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Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

ai experts - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Artificial Intelligence is evolving rapidly, and its success is driven by experts from diverse backgrounds – open-source visionaries, hands-on startup founders, influential educators, corporate research leaders, and champions of international competitions.

Here is the curated list of top AI experts, reflecting achievements in open-source innovation, coding, thought leadership and community influence, impactful roles at major tech companies, and excellence in competitions:

  1. Demis Hassabis
  2. Andrew Ng
  3. Fei-Fei Li
  4. Andrej Karpathy
  5. Connor Leahy
  6. Emad Mostaque
  7. Gary Marcus
  8. Thomas Wolf
  9. Soumith Chintala
  10. François Chollet
  11. Kai-Fu Lee
  12. Timnit Gebru
  13. Daphne Koller
  14. Dario Amodei
  15. Mira Murati
  16. Mustafa Suleyman
  17. Abhishek Thakur
  18. Oriol Vinyals

Now, let’s delve into their remarkable journeys and contributions:

Demis Hassabis

YouTube Video

Nationality: British

Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind (now Google DeepMind after its merger with Google’s Brain team).

A former child chess prodigy and neuroscientist, Hassabis has spearheaded AI breakthroughs like AlphaGo, which made history by defeating the world Go champion in 2016, and AlphaFold, which cracked the problem of protein folding. Under his leadership, DeepMind’s work spans from games to scientific research, pushing toward artificial general intelligence. Hassabis remains deeply technical (co-authoring many DeepMind papers) while also steering one of the world’s premier AI labs, and he frequently discusses how games and neuroscience inspire the development of advanced AI.

Andrew Ng

Nationality: Chinese-American

Andrew Ng is a Chinese-American AI pioneer and educator who has helped make AI knowledge accessible worldwide.

As the co-founder of Google Brain, he was early to show how large-scale deep learning (with projects like the “Google cat detector”) could revolutionize AI. He also co-founded Coursera, enabling millions to learn machine learning, and served as Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he built an industrial-scale AI research lab. Famous for saying “AI is the new electricity” to describe its transformative power, Ng now focuses on democratizing AI through his ventures DeepLearning.AI and Landing AI, emphasizing a data-centric approach to model development. He continues to teach (his online ML courses are among the world’s most popular) and to lead projects bringing AI into sectors like manufacturing and healthcare.

Fei-Fei Li

Fei Fei Li - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Nationality: Chinese-American

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for her crucial contributions to computer vision and for advocating “human-centered AI.”

As a professor at Stanford University, she led the creation of ImageNet, the massive image database that enabled groundbreaking advances in deep learning for vision when it fueled the Imagenet Challenge. Fei-Fei Li also served as Chief Scientist of AI at Google Cloud (2017–2018), bridging academia and industry. Currently, she co-directs the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), promoting AI research that is guided by ethical and societal considerations. A strong advocate for diversity in tech, she founded AI4ALL to encourage underrepresented youth to engage in AI.

Andrej Karpathy

Neural networks are basically just fancy math functions with millions of parameters. But they can do amazing things if you train them right.

Nationality: Slovakian

Andrej Karpathy is a Slovakian-born computer scientist who has become a popular figure in AI for both his technical contributions and his ability to communicate complex ideas. Formerly the Director of AI at Tesla, Karpathy led the vision and autonomous driving efforts, applying deep learning to real-world robotics at scale.

He was also one of OpenAI’s early researchers and in 2023 returned to OpenAI, where he works on cutting-edge AI models and training infrastructure. Andrej is well-known for his educational initiatives: he taught Stanford’s famed CS231n course on Convolutional Neural Networks and wrote insightful blog posts (like “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”) that have influenced many budding AI engineers. With a large following on social media, he bridges research and practice, often sharing code, tutoring (e.g., through char-rnn and microGPT projects), and championing open science in AI.

Connor Leahy

Nationality: American

Connor Leahy is an American AI researcher and engineer who has become a prominent advocate for open-source AI and AI alignment. He first gained recognition through EleutherAI, the volunteer research collective he co-founded, which successfully replicated large language models (like GPT-Neo/GPT-J) and openly released them to the public.

Building on that ethos, Leahy founded Conjecture, a startup focused on AI alignment research – essentially trying to ensure future AI systems remain safe and aligned with human values. Connor actively engages with the AI community about the importance of transparency and cooperation in AI development, often warning about the long-term risks of uncontrolled AGI. Despite tackling these big-picture challenges, he remains very much a builder at heart, contributing to code and research. In 2024–2025, he stands out as a young leader bridging practical AI development with the imperative of ethics and safety.

Emad Mostaque

Emad Mostaque - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Nationality: British

Emad Mostaque is a British entrepreneur who has become a leading voice in the open-source AI movement. He is the founder and CEO of Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, which in 2022 made waves as an open-source text-to-image generation model challenging proprietary offerings.

