There are many ways to define “top influencer”. You may just ask OpenAI to get a list: see results in Figure 1. However, it states that the data is not recent (2022 and earlier), and there is no link to the individual profiles. Here I focus on leaders very active on LinkedIn, with at least 100k followers, and popping up regularly on my feed. Emphasis is on GenAI and LLM, which are today among the hottest topics in AI. It is also what I am working on.
I created two categories: technical and general. I did not include people talking about SQL or data analysis and claiming to be AI gurus, no matter how many followers. Also, I did not include coaches – many talking about how to get an AI job – even if they are former FAANG engineers, and thus very popular. Many in my list regularly feature sponsored content from AI companies.
If I forgot someone, please let me know. You can compare with my 2023 listing here and see who grew at the fastest pace. Yann LeCun in particular, went from 276k to 701k followers in 16 months, and Alex Wang, now with 886k followers, was missing in my 2023 list. Of course, it is easier to grow fast when you are small, and this also applies in this context. Then the number of followers is just one metric, and not the most useful one: the quality of your network and followers is more important.
The leaders below are listed in random order. The listed location is where they live now. Many emigrated from another country.
Technical
People in this list tend to cover technical material rather in-depth, with efforts to make it accessible to a large audience. They have a strong technical background. Some of them discuss ground-breaking technology that they create on their own. Their audience tends to be developers and engineers. But also, decision makers, executives and stakeholders, when posting about the big picture, benchmarks, or catering to tech-savvy executives.
- Andrew Ng. Founder, investor and more. Palo Alto, 1.6m followers.
- Damien Benveniste. Former Machine Learning tech lead at Meta. Los Angeles, 156k followers.
- Alex Wang. Formerly, business algorithms at Deloitte. Australia. 886k followers.
- Sebastian Raschka. Staff Research Engineer. Wisconsin, 108k followers.
- Rami Krispin. Senior Manager, data science & engineering at Apple. California, 110k followers.
- Brij Kishore. Principal engineer at ADP. Author and GenAI strategist. New Jersey, 475k followers.
- Vincent Granville. GenAI entrepreneur and author. Washington State, 124k followers.
- Abhishek Thakur. Open-source research & development at Hugging Face. Norway, 151k followers.
- Julien Chaumond. CTO at Hugging Face. Paris, 114k followers.
- Yann LeCun. VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta. New York, 701k followers.
- Anima Anandkumar. Forner Sr. Director, Nvidia research. Professor at Caltech. Bay Area. 182k followers.
- Lior Sinclair. Founder, MIT lecturer. Austin Texas, 170k followers.
- Chip Huyen. VP of AI, author. San Francisco, 220k followers.
- Benjamin Rogojan. The “Seattle Data Guy”. Denver, 138k followers.
Generalists
People in this category target decision makers and executives, but also the layman or novices in the field. Thus, they typically have a larger audience. Their vocabulary and presentations are more accessible to the public at large but may not appeal as much to advanced technical practitioners.
- Andriy Burkov. Machine Learning lead, author. Quebec, 359k followers.
- Allie Miller. AI entrepreneur, advisor, investor. New York, 1.4m followers.
- Lex Fridman. Research Scientist, MIT. Massachusetts, 1.5m followers.
- Vin Vashishta. AI advisor, founder, author. Nevada, 182k followers.
- Cassie Kozyrkov. Former Chief Decision Scientist at Google. New York, 577k followers.
- Aishwarya Srinivasan. Senior AI Advisor at Microsoft. San Francisco, 501k followers.
- Pascal Bornet. Keynote Speaker, Best-selling Author. Florida, 1.4m followers.
- Greg Coquillo. AI product management at Amazon. Startup investor. Washington State, 195k followers.
- Armand Ruiz. VP of product management, AI platform at IBM. San Francisco, 85k followers.
- Steve Nouri. Founder of GenerativeAI. Australia, 1.6m followers.
- Bojan Tunguz. Former Sr. Engineer at Nvidia. Florida, 141k followers.
- Zach Wilson. Former Staff Engineer at Airbnb. San Francisco, 360k followers.
- Daliana Liu. Senior Data Scientist, formerly AWS. San Francisco, 272k followers.
Author
Vincent Granville is a pioneering GenAI scientist and machine learning expert, co-founder of Data Science Central (acquired by a publicly traded company in 2020), Chief AI Scientist at MLTechniques.com and GenAItechLab.com, former VC-funded executive, author (Elsevier) and patent owner — one related to LLM. Vincent’s past corporate experience includes Visa, Wells Fargo, eBay, NBC, Microsoft, and CNET. Follow Vincent on LinkedIn.
