The top 15 people in enterprise artificial intelligence
- Insider has compiled a list of 100 people at the forefront of artificial intelligence.
- The list spans several industries. Here are our picks for enterprise technology.
- See who made the list and read about how they're making an impact.
Cloud companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been building AI offerings for years, and now they are opening the door to generative AI.
AI and cloud have long been top priorities for customers' technology needs. This year, generative AI took hold of the world.
Microsoft got a head start with its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the maker of the AI chatbot ChatGPT. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud soon followed suit with their own investments and AI products — Google invested in the AI startup Anthropic. While AWS has long dominated the cloud industry, now it's finding playing catch-up in the AI sector.
Analysts say generative AI could drive cloud adoption. At the same time, it's too early for AI to drive up cloud sales for companies other than Microsoft. Cloud giants such as Microsoft and other enterprise technology companies including Databricks are figuring out how customers can best use generative AI.
Insider identified the top 100 people who make AI intelligent. Here are our picks for enterprise technology.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic
Amodei is a cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, an AI startup in which Amazon recently invested more than $1 billion. Amodei was the VP of research at OpenAI until he left in late 2020 to build "safer AI" and cofounded the rival startup. Earlier this year, Anthropic released Claude 2, a chatbot the company's huge foundation model powers. Google is also an Anthropic investor.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI
Brockman is the president, chair, and cofounder of OpenAI. He was the CTO of Stripe until he left to start the AI company in 2015 with Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others. In late 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT took the world by storm and launched the current generative-AI boom. Earlier this year, it released GPT-4, considered the most powerful AI model so far. The company is valued at a staggering $90 billion, according to a September Wall Street Journal report.
Clem Delangue, Hugging Face
Delangue wants to make AI accessible to every company. Delangue is the cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, an open-source platform where scientists, researchers, and engineers build, train, and deploy AI models. "If we don't support openness, open science, and open-source AI, just a few companies will be able to do it," Delangue told Business Insider. He wants to follow in the footsteps of companies such as Red Hat by making open-source AI a profitable endeavor. Hugging Face's platform is mostly free but has a paid premium version, which large companies primarily use. Investors include Amazon, Google, Nvidia, IBM, and Salesforce. It was most recently at a $4.5 billion valuation.
Aidan Gomez, Cohere
Gomez was a research intern at Google Brain in 2017 when he coauthored a paper on training AI models to better understand language. That paper introduced the revolutionary Transformer architecture, the basis for the generative-AI technology storming the business world today, including Generative Pre-trained Transformers, or GPT. In 2019, Gomez cofounded Cohere, which has become a leading rival of OpenAI, especially for enterprise companies because it promises to keep their data secure. In August, the Toronto-based startup raised $270 million at a roughly $2 billion valuation from a host of VCs and big companies including Oracle, Nvidia, and Salesforce Ventures.
Robin Li, Baidu
Li is the billionaire cofounder of the Chinese search and cloud juggernaut Baidu. Since launching Baidu in 2000, he has routinely steered Baidu's investments toward AI, with services ranging from content recommendation to autonomous driving. Baidu runs self-driving-taxi services in four Chinese cities, and Li held the company's developer conference in Baidu's metaverse app, XiRang, cohosted by humans and robots. The theme was AI development. Its cloud offers many AI services, too, such as PaddlePaddle, a deep-learning platform that millions of developers use. Baidu launched a Chinese-language generative-AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, earlier this year.
Mira Murati, OpenAI
Murati leads the technology team at OpenAI. A mechanical engineer, she previously worked at Leap Motion and at Tesla working on the Model X. Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 as a researcher and was promoted to CTO in 2022. She grew up in Albania, where she developed a passion for math and science, which earned her a scholarship to study in Canada and eventually the US. Under her leadership at OpenAI, her teams released the blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT, the image generator Dall-E, and several other AI products.
