@snowboat84: The previous article covered the top 75 people in AI (founders, lab directors, Transformer authors, top scholars). This is the second part, with seventy mini-biographies, still divided into four sections. They are not builders of the main models, but they shaped how the public understands AI—Karpathy, 3Blue1Brown, Lex …

The previous article covered the top 75 people in AI (founders, lab directors, Transformer authors, top scholars). This is the second part, with seventy mini-biographies, still divided into four sections. They are not the builders of the main models, but they shaped how the public understands AI—Karpathy, 3Blue1Brown, and Lex Fridman all belong to this track. Tool builders: PyTorch, Keras, HuggingFace, llama.cpp, pandas, NumPy—all from their hands, propping up the foundation of the entire industry. The brakes: from Stuart Russell, who wrote the standard AI textbook, to Yudkowsky, who shouted doomsday prophecies the loudest, to Timnit Gebru, who was fired by Google—a group that is inherently opposed to the builders, yet neither can do without the other. Those who turn AI into money: the shovel sellers Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, the heads of the four giants, VCs writing billion-dollar checks, and the operators behind Cursor, Devin, and Midjourney. After writing these seventy people, three patterns kept emerging: the AI that the public knows is shaped by science communicators; the most underestimated are the open-source folks—you use them every day but can't name them; on this list, the brakes and the accelerators are crowded together, sometimes even colleagues at the same company. This is the 67th of my 100-day 100 original long articles.