THE MACHINE AGE CAST
WHO PUT THESE PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF THE FUTURE?
Living files on the builders, scientists, critics, chroniclers, operators, money, and foundational figures who explain how we got here.
EMPIRE BUILDERS
- Andy JassyAndy Jassy's AI file: Amazon, AWS, workplace automation, data centers, spending, and the executive running the cloud giant through the AI boom.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Arthur MenschArthur Mensch's file: French math and AI research, Google DeepMind, Mistral AI, open-weight models, European sovereignty, and billions raised to build a frontier lab in Paris.ALSO: SCIENTISTS
- Dario AmodeiDario Amodei's running file: Anthropic, Claude, doom warnings, policy fights, and the haunted-prophet beat of the AI boom.ALSO: SCIENTISTS · DOOM PROPHETS
- Elon MuskElon Musk's AI file: xAI, Grok, supercomputers, feuds, money, warnings, and the world's loudest recurring machine-age side plot.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Jack DorseyJack Dorsey's file: Twitter, Square, Block, decentralization, Bitcoin, and the founder who keeps trying to rebuild giant internet systems without their old centers.ALSO: MONEY & POWER · FOUNDATIONAL FIGURES
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang's machine-age file: Nvidia, leather jackets, giant chip fortunes, forecasts, deals, and the salesman at the center of the boom.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Jingren ZhouJingren Zhou's file: Microsoft research, Alibaba Cloud, big-data infrastructure, Tongyi, Qwen, and the executive-scientist connecting China's cloud stack to its foundation models.ALSO: SCIENTISTS
- John TernusJohn Ternus's machine-age file: Apple hardware, iPad, AirPods, Apple silicon, and the engineer who inherited the company as AI became its next giant test.
- Liang WenfengLiang Wenfeng's file: quantitative finance, High-Flyer, hoarded GPUs, DeepSeek, open models, and the Chinese hedge-fund founder who made Silicon Valley rethink AI economics.ALSO: SCIENTISTS · MONEY & POWER
- Mark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg's AI file: Meta's spending, models, recruiting wars, safety claims, and another attempt to bend computing around his company.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Mira MuratiMira Murati's machine-age file: OpenAI history, new-model ambition, startup power, money, and another major protagonist leaving one lab to build another.
- Sam AltmanSam Altman in the machine-age file: OpenAI power, money, promises, reversals, and the recurring face of the boom.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Satya NadellaSatya Nadella's AI file: Microsoft, Copilot, OpenAI entanglements, enterprise bets, and the manager of one of the machine age's biggest balance sheets.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Sundar PichaiSundar Pichai's machine-age file: Google, Gemini, DeepMind, search, product bets, and the calm face attached to one of AI's largest empires.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
- Tim CookTim Cook's AI file: Apple, Siri, privacy, hardware, partnerships, caution, and the controlled corporate response to an unruly new computing era.ALSO: MONEY & POWER
SCIENTISTS
- Andrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy's file: Hinton's classroom, Stanford vision research, early OpenAI, Tesla Autopilot, a return to OpenAI, and then teaching the internet how the machines work.ALSO: SCENE BUILDERS
- Binyuan HuiBinyuan Hui's file: Qwen, coding models, reasoning, OpenDevin, Qwen-Coder, and the push to make autonomous software engineering an open model problem.ALSO: SCENE BUILDERS
- Bowen YuBowen Yu's file: automated alignment research, Alibaba, Qwen-Instruct, post-training, reasoning, and the machinery that turns a base model into something people can actually use.
- Daya GuoDaya Guo's file: code intelligence, Microsoft Research Asia, DeepSeek, DeepSeek-Coder, reasoning models, and the research path from programming-language AI into frontier systems.
- Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis's machine-age file: DeepMind, Gemini, scientific breakthroughs, AGI forecasts, and the research boss inside Google's AI empire.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS
- Fei-Fei LiFei-Fei Li's file: ImageNet, Stanford AI, Google Cloud, human-centered AI, and the computer-vision pioneer now trying to teach machines spatial intelligence.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS
- Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton's file: neural networks through the wilderness, AlexNet, Google, a Nobel Prize, and the pioneer who later started warning about the machinery he helped unleash.ALSO: DOOM PROPHETS
- Guillaume LampleGuillaume Lample's file: unsupervised translation, Meta AI, LLaMA, and the scientist who left one giant American lab to co-found Europe's Mistral AI.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS
- Ilya SutskeverIlya Sutskever's AI file: OpenAI history, superintelligence, safety, research mystique, and the scientist who keeps reappearing near the edge of the story.ALSO: DOOM PROPHETS
- Jeremy HowardJeremy Howard's file: Kaggle, medical AI, fast.ai, ULMFiT, practical deep-learning education, and a career spent trying to put powerful models in more hands.ALSO: SCENE BUILDERS · INDEPENDENT OPERATORS
- Junyang LinJunyang Lin's file: Peking University, Alibaba DAMO, Qwen, open-weight model releases, billion-download scale, and the technical leader who walked away at the peak.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS
- Timothée LacroixTimothée Lacroix's file: mathematics, recommender systems, Meta AI, LLaMA-era research, and the engineering operation behind Mistral's European frontier models.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS
- Yoshua BengioYoshua Bengio's file: deep-learning research, Mila, the Turing Award, frontier-risk warnings, and the scientist building a new lab around safer AI.ALSO: DOOM PROPHETS
FOUNDATIONAL FIGURES
- Steve JobsSteve Jobs's file: Apple, exile, return, iPod, iPhone, and the product religion whose hardware empire now has to survive the machine age without him.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS · MONEY & POWER
DOOM PROPHETS
- Eliezer YudkowskyEliezer Yudkowsky's file: Friendly AI, MIRI, LessWrong, alignment, rationalism, and two decades of insisting the machine might kill everybody.ALSO: TECHNOLOGY CRITICS
TECHNOLOGY CRITICS
- Tristan HarrisTristan Harris's file: persuasive technology, Google's attention machine, Time Well Spent, The Social Dilemma, and the warning that AI may replay social media at higher speed.ALSO: DOOM PROPHETS
MONEY & POWER
- Jeff BezosJeff Bezos's AI file: Amazon, cloud money, giant bets, private capital, and the gleaming robber-baron energy that keeps wandering back into the machine age.ALSO: EMPIRE BUILDERS
CHRONICLERS
- Dwarkesh PatelDwarkesh Patel's file: a student podcast that somehow became the long-form interrogation room where frontier AI researchers explain what they think is coming.
- Dylan PatelDylan Patel's file: SemiAnalysis, chips, supply chains, GPUs, datacenters, and the independent researcher counting the physical machinery underneath the AI story.ALSO: INDEPENDENT OPERATORS
- Ethan MollickEthan Mollick's file: entrepreneurship research, classroom experiments, One Useful Thing, Co-Intelligence, and the professor stress-testing generative AI in ordinary work.ALSO: TECHNOLOGY CRITICS
- Lex FridmanLex Fridman's file: machine-learning research, MIT, marathon interviews, and the podcast couch where much of the machine age narrates itself for several hours at a time.ALSO: SCIENTISTS
- Simon WillisonSimon Willison's file: Django, startup life, Datasette, two decades of blogging, and an independent programmer documenting the LLM revolution almost day by day.ALSO: INDEPENDENT OPERATORS · SCENE BUILDERS
SCENE BUILDERS
- swyx (Shawn Wang)swyx's file: finance, developer communities, Learn in Public, Latent Space, and the effort to turn 'AI Engineer' into an actual profession and scene.ALSO: CHRONICLERS
- ThePrimeagenThePrimeagen's file: Netflix engineering, Neovim, Harpoon, livestreamed open source, programmer internet culture, and an AI agent built by someone who still wants humans to code.ALSO: INDEPENDENT OPERATORS
- Thomas WolfThomas Wolf's file: the Transformers library, Hugging Face, BigScience, BLOOM, and the open-source infrastructure that helped turn foundation models into something developers could actually use.ALSO: SCIENTISTS
INDEPENDENT OPERATORS
- George HotzGeorge Hotz's file: iPhone hacking, PlayStation fights, comma.ai, openpilot, tinygrad, and a recurring attempt to build important technology outside the giant-company stack.ALSO: SCIENTISTS
- Pieter LevelsPieter Levels's file: digital nomads, Remote OK, a ridiculous number of solo products, and the indie hacker who turned generative AI into another one-man software factory.ALSO: SCENE BUILDERS