Sarah Nagy, Seek AI
Nagy cofounded Seek AI in 2021. Her startup uses generative AI to automate repetitive tasks for corporate data-science teams. Nagy previously had a career on Wall Street working at Citadel's Ashler Capital. She describes herself as a "quant," meaning a person who uses mathematical and statistical analysis to find great picks for investment firms. She is also a classical pianist and an accomplished golfer.
Naveen Rao, Databricks
Rao, a cofounder of MosaicML, has had a big year. In July, Databricks purchased Rao's AI platform for $1.3 billion, and Rao went from being the CEO of a hot startup to the VP of generative AI at a company nearing a possible IPO. A design and verification engineer by training with a doctorate in neuroscience, Rao already had a storied career. His first AI startup, Nervana, sold to Intel in 2016 for $408 million. At Databricks, Rao oversees generative-AI strategy and R&D, along with spearheading the company's efforts to democratize generative AI and large language model training through data, governance, and machine-learning solutions.
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly
Roy-Chowdhury became CEO of the writing-assistant-tool startup Grammarly earlier this year after being its global head of product for more than two years. He hit the ground running by embracing generative-AI tools by launching an AI assistant for Grammarly's core product offering. It performs classic generative-AI tasks such as composing emails and writing replies, but it also provides tone-rewriting suggestions, which helps writers achieve the desired level of formality or professional relevance. Roy-Chowdhury has been outspoken since gaining his position that AI should be thought of more as "augmented intelligence" because of its ability to increase human learning and productivity, not replace it.
Ovetta Sampson, Google
Excellent communication skills, technical expertise, and a knack for leading teams is a rare combination for a tech worker. For Sampson, Google's director of user experience machine learning, it's her "sweet spot." She has spent her career working on "human-centered" projects, such as AI that regular people can and want to use. Sampson was talking about responsible AI way before 2023; in 2017, as the design research lead at the consulting firm IDEO, she helped create the design industry's first set of AI-ethics principles.
Silvio Savarese, Salesforce
If you haven't heard the news, Salesforce is betting big on AI. That means Savarese, Salesforce's chief scientist and an executive vice president, is in the spotlight. A former Stanford computer-science professor, Savarese left his tenured position to lead the scientific direction and long-term strategy for AI at one of the biggest software companies in the world. Savarese has published more than 350 scientific articles that others have cited over 55,000 times.
Kevin Scott, Microsoft
Microsoft was thrust into the AI spotlight this year when Bing beat Google to become the first major search engine to incorporate generative AI through a partnership with OpenAI. Scott, Microsoft's CTO, brokered the partnership. He knew the former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from Altman's attempt to hire him for one of his early startups, Loopt, and, soon after his appointment as CTO, began to hash out what would become a groundbreaking combination. Scott is busy expanding Microsoft's generative-AI technology into other products now.
Karén Simonyan, Inflection AI
Simonyan has been conducting impactful machine-learning research that thousands of other researchers have cited for over a decade since his years at Oxford. He launched Vision Factory, which was Google's DeepMind acquired in 2014. He stayed on as a principal scientist leading a team that created technologies such as AlphaZero, the AI that mastered the board game Go; and AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. In June, his new startup, Inflection AI, which he cofounded with Reid Hoffman and the DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, raised $1.3 billion from Microsoft, Hoffman, Bill Gates, the former Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Nvidia.
Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Amazon Web Services
Bukovec came to technology via the Peace Corps. Following a volunteer stint in Mali in the 1990s, Bukovec found her niche in product leadership, shepherding fledgling broadband and infrastructure startups through their first few years. After nearly a decade at Microsoft, she's now technology vice president at AWS, where she leads some of AWS' first and largest data services, such as Amazon S3, and helps organizations of all sizes and industries work with generative AI.
Diya Wynn, Amazon Web Services
As the senior practice manager for responsible AI at AWS, Wynn helps clients use emerging and intelligent technologies in ways that align with their ethics and values. Wynn, who's based in Washington, has worked in tech for more than two decades and has been at AWS for 6 years. Her focus on responsible technology has never been more timely as she helps educate companies and governments on navigating the potential risks of using AI.
Correction: January 9, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated the amount Nervana was sold for. It was $408 million, not billion.
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