VIBERS

People and companies to know in AI. Explore their work, ideas, and experience.

Sunghun Kim

Sunghun Kim, also known professionally as Sung Kim, is Upstage’s co-founder and chief executive. He combines a background in software-engineering research with AI education and enterprise model development.

Start with DeepLearningZeroToAll

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Hwalsuk Lee

Hwalsuk Lee, also known as Stan Lee, is Upstage’s co-founder and chief technology officer. His work connects computer vision, document processing and language models, following earlier leadership of Naver Clova’s Visual AI team.

Start with CRAFT text detector

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Lucy Park

Lucy Park, also known as Eunjeong Park, is Upstage’s co-founder and chief product officer. She develops the connection between language models, document intelligence and enterprise products, following earlier work on Korean NLP resources and Naver’s Papago translation service.

Start with KoNLPy

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Shunyu Yao

Shunyu Yao is Tencent’s chief scientist for AI. His research connects language-model reasoning with actions and external feedback. He is the first-listed author of ReAct and Tree of Thoughts and completed a computer-science PhD at Princeton.

Start with ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

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Jim Fan

Jim Fan, also published as Linxi Fan, is a Director and Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA. His work studies agents that learn and act in games and the physical world, including Voyager, Eureka and humanoid-robot models.

Start with Voyager

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Arthur Mensch

Arthur Mensch is the co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI. His research includes efficient language-model training, the Chinchilla study at DeepMind, and Mistral’s early open model releases.

Start with DeepMind’s introduction to Chinchilla

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Mark McQuade

Mark McQuade is co-founder and chief executive of Arcee AI, an open-weight model lab. His work includes the company’s move from adapting existing models to pretraining its own, and coauthorship of the MergeKit model-merging paper.

Start with MergeKit

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Lucas Atkins

Lucas Atkins is Arcee AI’s chief technology officer and head of research. His public work covers efficient model training, open model releases and the infrastructure needed for coding agents to work across long tasks.

Start with Spectrum: Targeted Training on Signal to Noise Ratio

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Timothée Lacroix

Timothée Lacroix is the co-founder and CTO of Mistral AI. His work spans knowledge-base completion and language models, including co-authorship of LLaMA, Mistral 7B and Mixtral.

Start with Tensor Decompositions for temporal knowledge base completion

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Dani Yogatama

Dani Yogatama is co-founder and CEO of Reka and an associate professor of computer science at USC. His research spans language models, memory and reinforcement learning, following research roles at DeepMind and Baidu.

Start with Relational Memory Augmented Language Models

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Mikel Artetxe

Mikel Artetxe is co-founder of Reka and an honorary researcher at the University of the Basque Country. His research concerns multilingual language models and learning translation systems when parallel training data is scarce.

Start with Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

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Guillaume Lample

Guillaume Lample is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Mistral AI. His research includes translation without paired examples, neural approaches to symbolic mathematics, and the original LLaMA models at Meta.

Start with Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only

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Clément Delangue

Clément Delangue is the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, a platform for sharing and using AI models, datasets and applications. His public work combines company building, co-authored research and advocacy for open access to AI.

Start with AI Insight Forum written opening statement

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Julien Chaumond

Julien Chaumond is the co-founder and CTO of Hugging Face. He co-authored the Transformers and DistilBERT papers and contributes to public explanations of the platform’s model, tooling and infrastructure work.

Start with DistilBERT

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Thomas Wolf

Thomas Wolf is Hugging Face’s co-founder and Chief Science Officer. His work includes the Transformers library, collaborative open science and writing about what AI would need to contribute to scientific discovery.

Start with The Einstein AI model

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Soumith Chintala

Soumith Chintala is CTO of Thinking Machines Lab and a co-founder of PyTorch. His work spans machine-learning frameworks, image generation, open-source communities and robotics.

Start with PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library

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Nils Reimers

Nils Reimers is a researcher and software developer focused on semantic search. He coauthored Sentence-BERT and created Sentence Transformers, helping developers represent text as vectors that can be compared efficiently. His current website identifies him as VP of AI Search at Cohere.

