AI ENGINEERS

ENGINEERS

• Andrej KarpathyHinton's classroom → OpenAI → Tesla → OpenAI again → teaching the internet how the machines work.
• Binyuan HuiQwen-Coder, OpenDevin, reasoning — pushing open models toward autonomous software engineering.
• Elon MuskGrok, supercomputers, feuds, and money. xAI is the loudest recurring side plot in the AI boom.
• George HotziPhone hacks, PlayStation fights, comma.ai, tinygrad — and a career spent refusing the giant-company stack.
• Greg BrockmanOpenAI co-founder, training infrastructure, and the engineering machine behind the lab's biggest bets.
• Jeff DeanGoogle's infrastructure → Google Brain → Gemini: the engineer whose systems sit underneath modern AI.
• Jensen HuangLeather jacket, giant chip fortune, and the Nvidia roadmap everyone else keeps waiting on.
• John TernusiPad, AirPods, Apple silicon — then the hardware engineer inherited Apple just as AI became its giant test.
• Lisa SuAMD, CPUs, Instinct accelerators — the engineering fight to keep Nvidia from owning the whole AI gold rush.
• Mark ZuckerbergOpen models, giant compute bets, recruiting wars, and another attempt to bend the next computing platform around Meta.
• Noam ShazeerTransformer, mixture-of-experts, Character.AI — then a 2026 jump from Google back into the OpenAI race.
• Pieter LevelsDigital nomads, Remote OK, too many solo products to count, and generative AI as the next one-person factory.
• Ray KurzweilReading machines, synthesizers, Google, the Singularity — six decades of saying the machines are coming fast.
• Simon WillisonDjango, Datasette, two decades of blogging, and a habit of making new models prove what they can actually do in public.
• swyx (Shawn Wang)Learn in Public, Latent Space, and a successful campaign to make AI Engineer an actual job title.
• Theo BrowneTwitch engineer → T3 Stack → UploadThing → a five-day AI chat app that became T3 Chat.
• ThePrimeagenNetflix, Neovim, Harpoon, livestreamed open source — and an AI agent built by someone who still wants humans to code.
• Thomas WolfTransformers, BLOOM, Hugging Face: the open-model infrastructure that made frontier AI feel downloadable.
• Timothée LacroixMath, recommenders, Meta AI, LLaMA — now the engineering operation behind Mistral.