agi
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Paul Graziani and the trouble with empty space
He helped turn satellite calculations into software that thousands of teams could share. After 33 years at AGI, Paul Graziani retired into a job concerned with what happens when space gets crowded.
Daniel Faggella built a business to buy himself a different future
A jiu-jitsu instructor sold his online education company to fund an AI research venture. Now the founder of Emerj is asking what kind of intelligence deserves to inherit the future.
Liang Wenfeng and the expensive business of curiosity
Before DeepSeek became a global argument about the price of intelligence, Liang Wenfeng built a trading firm that could pay for his questions. Then he gave other people the means to explore the answers.
Tim Lupo
Tim Lupo is the co-founder and CEO of Deeptune, a New York startup that builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments - which he calls 'training gyms' or 'flight simulators' - where AI agents learn to do real digital work across enterprise software like Salesforce and Slack. In early 2026 the company raised a $43M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Deeptune started life as an AI video-dubbing tool that landed Lupo and co-founder Lukas Schmit on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to become RL infrastructure for frontier AI labs. A former founding engineer at Hebbia and a full-merit USC scholar, Lupo pitches the roughly 20-person, in-person team as one of the only early-stage places in New York to work on AGI.
Vlad Chernyshov
Vlad Chernyshov is the co-founder and CEO of Dasha.AI, a New York conversational-voice-AI company he started in late 2016 to build machines that talk like people - with the ums, the breaths, the interruptions and all. A competitive programmer out of Novosibirsk, Russia, he landed his first paying customer (a San Francisco dental practice) the day after Y Combinator rejected him, raised a $2M seed from RTP Global in 2019, and has framed Dasha's real target not as call centers but as artificial general intelligence reached through speech.
Jad Tarifi
Jad Tarifi is the co-founder, CEO and Chief AI Scientist of Integral AI, a Tokyo- and Silicon Valley-based startup building energy-efficient, interactive world models aimed at scalable artificial general intelligence and embodied robotics. Before founding the company in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Google, where he founded and led the company's first generative AI team and worked on neocortex-inspired learning from limited data. Born and raised in Lebanon, he holds a PhD in computer science and AI from the University of Florida and an MS in quantum computing. In December 2025 he drew global attention - and skepticism - by claiming Integral AI had built the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA. He is also the author of the four-volume 'Freedom Series' on AI and human potential.
Deepak Pathak
Deepak Pathak is the co-founder and CEO of Skild AI, the Pittsburgh robotics company building a single general-purpose 'brain' that can run any robot from a quadruped to a humanoid. A Raj Reddy Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he earned a gold medal at IIT Kanpur and a PhD at UC Berkeley before betting that physical intelligence, not language, is the real path to AGI. In January 2026 Skild raised $1.4 billion at a valuation north of $14 billion, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
Ishaan Bhola
Ishaan Bhola is the Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building full-stack autonomous agent infrastructure and a next-generation AI-native CRM. A serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded six ventures across consumer apps, home decor e-commerce, fintech lending, account-based marketing, and now AGI infrastructure, Bhola has scaled teams to 200+ employees and built products used by millions. SuperAGI raised a $10M Series A led by WhatsApp founder Jan Koum's Newlands VC in March 2024, and has grown to $9.9M in revenue with an open-source platform boasting 15,200+ GitHub stars.
Jason Warner
Jason Warner is the co-founder and CEO of Poolside, a San Francisco-based frontier AI lab building proprietary foundation models for software development with $626M raised and a $3B+ valuation. Before Poolside, he was CTO of GitHub - where he launched Actions, Packages, Codespaces, and incubated what became GitHub Copilot - and then a Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. A self-described 'average developer but excellent architect,' Warner is betting that reinforcement learning from code execution will make software the first domain where AI surpasses human-level intelligence.
Jonathan Siddharth
Jonathan Siddharth is the CEO and Co-founder of Turing, a $2.2 billion AI-powered talent and AGI infrastructure company based in San Francisco. A Stanford CS alum with a lifelong obsession with artificial intelligence, he built his first neural network as a teenager to drive a simulated car. After founding and selling Rover (an AI content discovery app) for ~$30M, he launched Turing in 2018 to build the world's largest intelligent developer talent cloud. Today, Turing partners with frontier AI labs including OpenAI to train and improve the world's most capable language models, and counts Fortune 500 companies among its 900+ enterprise clients. He has raised $334M in total funding and led Turing to over $167M in annualized revenue.
Demis Hassabis
Sir Demis Hassabis CBE FRS is a British AI researcher, neuroscientist, chess prodigy, and game designer who co-founded DeepMind in 2011 and serves as CEO of Google DeepMind. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's protein structure prediction, was knighted for services to AI, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the development of artificial general intelligence.
D. Scott Phoenix
D. Scott Phoenix is a deep tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Vicarious, an artificial general intelligence company that raised $250M from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other tech luminaries before being acquired by Alphabet in 2022. Now a partner at Fifty Years, he invests in scientists and engineers solving humanity's biggest problems. A Y Combinator alum who founded his first startup at 16, Phoenix is a leading voice in AI safety advocacy and believes artificial general intelligence will be 'humanity's last invention.'
Azalia Mirhoseini
Azalia Mirhoseini is an Iranian-born AI researcher, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence - a frontier AI lab valued at $4 billion that uses AI to design better chips, which in turn train stronger AI. Best known for AlphaChip, the deep reinforcement learning system that now designs Google's TPUs and has compressed chip floorplanning from months to hours, she also co-invented the Mixture-of-Experts architecture underpinning GPT, Claude, and Gemini. With 20,000+ citations and a $335M-funded startup launched in under four months, she is closing the recursive loop between artificial intelligence and the hardware it runs on.