann LeCun, head AI scientist at Meta. He is pushing for open-source AI development against the grain of most other US tech giants, which are working on proprietary models.
3. Elizabeth Kelly, director at the United States Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, which was unveiled last year at the world’s first AI Safety Summit in the UK. Kelly was one of the lead drafters of Biden’s AI executive order.
4. Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of India’s first AI unicorn, OlaKrutrim. He started his career at Microsoft.
5. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. PIF announced a new $100 million fund for semiconductors and related industries, and plans to create a $40 billion fund for investing in AI.
6. Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI, France’s national AI champion and the only European generative AI startup to challenge its American and Chinese counterparts.
7. Faisal Al Bannai, secretary general of the UAE’s Advanced Technology Research Council. Last year, the ATRC spent millions of dollars building Falcon, a series of open-source large language models which at the time beat offerings by Meta and Google.
8. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. At the time of its launch the company’s latest model – Claude 3.5 Sonnet – was by some measures the most powerful publicly accessible AI.
9. Zhang Linghan, professor at the Institute of Data Rule of Law at China’s University of Political Science and Law. She’s the first author listed on China’s draft preliminary AI law and sits on the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI.
10. Geoffrey Irving, research director at the UK AI Safety Institute. He previously worked at Google DeepMind and OpenAI.
11. Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, co-authored one of the first studies to calculate the carbon footprint of large language models.