AI is the talk of the town. Staying updated on AI developments becomes crucial if you don’t want to get left behind.
And what better way to get updates than following the best minds in the business? It becomes much easier to keep pace with the trends when you follow those who set them.
So, we’ve curated a list of the top 10 AI influencers who are visionary thinkers shaping the AI scene and leading the conversations about whatever’s latest in AI.
If you’re a marketer or a social media expert or want to learn from the real movers and shakers in the AI world, this list will help you understand their contributions well.
AI Influencers: Follow Who’s Talking About the Latest AI Trends
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are AI Influencers?
AI influencers are experts in artificial intelligence—researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, educators, or thought leaders—who share their knowledge and insights with others. They explain the nuances, use cases, and relevance of AI to the world at large.
AI influencers actively contribute to understanding technological aspects related to AI and developing AI tools.
These popular virtual influencers engage via various channels, such as social media platforms, academic publications, conferences, and industry forums, to share their expertise and perspectives on AI-related topics.
In short, they help us understand AI better and grasp how it may change our lives in the future.
Summarize this article for me please10 AI Influencers You Need to Follow
Sifting through multiple profiles, we’ve carefully selected 10 thought leaders and pioneers of AI who are driving significant developments and will offer you valuable insights and learnings.
Follow these influencers to stay up-to-date with AI:
1. Sam Altman (@sama)
Samuel Harris Altman is the Founder and CEO of OpenAI—one of the most famous organizations leading the AI spring.
Open AI has developed various large language-based AI models (LLMs), open-source AI models, and advanced image generation models (DALL•E 2, DALL•E 3). ChatGPT, a popular Generative AI & free-to-use chatbot assistant, is also founded on an AI system built by OpenAI.
At eight years of age, Sam began coding, which led him to co-found Tools for Humanity in 2019. It’s an organization that builds systems designed to scan people’s eyes to provide authentication and verify proof of livelihood to counter fraud. From 2014 to 2019, he also served as the President of startup accelerator Y Combinator.
At present, with a whopping 2.5 million followers on X, Sam actively shares updates about Open AI’s progress and innovation in AI tools while contributing to his Apollo projects (Apollo is an early-stage fund that invests in moonshots). He invests heavily in AI safety research to ensure powerful AI systems are controlled. He’s an important voice shaping policy around advanced AI.
2. Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei)
Dr. Fei Fei Li is an AI influencer, the Co-Director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
She was a VP at Google and served as the Chief Scientist for AI/ML at Google Cloud.
She was appointed to the board of X in 2020 as an independent director to lead the social AI progression and assess the use of AI tools for social media to police its platform.
With 445k+ followers on X, Li recently shared her upcoming book, The Worlds I See, based on the curiosity, exploration, and discovery at the dawn of AI.
She was recently named “Godmother” of AI as the national voice advocating ethics and diversity in STEM and AI.
Li also invented the ImageNet and ImageNet Challenge, a large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort contributing to the latest AI development and deep learning.
3. Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg)
Dr. Andrew Ng, with 943k followers on X, is the Founder of DeepLearning.AI, the Founder and CEO of Landing AI, and the Chairman and Founder of Coursera.
In 2011, Andrew led the development of the main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform at Stanford University, enabling a machine learning (ML) course offered to over 100,000 online students on Coursera. His Coursera classes have reached over 3 million students worldwide.
A former Baidu and Google Brain research scientist, he is an authority on machine learning and AI education. He has authored and co-authored over 200 research papers in robotics and ML while transforming countless lives through his work in AI.
In 2013, he was named ‘the most influential person in the world’ by Time 100.
As an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, he shares his expertise and vision for AI education and applications. He continues to publish seminal research advancing deep learning.
4. Kate Crawford (@katecrawford)
Kate Crawford, with around 83k followers on X, is a notable expert studying how artificial intelligence impacts society.
Her work spans two decades of AI evolution and focuses on understanding how big data, machine learning, and AI affect history, politics, labor, and the environment.