Start with Sentence-BERT

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Eric Hartford

Eric Hartford develops open-weight language models, datasets and systems software. He created Dolphin and Samantha and now publishes through Quixi AI. His work focuses on making models and their training choices available for others to inspect and adapt.

Start with Dolphin: original dataset announcement

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Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas is Perplexity’s co-founder, President and CEO. His research background includes reinforcement learning and generative models; at Perplexity, he has focused on turning web search and language models into answers that cite their sources.

Start with Berkeley alum wants to make the planet smarter

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Denis Yarats

Denis Yarats identifies himself as Perplexity’s co-founder and CTO in an indexed public LinkedIn profile. His earlier published work studies how reinforcement-learning systems can learn useful behavior directly from images, with public implementations including DrQ and DrQ-v2.

Start with The perplexities of information retrieval

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Scott Wu

Scott Wu is Cognition’s co-founder and CEO. He introduced the company’s Devin software-engineering agent and describes a workflow in which engineers delegate tasks and review completed changes.

Start with Cognition CEO Scott Wu on AI coding agents

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Jason Warner

Jason Warner is co-founder and co-CEO of Poolside, which trains AI models for software development. Previously GitHub’s chief technology officer, he connects experience building developer platforms with research on learning from code execution.

Start with Poolside research vision

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Eiso Kant

Eiso Kant is co-founder and co-CEO of Poolside. His work spans models for software development, the execution infrastructure used to train them and large-scale AI compute. Axon also lists him as a director and as president of Poolside Infrastructure Company.

Start with Designing a world-class code execution environment

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Walden Yan

Walden Yan is a Cognition co-founder, listed as Chief Product Officer by AI Engineer’s 2026 conference program. His public work includes neural program-synthesis research, a React wrapper for AI text completion and writing about extending Devin into software operations.

Start with Welcoming TierZero to Cognition

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Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is World Labs’ co-founder and CEO, Stanford’s Sequoia Professor of Computer Science, and a founding co-director of Stanford HAI. Her work spans ImageNet, computer vision, and models of three-dimensional worlds.

Start with With spatial intelligence, AI will understand the real world

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Ramin Hasani

Ramin Hasani is the co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI and a machine-learning scientist associated with MIT CSAIL. His research studies neural networks that model changing systems over time, including Liquid Time-constant Networks.

Start with Liquid Time-constant Networks

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Mathias Lechner

Mathias Lechner is co-founder and CTO of Liquid AI and a research affiliate at MIT CSAIL. His work includes continuous-time neural models and methods for making learned control systems more efficient and reliable.

Start with Closed-form Continuous-time Neural Models

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Alexander Amini

Alexander Amini is co-founder and chief scientific officer of Liquid AI. His research concerns autonomous systems that can make decisions under uncertainty, and his teaching includes MIT’s introductory deep-learning course.

Start with VISTA 2.0

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Daniela Rus

Daniela Rus directs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founded Liquid AI. Her robotics research asks how machines can change their shape, coordinate with one another and act in physical environments.

Start with Self-transforming robot blocks

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Akshat Shrivastava

Akshat Shrivastava is Perceptron AI’s co-founder and chief technology officer. He researches multimodal models and efficient inference, following work at Meta’s FAIR and Reality Labs teams on language, speech and on-device AI.

Start with LayerSkip

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Justin Johnson

Justin Johnson is a World Labs co-founder and computer-vision researcher. His published work includes perceptual losses for image transformation, the CLEVR visual-reasoning dataset, and PyTorch3D.

Start with PyTorch examples

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Percy Liang

Percy Liang is a Stanford computer-science professor, director of its Center for Research on Foundation Models, and a Together AI founder. He develops tools and methods for open research and for evaluating the capabilities and transparency of language models.

Start with Improving Transparency in AI Language Models: A Holistic Evaluation

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Tri Dao

Tri Dao is Together AI’s co-founder and chief scientist and, according to Princeton’s current directory, a visiting research scholar. His research connects machine-learning algorithms with how hardware actually executes them, including FlashAttention and Mamba.