Emad, originally a hedge fund manager turned tech founder, raised substantial funding to support open AI research and released generative AI tools to the public, stressing the importance of transparency and community collaboration. Under his leadership, Stability AI has helped spawn a vibrant ecosystem of AI image and text generation projects. Mostaque continues to champion the idea of “AI by the people, for the people,” frequently engaging with developers online and pushing for decentralized, global participation in AI development.

Gary Marcus

Nationality: American

Gary Marcus is an American cognitive psychologist, author, and entrepreneur who has taken on the role of one of AI’s most prominent skeptics and thought leaders. A professor emeritus at NYU, Marcus has long argued that truly robust AI will require integrating neural networks with symbolic reasoning, reflecting the strengths of human cognition.

He founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning startup acquired by Uber, and has written bestselling books including “Rebooting AI”, which critiqued the deep-learning-centric approach of recent AI and outlined paths toward more reliable AI. In 2023 and 2024, Marcus’ influence grew as he became a key commentator on generative AI’s shortcomings and risks, speaking at venues like the U.S. Congress and the UN. He runs a popular Substack newsletter and frequently engages in public debates (often sparring with AI optimists) to push for AI systems that can reason, generalize, and understand causality better. Love him or not, Marcus’ contrarian perspective challenges the AI community to address blind spots and strive for more trustworthy AI.

Thomas Wolf

Nationality: French

Thomas Wolf is a French computer scientist and co-founder of Hugging Face, a company and open-source community that has democratized access to NLP and transformer models.

As Chief Science Officer at Hugging Face, Wolf has overseen the development of the Transformers library, which has become a standard toolkit for developers working with large language models and other AI models. He is a prolific educator and communicator, breaking down complex AI topics in blogs and talks, and has been instrumental in campaigns for responsible AI (such as supporting model evaluation and bias detection). Thomas holds a PhD in machine learning and combines academic insight with practical coding – often contributing directly to open-source code. In 2024–2025, he remains a key connector in the AI world, collaborating with industry and academia to promote an open, inclusive approach to AI technology.

Soumith Chintala

Soumith Chintala 1 - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Nationality: Indian

Soumith Chintala is an Indian software engineer known for co-creating PyTorch, one of the world’s most popular open-source deep learning frameworks.

Based at Meta AI (Facebook) in New York, Chintala was instrumental in PyTorch’s development from its early days (building on the Torch library) to its widespread adoption by researchers and engineers alike. PyTorch’s eager execution and flexible design—shaped in part by Soumith’s vision—helped accelerate research breakthroughs and is now an official Linux Foundation project. Beyond PyTorch, Soumith has contributed to AI research in computer vision and generative modeling, and he actively engages with the open-source community through code, forums, and conferences. He exemplifies the modern AI leader who still codes, and his work ensures that cutting-edge AI techniques are available to all.

François Chollet

Nationality: French

François Chollet is a French software engineer and AI researcher, globally recognized as the creator of Keras, a high-level neural network API that made deep learning accessible to tens of thousands of developers.

He authored the influential book “Deep Learning with Python,” and for nearly a decade he worked at Google, contributing to the TensorFlow ecosystem and driving research in areas like automated machine learning and reasoning. In 2024, Chollet left Google to co-found a new AI company, reflecting his continued commitment to innovation. He also launched the ARC Challenge (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) with a $1M prize to spur advancements in AI’s problem-solving abilities. Known for his sharp insights (often shared on Twitter) about the limitations and potential of current AI, Chollet remains a highly influential figure straddling practical tool-building and theoretical forward-thinking in AI.

Kai-Fu Lee

Kai Fu Lee - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Nationality: Taiwanese

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is a Taiwanese-born AI expert and one of the most prominent figures in AI in Asia. With a PhD in AI from Carnegie Mellon, he pioneered early speech recognition research and went on to lead Microsoft Research Asia and Google China, nurturing a generation of AI talents in the 2000s.

Kai-Fu Lee later founded Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in AI startups in China and abroad, bridging Silicon Valley and Beijing tech ecosystems. He is the bestselling author of “AI Superpowers,” which compares the AI development trajectories of the US and China and outlines AI’s societal impacts. In 2024–2025, Lee continues to influence the global tech community as an investor, thought leader, and advocate for using AI to address real-world problems (like healthcare and education), all while promoting collaboration between AI communities worldwide.

Timnit Gebru

Nationality: Ethiopian-American

Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-American computer scientist who has become a leading advocate for ethical AI and algorithmic fairness. With a background at Stanford AI Lab (she co-authored a seminal paper on bias in facial recognition that revealed how AI misclassified darker-skinned women), she joined Google and co-led its Ethical AI team.

In 2020, Gebru’s controversial departure from Google (after raising concerns about the risks of large language models) made global headlines and underscored issues of diversity and ethics in tech. She has since founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), focusing on community-rooted AI research outside Big Tech. Timnit’s work spans technical research on AI bias, impactful writings, and advocacy—she tirelessly speaks about the social consequences of AI and the need for inclusivity. Her influence in 2024–2025 is seen in the growing field of AI ethics and the numerous initiatives now examining data practices, bias, and power in AI.

