frontier-ai-lab
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Eric Zelikman
Eric Zelikman is the co-founder and CEO of humans&, a human-centric frontier AI lab in Redwood City building foundation models designed for communication and collaboration rather than automation. A former early researcher at xAI, he helped shape Grok's pretraining data and scaled reinforcement learning for reasoning across Grok 3 and Grok 4. Before that, as a Stanford PhD candidate, he authored STaR and Quiet-STaR, foundational papers that taught language models to reason in natural language using their own rationales. In January 2026, humans& emerged from stealth with a $480M seed round at a roughly $4.48B valuation, backed by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV, SV Angel and Emerson Collective.
Andy Markoff
Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'