She is a respected scholar at Microsoft Research New York and USC Annenberg and contributes to widely recognized research journals like Nature and Science.
Kate’s unique projects, like ‘Anatomy of an AI System’ and ‘Excavating.ai’, earned prestigious awards and spots in major museums. ‘Anatomy of an AI System’ dissects the full stack supply chain and data flows behind an Amazon Echo device. . Excavating.ai, on the other hand, is an ethnographic study that reveals the ideologies, values, and biases that become embedded in AI systems based on the worldviews of AI developers.
Both projects have been influential in demonstrating the often-hidden human elements and ethical dimensions within AI systems. Crawford’s works, including her book, Atlas of AI, call for more transparency and accountability in how the values of those building it shape AI.
Co-founder of the AI Now Institute, Crawford’s focus on the societal implications of AI aligns with the raised concerns of marketers and social media professionals leveraging AI.
5. Ian Goodfellow (@goodfellow_ian)
Ian J. Goodfellow, a computer scientist and engineer, has made a significant impact in the field of artificial neural networks and deep learning.
With a substantial following in the AI community, Goodfellow’s groundbreaking idea emerged during a casual gathering in 2014. Over a chat with friends, he conceptualized a method for computers to generate images independently, free from human intervention. This led to the creation of GANs or Generative Adversarial Networks.
The key idea behind GANs is to pit two neural networks against each other to generate new, synthetic data resembling some training dataset. The two networks play a continuous game, improving until the generated instances are indistinguishable from real data.
Currently a research scientist at DeepMind, Goodfellow reflects on his unexpected fame, finding it somewhat surreal. Despite this, he is dedicated to countering the misuse of his discoveries. His vision involves safeguarding the ethical use of AI, a cause he passionately champions.
6. Allie Miller (@alliekmiller)
Allie Miller is an AI entrepreneur, advisor, and investor.
With over one million followers on LinkedIn, she actively contributes to AI education, speaks on AI worldwide, advises global AI public policy, and creates educational resources for businesses to excel with AI. She’s a popular virtual influencer advocating for AI education across social media platforms.
She previously led Machine Learning Business Development for Startups and Venture Capital at Amazon (AWS).
From the ground up, she grew the business within AWS, advising and supporting top machine learning researchers, founders, and investors worldwide.
Before that, Allie achieved a milestone as a winner in national innovation competitions and became the youngest woman to develop an AI product at IBM.
She’s been widely recognized as ‘AI Innovator of the Year’ by AIconic in 2019 and LinkedIn Top Voice for Technology and AI for multiple years. Follow her for artificial intelligence and tech news, insights, and job advice.
7. Tabitha Goldstaub (@tabithagold)
Tabitha Goldstaub is a tech entrepreneur focused on the impact of AI. She co-founded CogX, an online platform that gathers researchers and policymakers to discuss AI advancements, and served as the chair of the UK government’s AI Council.
Goldstaub has 15k+ followers on Linkedin and 14k+ followers on X. She’s actively involved with organizations like TechUK and the Alan Tiring Institute, advising AI and tech matters.
Sharing her personal experience, Goldstaub authored How to Talk to Robots: A Girls’ Guide to a World Dominated by AI. She forecasts AI trends and helps businesses apply AI ethically via advisory services.
She was listed in Media Week’s ‘30 under 30’ in 2012. Moreover, she found a spot in the London Evening Standard newspaper’s ‘Silicon 60’ in 2014. She also bagged the “Amy Johnson Award” from the Society of Women’s Engineering.
8. Yann LeCun (@ylecun)
Yann LeCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and a respected professor at New York University has a significant following of 625k on LinkedIn and 641k on Twitter. He’s well-known for his expertise in AI, machine learning, computer vision, and robotics.
In the late 80s, he proposed architecture for building neural networks to help computers recognize images. This groundbreaking work resulted in the advancement of convolutional neural networks, now widely used for image, video, and speech recognition.
