Agnes Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago whose work sits at the rare intersection of rigorous academic thought and genuine public provocation. Author of 'Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming' (2018) and 'Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life' (2025), she argues that Socratic open inquiry - the willingness to be persuaded by better reasons - is not just for intellectuals but for everyone. A Guggenheim Fellow and Lebowitz Prize winner, she writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Point Magazine, runs the Night Owls public debate series in Chicago, and co-hosts the 'Minds Almost Meeting' podcast with economist Robin Hanson. Known for contrarian takes ('The Case Against Travel'), deeply personal essays, and a living arrangement that keeps her ex-husband as a co-resident, Callard treats philosophy not as a career but as a way of life.
Freddie deBoer is an American author, cultural critic, and PhD-wielding contrarian who has spent 17 years making everyone on the internet uncomfortable - including people who agree with him. A self-described Marxist who despises most of the left, his Substack newsletter 'cool but rude' has over 67,000 subscribers hungry for unvarnished takes on education, identity politics, media dysfunction, and mental illness. Author of three books - The Cult of Smart (2020), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), and debut novel The Mind Reels (2025) - deBoer writes with the conviction of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Roxane Gay is a New York Times bestselling author, professor, cultural critic, and publisher whose work sits at the intersection of feminism, race, and identity. Best known for 'Bad Feminist' and 'Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body', she holds the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University, writes opinion for the New York Times, runs the Substack newsletter 'The Audacity', and publishes underrepresented voices through her imprint Roxane Gay Books at Grove Atlantic. In 2025 she received the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
Tim Dettmers is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), best known for making large language models accessible on consumer hardware. He created the bitsandbytes library (2.2M monthly installs), co-authored QLoRA - a technique enabling fine-tuning of 65B-parameter models on a single GPU - and pioneered LLM.int8() quantization. With over 18,000 citations across his work, Dettmers has become one of the most influential voices in efficient deep learning, consistently arguing that computational democratization - not AGI hype - is where the real progress lives.
Osman Ali Mian is an early-career AI researcher specializing in causal discovery and trustworthy machine learning. He completed his PhD magna cum laude at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Saarland University, Germany) and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) in Essen. He has published at top-tier venues including AAAI, ICML, AISTATS, and KDD, and won an Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2026 — marking him as a rising star in causal ML.