Daphne Koller

Nationality: Israeli-American

Dr. Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist who has made her mark both in academia and industry. A former Stanford professor, she is celebrated for her research in probabilistic graphical models and for co-authoring the textbook “Probabilistic Graphical Models.”

Daphne co-founded Coursera in 2012, alongside Andrew Ng, revolutionizing online education and bringing machine learning courses to millions. After Coursera, she turned her expertise toward biomedicine by founding Insitro, a company that uses machine learning for drug discovery and development. Koller’s interdisciplinary approach – applying AI to solve hard problems in education and healthcare – exemplifies the meaningful impact AI experts can have across fields. She has received numerous honors (including a MacArthur Fellowship) and continues to be a role model for women in tech. In her current role as CEO of Insitro, she remains hands-on with AI-driven science while also advising and speaking globally on the future of AI and education.

Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Nationality: American

Dario Amodei is an American physicist-turned-AI researcher who co-founded Anthropic, one of the leading AI startups focused on large language models and AI safety.

As CEO of Anthropic, Dario oversees the development of Claude, a rival assistant to ChatGPT, aiming to build helpful and harmless AI systems. He was previously VP of Research at OpenAI, where he worked on projects like GPT-2 and led the policy on publishing it responsibly. Along with his sister Daniela, Dario started Anthropic in 2021 motivated by a vision of AI aligned with human values, and the company has since secured major investments (including from Google) to advance AI research with an emphasis on safety constraints. With a strong research background (he’s co-authored papers on topics from model interpretability to reinforcement learning from human feedback), Dario Amodei exemplifies an AI startup founder who still dives into technical details. He is also a key figure in the broader conversation on AI governance.

Mira Murati

Nationality: Albanian

Mira Murati is an Albanian-born engineer who serves as the Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI. She has been the driving force behind some of OpenAI’s most notable projects – leading the teams that developed GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the DALL-E image generator.

Murati started her career in robotics (including product management on the Tesla Model X) before moving into AI research and product development. As one of the few high-profile female tech leaders in AI, she’s known for her combination of technical acumen and thoughtful approach to AI’s societal implications. In 2023, Murati briefly held the interim CEO role at OpenAI during a pivotal moment for the company, underscoring the trust placed in her leadership. She continues to advocate for careful, inclusive development of AI and often represents OpenAI in media and conferences, discussing how to balance innovation with safety.

Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman - Top 18 AI Experts Ready to Help

Nationality: British

Mustafa Suleyman is a British entrepreneur and AI policy expert who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 with Demis Hassabis. At DeepMind, Suleyman led the Applied AI division, translating research breakthroughs into real-world impact (like health diagnostics), and later became Google’s VP of AI Policy.

In 2022, he left Google to start Inflection AI, where as CEO he’s developing personal AI assistants; their first product, Pi, offers a conversational chatbot focused on being helpful and emotionally intelligent. Mustafa is also known for his work in AI ethics and governance: he has been involved in global forums discussing AI regulation and co-authored the 2023 book “The Coming Wave,” which explores the impacts of AI and how society should prepare. With a career spanning hands-on tech to high-level strategy, Suleyman remains a key figure shaping the future of AI in both industry and policy realms.

Abhishek Thakur

Nationality: Indian

Abhishek Thakur is a machine learning engineer and data science influencer best known as the world’s first Quadruple Kaggle Grandmaster. Originating from India and now based in Europe, he earned grandmaster status in Kaggle’s competitions, kernels, discussions, and datasets categories, demonstrating both elite skill and a commitment to sharing knowledge.

Abhishek has worked in industry (including a role at Hugging Face leading AutoML tooling) and in 2023 he founded Arcee AI, focusing on simplifying AI integrations. He’s the author of the popular book “Approaching (Almost) Any Machine Learning Problem,” which is praised for its practical guidance. On his YouTube channel and blog, Abhishek regularly offers tutorials, coding demos, and insights from his competition experience, making advanced techniques accessible to the community. He remains very active on social media, where he combines hands-on tips with a passion for community-building in AI.

Oriol Vinyals

Nationality: Spanish

Oriol Vinyals is a Spanish computer scientist and a leading AI researcher known for his work on deep learning and reinforcement learning. A former child prodigy in mathematics (he won gold at the International Olympiad in Informatics), Oriol went on to co-develop key algorithms in AI: he was a co-author of the 2014 paper on Sequence-to-Sequence learning, which enabled breakthroughs in machine translation and natural language processing.

He joined DeepMind in London, where he led the team that created AlphaStar, the first AI to defeat top professional players in the real-time strategy game StarCraft II. Now a Principal Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Vinyals is at the forefront of large-scale neural network research (including efforts on large language models and multimodal AI). He is widely respected for blending theoretical insights with ambitious engineering, and his contributions continue to influence how AI systems learn complex sequences and behaviors.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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