He is also one of the leading creators of the DjVu image compression technology, which helped make digital images clearer and compress them without losing their quality.
He has, to his name, prestigious honors, including the Turing Award (2019) and the Chevalier (Knight) of the French Legion of Honour (2023), among others.
Currently, he leads AI Research at Facebook, and is a vocal defender of AI technology, claiming that “AI doomerism is doomed.”
9. Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru)
With a substantial following of 165k on Twitter and 40k on LinkedIn, Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist from Eritrea and Ethiopia, researches artificial intelligence—focusing on bias in algorithms and data mining. She is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).
She earned a PhD from Stanford University and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias in projects that aimed to glean insights from data.
Her research at Microsoft in 2017 exposed flaws in AI facial recognition, revealing biases against women and people of color. It highlighted how the data sets used to train the algorithm contained several images of white men but very few Black women. The results forced IBM and Microsoft to update their data sets.
She co-founded ‘Black in AI,’ advancing diversity among AI researchers. Gebru gained recognition for her ethical AI expertise, earning spots among Fortune‘s ‘World’s 50 Greatest Leaders’, Nature‘s influential scientific figures, and Time‘s most influential people in 2022.
She also led a diverse AI team at Google, challenging industry norms and fostering critical work that reshaped the AI glossary.
10. Rachel Thomas (@math_rachel)
Rachel Thomas is a computer scientist and the co-founder of fast.ai, which makes AI education accessible. She teaches courses on responsible AI development so practitioners mitigate harmful biases. Her free courses have earned her critical acclaim in publications such as The Economist, MIT Tech Review, and Forbes.
She is also the founding Director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco and has 90k Twitter followers.
She holds a PhD in Mathematics from Duke University. In her early days, she worked as a data scientist and software engineer at Uber.
Thomas earned recognition from Forbes as one of the 20 Incredible Women in AI and was featured in the book Women Tech Founders on the Rise. Her commitment to data ethics, extensive contributions to deep learning education, and influential writings underline her significant impact on AI.
Her influence extends far and wide, with her writing reaching over a million readers and being translated into Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Portuguese, and earning spots on the front page of Hacker News nine times.
Summarize this article for me pleaseInterested in Artificial Intelligence? Meet ClickUp AI
We’ve discussed human influencers, their impact, and the increasing use of AI in various industries. If you’re looking for ways to bring AI closer home and use it in your daily life, meet ClickUp AI.
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Here are some top ClickUp AI features to help you make the most of your time:
- Custom AI prompt recommendations: Get prompt recommendations, making the writing process more intuitive and productive
- Live editing assistant: Create AI-generated content using the tool as your real-time guide, with suggestions, insights, and improvements on the edits
- Task automation: Automate your routine tasks with pre-built automation and simplify your workflow
- Document summarization: Swiftly generate concise summaries from lengthy documents
- Translation: Translate content into multiple languages, facilitating communication and collaboration across diverse teams and audiences
While these features will help make your work life easier, expect more. ClickUp AI is in its early stages, so stay tuned for exciting developments.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Future of AI Is Up to Us
There’s no denying that AI has made its presence felt and will not leave any sector untouched. While revolutionary AI systems grab headlines, we must remember the future of AI lies in all of our hands.
The pioneering minds driving AI innovation today, like those we’ve profiled here, merely set the stage for what comes next. It is up to all of us to guide AI thoughtfully, ethically, and creatively to its full potential.
So stay curious. Keep exploring the edge of what’s possible. Find novel uses for AI tools that bring the world more joy, justice, and empowerment. The only real limit is human imagination.
And while you’re at it, give ClickUp a try! Its AI features, combined with its multiple project management and collaboration tools, are bound to offer you various avenues to make your work life simpler and more productive. Be it writing, editing, multiple customizable templates, different views, or dashboards, ClickUp and its AI will not disappoint.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
