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Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

ai llm engineers - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly reshaped the AI landscape – powering everything from chatbots and search engines to research and creative tools.

Behind these breakthroughs is a global community of brilliant minds pushing the boundaries of deep learning, transformer architectures, prompting techniques, and scalable model training. This list features some of the most influential figures in the LLM space: from open-source contributors and hands-on engineers to visionary researchers, educators, and startup founders. Each has played a defining role in shaping how modern LLMs are built, understood, and deployed.

  1. Geoffrey Hinton
  2. Yannic Kilcher
  3. Richard Socher
  4. Lewis Tunstall
  5. Tim Dettmers
  6. Fei-Fei Li
  7. Andrew Ng
  8. Jason Wei
  9. Yoshua Bengio
  10. Aidan Gomez
  11. Sam Shleifer
  12. Yann LeCun
  13. Kai-Fu Lee
  14. Harrison Chase

Now, let’s delve into their profiles and contributions:

Geoffrey Hinton

YouTube Video

Nationality: British-Canadian

Geoffrey is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and a pioneer of deep learning.

He co-authored the early backpropagation algorithm and training of deep nets; he co-won the 2018 Turing Award. Hinton’s lab at Google Brain contributed to understanding of transformers. In 2024 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics (for neural nets). Although less active in coding, he advises many AI teams. His research on neural representations and his advisory role influence how modern LLMs are trained.

Yannic Kilcher

Nationality: Swiss

Yannic is a machine learning engineer and YouTuber. His site states he runs “a YouTube channel dedicated to AI research”.

Kilcher regularly posts in-depth video explainers of new LLM papers (e.g. GPT-4, PaLM), often with thousands of views. He helps the community quickly grasp academic LLM developments. With hundreds of thousands of subscribers, his walkthroughs of transformer architectures and model benchmarks make him an important influencer bridging research and practice.

Richard Socher

Richard Socher - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Nationality: German

Richard is an NLP pioneer (ex-Stanford PhD, MetaMind founder) who was Chief Scientist at Salesforce.

In 2020 he left Salesforce “to build the next big search engine” (founding AI search startup You.com). You.com combines search with LLM-powered chat summaries. Socher’s deep research background (RNN, attention) and his role as a startup founder keep him influential. He regularly speaks about semantic search and large models, and his startup’s code (GitHub: youdotcom) is open-source.

Lewis Tunstall

Nationality: British

Lewis is an LLM engineer at Hugging Face and co-author of NLP with Transformers.

His profile on Hugging Face simply lists his interests as “LLMs, LLMs, LLMs”. Tunstall leads HF research projects (e.g. efficient “smol” models) and authored the recent “OlympicCoder” open models that solve competitive programming (Olympiad) problems. He also teaches NLP courses and has 45K+ followers on LinkedIn, often engaging the community with blog posts and live coding on LLM applications.

Tim Dettmers

Tim Dettmers - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Nationality: German

Tim is an ML researcher known for efficient LLM training techniques.

He created the popular bitsandbytes library (8-bit optimizers) used by many LLM engineers. On his blog he describes LLM.int8(), an 8-bit quantization method that preserves model performance. Dettmers was a researcher at Hugging Face and Allen Institute. He frequently tweets benchmarks and releases (e.g. memory-efficient training code on GitHub), helping others train large models with limited resources.

Fei-Fei Li

Nationality: Chinese-American

Fei-Fei is a professor at Stanford and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.

She created ImageNet (transforming deep learning) and co-founded AI4ALL (STEM education). Although primarily a vision researcher, Li is now active in generative AI, co-founding a biotech company (with AI) and leading AI4All programs on AI literacy. She often speaks about the societal impacts of AI, including LLMs, and promotes policies for responsible AI education and deployment.

Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Nationality: British-American

Andrew is an adjunct Stanford professor and co-founder of Coursera and DeepLearning.AI.

He led Google Brain’s early deep learning projects. In 2023 he launched a “Generative AI” specialization on Coursera (5 courses on LLM concepts). Through DeepLearning.AI he funds and publishes courses on AI, including LLMs. Ng’s weekly emails and X posts (he has >1M followers) analyze industry trends. His AI Fund backs startups using LLMs (e.g. medical AI) and he often comments publicly on LLM progress and education.

Jason Wei

Nationality: American

Jason is an AI researcher (formerly at Google Brain, now at OpenAI) focusing on model prompting and capabilities.

On his site he notes his Google Brain work “helped popularize chain-of-thought, instruction tuning, and emergent phenomena” in LLMs. He co-authored landmark papers on prompting (e.g. the original chain-of-thought paper) and worked on OpenAI’s advanced models (o1, GPT variants). Wei shares experiments and insights on Twitter and his blog, influencing how the community develops and uses LLMs.

Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Nationality: Canadian

Yoshua is a professor at the University of Montreal and head of the Mila AI lab.

He “is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in AI”. Bengio co-developed many neural network techniques (seq2seq, attention) and won the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning. He now leads large-scale generative model research (MILA’s open LLM projects) and works on AI safety. Bengio also co-leads Canada’s national AI strategy, and frequently publishes and speaks about open, ethical LLM development.

Aidan Gomez

Nationality: Canadian

Aidan is co-founder and CEO of Cohere (launched 2019), an AI startup providing enterprise LLM services.

He was previously a Google Brain researcher and is noted as “a co-creator of the transformer architecture” that underlies modern LLMs. At Cohere he continues to innovate on language models (multilingual models, retrieval-augmented generation tools). Gomez blogs and speaks about scaling laws and open-source NLP; his talks at ML conferences (and a PhD thesis) have heavily influenced LLM engineering principles.

Sam Shleifer

Nationality: American

Sam is an AI research engineer at Hugging Face focused on NLP.

In a 2020 interview he noted that HF’s technology is used by Apple, Bing, Grammarly and others. He highlights that Hugging Face released over 1,000 open models (with multilingual translation, summarization, etc.). Shleifer actively writes on making LLMs accessible (see NVIDIA’s AI Podcast featuring his work) and contributes to HF’s open-source libraries (e.g. fine-tuning scripts on GitHub).

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Nationality: French-American

Yann is Chief AI Scientist at Meta and a professor at NYU.

He pioneered convolutional neural networks and self-supervised learning. LeCun co-won the 2018 Turing Award. At Meta he works on scalable transformers and retrieval systems (e.g. FAISS library). LeCun regularly comments on AI policy and research on Twitter (he has millions of followers). He debates open vs proprietary LLMs, and his algorithms and labs (Meta AI) shape major model releases.

Kai-Fu Lee

Kai Fu Lee - Top 15 AI LLM Engineers You Need to Follow

Nationality: Taiwanese

Kai-Fu is a prominent AI entrepreneur and investor (former head of Google China, now CEO of Sinovation Ventures and founder of AI company 01.AI).

He wrote AI Superpowers and AI 2041, analyzing how AI (including LLMs) will affect society. While not an LLM engineer, he funds many AI startups and is a vocal commentator on generative AI’s impact in China and worldwide. Lee’s large public profile (books, keynote speeches, social media) makes him an influential figure in the AI/ML community.

Harrison Chase

Nationality: American

Harrison is co-founder and CEO of LangChain, an open-source framework for building applications with LLMs (chatbots, RAG, etc.).

As a hands-on developer, he maintains LangChain’s code on GitHub and frequently posts updates on the project. LangChain is widely used by LLM practitioners. Chase also co-hosts webinars and writes technical posts (on LinkedIn and Twitter) teaching best practices for LLM integration. His leadership at LangChain and active engagement with developers make him a key figure in LLM infrastructure.

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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