Top 100 AI Minds: Everyone Talks AI, But Who's Calling the Shots?
There's a new live-data highscore list of the top AI minds on this planet.
Everyone talks AI, but who's calling the shots?
Who are the top 100 AI researchers?
Nothing beats a solid highscore list: there's a new top 100 of the best AI researchers.
Check the live data on MetisList.com.
Metis List makes the call and ranks the fastest AI brains.
Ranking factors:
- Education
- Citations
- Current company
- Number of appearances on the Dwarkesh Podcast
- Notable works
Here's a snapshot from 30.07.2025. Let's see how the ranking evolves:
| 1 | Ilya Sutskever |
| 2 | Noam Shazeer |
| 3 | Geoffrey Hinton |
| 4 | Alec Radford |
| 5 | Kaiming He |
| 6 | Alan Turing |
| 7 | John Schulman |
| 8 | Jürgen Schmidhuber |
| 9 | Jeff Dean |
| 10 | Quoc V. Le |
| 11 | Jared Kaplan |
| 12 | Yann LeCun |
| 13 | Chris Olah |
| 14 | David Silver |
| 15 | Sergey Levine |
| 16 | Jason Wei |
| 17 | Diederik P. Kingma |
| 18 | Yoshua Bengio |
| 19 | Fei-Fei Li |
| 20 | Shengjia Zhao |
| 21 | Shane Legg |
| 22 | Ian Goodfellow |
| 23 | Andrej Karpathy |
| 24 | Barret Zoph |
| 25 | Mark Chen |
| 26 | Zhihong Shao |
| 27 | Devendra Singh Chaplot |
| 28 | Jan Leike |
| 29 | Alexander Kirillov |
| 30 | Ethan Perez |
| 31 | Tom Brown |
| 32 | Neel Nanda |
| 33 | Tri Dao |
| 34 | Hongyu Ren |
| 35 | Dan Hendrycks |
| 36 | Lukasz Kaiser |
| 37 | Jeffrew Wu |
| 38 | Shaoqing Ren |
| 39 | Alexander Wei |
| 40 | Prafulla Dhariwal |
| 41 | zico kolter |
| 42 | Alex Graves |
| 43 | Lilian Weng |
| 44 | Naman Goyal |
| 45 | Eric Zelikman |
| 46 | Lucas Beyer |
| 47 | Albert Gu |
| 48 | James Bradbury |
| 49 | Noam Brown |
| 50 | Chelsea Finn |
| 51 | Yi Tay |
| 52 | Alexander Kolesnikov |
| 53 | Nick Ryder |
| 54 | Hyung Won Chung |
| 55 | Mostafa Dehghani |
| 56 | Sholto Douglas |
| 57 | Deli Chen |
| 58 | Jiahui Yu |
| 59 | Percy Liang |
| 60 | Nicholas Carlini |
| 61 | Kai Chen |
| 62 | Paul Christiano |
| 63 | Wojciech Zaremba |
| 64 | Trenton Bricken |
| 65 | Timothy P. Lillicrap |
| 66 | Leo Gao |
| 67 | Andrew Ng |
| 68 | Amanda Askell |
| 69 | Edward J. Hu |
| 70 | Jimmy Ba |
| 71 | Jack Rae |
| 72 | Jianlin Su |
| 73 | Yang Song |
| 74 | Christopher Ré |
| 75 | Jon Barron |
| 76 | Christopher Hesse |
| 77 | Niki Parmar |
| 78 | Robin Rombach |
| 79 | Yair Carmon |
| 80 | François Chollet |
| 81 | Jacob Steinhardt |
| 82 | Neil Houlsby |
| 83 | Jacob Hilton |
| 84 | Koray Kavukcuoglu |
| 85 | Sandhini Agarwal |
| 86 | Stephen Roller |
| 87 | George Boole |
| 88 | Piotr Dollár |
| 89 | Nelson Elhage |
| 90 | Xuezhi Wang |
| 91 | Denny Britz |
| 92 | Jack Clark |
| 93 | Long Ouyang |
| 94 | Tom Henighan |
| 95 | Pieter Abbeel |
| 96 | Rowan Zellers |
| 97 | Sherjil Ozair |
| 98 | Jean Pouget-Abadie |
| 99 | Sam McCandlish |
| 100 | Jonathan Ho |
Glad to see Andrej Karpathy on the list. He's my current favorite AI explainer. If you haven't watched his personal YouTube videos yet, catch up now. He proves again how valuable the gains of our era are, and how great it is when a sharp brain drops its knowledge and thoughts straight into a simple screencast. Pure Awesomnia.
The list comes from the TBPN team, the Technology Brothers Podcast Network, currently the most exciting tech media news format on the planet, by a mile.
That alone does not make the list useful.
The ranking method is fair game for doubt. This list is more of a TBPN marketing asset than a seriously built and maintained ranking. Time will tell. The TBPN crew can still tighten the method and the list.
But as always: nothing beats a highscore list.
That hits me as a competitive ape, RL-CIV gamer and tech nerd: Hardwired for Highscore.
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who's the best of them all?
