Part One of a three-part “who’s who” series providing brief profiles of many major players in the AI industry. This first part focuses on AI’s powerful technology moguls. They are listed alphabetically by their company name.
Amazon
Primary AI Product: AWS (Amazon Web Services) and AI chips
Jeff Bezos (Amazon Magnate)
The well-known founder and former CEO of Amazon.com recently rented Venice for his wedding and sent Katy Perry into space on one of his Blue Origin rockets. In October 2025, Bezos reportedly said “This is real, the benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.” In the same appearance, he also admitted that AI was “an industry bubble.”
Anthropic
Primary AI Product: Claude
Daniela Amodei (Anthropic Cofounder/VP of Safety & Policy)
Born in San Francisco in 1987, Amodei’s undergraduate degree in English Literature shows that, with the right familial connections, a Humanities degree can lead to a high-profile job in Silicon Valley. First working in AI ethics and safety at OpenAI alongside her brother Dario, she left alongside him in 2021 to co-found Anthropic. Her stewardship of Anthropic’s Safety & Policy has helped create the public perception that Anthropic is the ethical AI company – oh, except for the fact that they pirated thousands of books to train Claude. Truly, Anthropic are the only people moral enough to responsibly shepherd humanity into the era of AGI.
Dario Amodei (Anthropic Cofounder/CEO)
The San Francisco native first made waves as the vice president of research at OpenAI. Amodei’s concerns about Sam Altman’s ability to ethically steward AGI (should that breakthrough happen) as well as their Boomer versus Doomer philosophical disagreements led Dario and his sister Daniela to leave OpenAI in 2021 and co-found Anthropic. Famous for being awkward, as well as for kind of standing up against the US military‘s desire to use Anthropic’s models for automated killing machines.
DeepSeek
Primary AI Product: Claude
Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek CEO)
Born in Wuchuan in 1985, Liang founded DeepSeek in October 2023. In October 2022, US president Joe Biden began exerting export controls over computer chips sold in China, preventing Chinese companies from buying the latest cutting edge Nvidia chips. In order to regain their lost income in China, Nvidia began manufacturing lower power AI chips specifically for the Chinese market; the US retaliated with tighter export controls, so Nvidia made even lower power chips, and so on. The US assumed this would guarantee American superiority in AI development. However, on 20 January 2025, DeepSeek released their R1 LLM, a powerful frontier model that was trained for a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley LLMs, running on Nvidia’s lower quality chips. The ensuing frenzy over DeepSeek’s substantial achievement led to a US stock market crash a week later and DeepSeek overtaking ChatGPT as the number one app in the so-called West. As DeepSeek continues to innovate with less powerful resources than their American competitors, Liang’s personal value has continued to skyrocket: as of 14 July 2026, he has become the world’s richest AI model CEO.
Primary AI Product: DeepMind/Gemini
Jeff Dean (Head of Google AI/DeepMind)
As Google’s 30th employee, Hawaiian-born Dean has worked his up from engineering advertising and Google Translate to eventually becoming head of Google’s AI department. He was involved in multiple controversial firings of Google whistleblower employees including Timnit Gebru (fired for exposing racist practices at Google and within its AI models) and Satrajit Chatterjee (fired for directly challenging the veracity of Dean’s own research). Dean came up with the name “Gemini” for Google’s AI chatbot when the company decided to merge its Google Brain and DeepMind departments into a single department named Google DeepMind.
Meta
Primary AI Product: Meta AI
Mark Zuckerberg (Meta Cofounder, chairman & CEO)
After gambling his company’s future on VR/the “Metaverse” and losing (big), Zuckerberg pivoted to playing catchup with AI. You might know him as the man responsible for temporarily letting everyone use Meta AI to make deepfakes of anyone with an Instagram account, the man responsible for tracking his employees’ every keystroke to train the Meta AI monitoring system, and the man responsible for using a biased AI system to fire pregnant employees.
Microsoft
Primary AI Products: Copilot, Azure
Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO)
Hyderabad-born executive responsible for Microsoft’s early investment in OpenAI and subsequently providing the vote of confidence in Sam Altman necessary to get him re-instated as OpenAI’s CEO after an unsuccessful internal coup in 2024. Nadella also bet big on making Copilot the centrepiece of Windows 11, to the company’s eventual chagrin. When Microsoft was exposed in 2025 as having helped the Israeli military’s elite cybersecurity division Unit 8200 collect millions of hours of audio recordings from the mobile phones of Palestinians, store them in Azure, and process their data with Microsoft AI (thereby helping Unit 8200 target civilians during the Palestine genocide post-Oct. 7, 2023), Nadella took “decisive action” by allowing the head of Microsoft Israel to quietly resign, then transferring oversight of the Israeli branch to Microsoft France. Incidentally, the Palestine Boycott/Divest/Sanctions movement has declared Microsoft to be “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide…in Gaza.” Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide led Brian Eno to donate the fee Microsoft paid him for composing the Windows 95 startup sound to aid for Palestine, saying “I pledge that the fee I originally received for that Windows 95 chime will now go towards helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza. If a sound can signal a real change then let it be this one.”
Nvidia
Primary AI Product: GPUs
Jensen Huang (Nvidia Founder & CEO)
The Taiwanese/American founder of Nvidia is known for many things: not wearing a watch, always wearing a leather jacket regardless of social etiquette or context, and AI tokenmaxxing. He designs and manufactures the computing chips, or GPUs, that power AI companies’ Data Centers, thereby making him and his company a pivotal part of the AI supply chain, better known as the AI Bubble; as described by Cory Doctorow: “…it’s normal for Nvidia to ‘invest’ tens of billions in a data center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. The same chunk of money [is] being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).”