Start with FlashAttention

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Ming Ding

Ming Ding is an AI researcher and a first author of CogView and CogView2, early transformer-based systems for generating images from text. His work also includes cognitive graphs for multi-hop question answering.

Start with CogView2

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Shen Nie

Shen Nie researches generative models at Renmin University of China. He co-authored the original LLaDA work, which trains a language model to reconstruct masked text instead of requiring every word to be generated strictly from left to right.

Start with Large Language Diffusion Models

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Lin Qiao

Lin Qiao is Fireworks AI’s co-founder and CEO. Before founding the company, she led engineering for PyTorch, AI compilers, and on-device AI platforms at Meta. Her work centers on getting machine-learning systems into production.

Start with Why This Ex-Meta Leader is Rethinking AI Infrastructure

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Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch is Vercel’s founder and CEO and a software engineer who designed and co-authored Next.js. His work connects web interfaces, open-source tools and the infrastructure used to publish applications.

Start with Pure UI

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Erik Bernhardsson

Erik Bernhardsson is Modal’s co-founder and CEO. He previously led technology at Better.com and machine-learning work at Spotify, where he helped build recommendation systems and released data infrastructure tools.

Start with Annoy

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Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman is executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI, focused on the company’s frontier-model and superintelligence efforts. He co-founded DeepMind and Inflection AI and wrote The Coming Wave with Michael Bhaskar.

Start with What is an AI anyway?

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Brad Lightcap

Brad Lightcap helped build OpenAI’s business and operating teams and served as its chief operating officer. His public interviews explain how companies move from individual experiments with AI to changes in their workflows. He announced his departure from OpenAI in August 2026.

Start with Navigating the new frontier with Brad Lightcap

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Kevin Scott

Kevin Scott is Microsoft’s chief technology officer. His career spans computer-science research and engineering leadership at Google, AdMob and LinkedIn; his public work includes the book Reprogramming the American Dream and the podcast Behind the Tech.

Start with A conversation with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott

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Ruchir Puri

Ruchir Puri is chief scientist of IBM Research, an IBM Fellow and a vice president for IBM’s technology and technical community. His work spans automated chip design and AI systems for understanding and generating software.

Start with Project CodeNet

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David D. Cox

David D. Cox is vice president for AI Foundations at IBM Research and the IBM director of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab. Trained in neuroscience, he has worked on visual learning, model optimization and the development of foundation models.

Start with Making a Science of Model Search

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Mario Rodriguez

Mario Rodriguez is GitHub’s chief product officer. His work centers on developer tools and GitHub Copilot, and his writing explains how coding agents fit into product workflows, applications and code review.

Start with Build an agent into any app with the GitHub Copilot SDK

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Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang co-founded NVIDIA and has led it since 1993. His influence in AI comes from the computing platform behind model training and deployment: GPUs, CUDA software and the systems built around them. His public talks and essays explain the company’s strategy and its view of where AI infrastructure is heading.

Start with AI Is a 5-Layer Cake

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Bryan Catanzaro

NVIDIA’s vice president of Applied Deep Learning Research, with contributions spanning cuDNN, neural graphics and distributed language-model training.

Start with Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism

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Mati Staniszewski

ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO, building a business around generated audio and conversational interfaces.

Start with Written evidence on scaling AI and creative technology

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Brendan Iribe

Brendan Iribe is a co-founder of Sesame, which develops conversational AI agents and wearable computing. He previously co-founded and led Oculus and Scaleform, building businesses around new ways for people to interact with computers.

Start with Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

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Ankit Kumar

Ankit Kumar is a Sesame co-founder and a co-author of its conversational speech research. His earlier work includes co-founding Ubiquity6 and leading Discord’s Clyde AI engineering effort.

Start with Conversational Speech Model

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Ryan Brown

Ryan Brown is part of Sesame’s leadership team, working at the intersection of hardware and conversational computing. He previously worked as a hardware architect at Oculus, where he spoke publicly about the engineering behind virtual reality.

Start with Exploring the Future of Virtual Reality with Oculus

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