Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, and one of the most widely read and debated public intellectuals of his generation. Known for his books '12 Rules for Life' and 'Beyond Order' - which together sold over 7 million copies - and a YouTube channel with over 8.8 million subscribers, he blends Jungian psychology, evolutionary biology, and Biblical narrative into a framework for personal responsibility and meaning. He co-founded Peterson Academy in 2024, an online education platform with 72,000 students, and hosts 'The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast,' which has surpassed 150 million downloads.
Byung-Gon Chun is the CEO and Co-founder of FriendliAI, and a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University currently on leave. A systems researcher turned founder, he is best known for inventing continuous batching - the scheduling technique that became the default standard in every major LLM inference engine, from vLLM to TensorRT-LLM. His lab published the foundational ORCA paper at OSDI 2022, and he then turned that academic insight into FriendliAI, an enterprise AI inference platform that raised $26.7M and supports over 550,000 models from Hugging Face. With a career spanning Intel, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook, Chun brings rare depth across both research and production AI infrastructure.
Stefano Ermon is the CEO and co-founder of Inception Labs, the company behind Mercury - the world's first commercial-scale diffusion LLM. An Italian-born Stanford associate professor on leave, Ermon co-invented DDIM (the speedup trick powering modern image generation), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO, the alignment technique used to fine-tune today's leading LLMs), and the SEDD discrete diffusion framework that won ICML 2024's Best Paper Award. At Inception, he's betting that diffusion - not autoregression - is the architecture that will define the next generation of AI, with Mercury 2 clocking 1,000+ tokens per second at a fraction of the cost of GPT or Claude.
Scott Andrew Shane is one of the most cited entrepreneurship scholars alive, holding the A. Malachi Mixon III Professorship at Case Western Reserve University while simultaneously running Comeback Capital, a pre-seed VC fund backing Heartland startups, and advising Right Side Capital Management. He has written or edited 16 books, published over 94 scholarly articles, won the 2009 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, and manages a personal angel portfolio of 50+ companies - all while arguing, with data, that most things people believe about entrepreneurship are wrong.
Steve Blank is the father of modern entrepreneurship - a Silicon Valley serial founder who retired the day before his company E.piphany's 1999 IPO, then spent the next two decades teaching the world that startups aren't small versions of big companies. His Customer Development methodology and Lean LaunchPad curriculum, adopted by the NSF as I-Corps, have trained 9,300+ scientists, launched ~1,400 startups, and raised over $3 billion. A Vietnam-era Air Force veteran who never finished college, Blank now teaches at Stanford, advises the U.S. Navy, and co-directs Stanford's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation - applying startup thinking to national defense.
Pieter Abbeel is one of the world's leading AI and robotics researchers, a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-founder of Covariant. His pioneering work in robot learning through apprenticeship learning and reinforcement learning has shaped modern robotics. His students have co-founded over a dozen AI companies including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Physical Intelligence. In 2024, he joined Amazon to lead frontier model research, and in December 2025 was appointed head of Amazon's LLM efforts within the AGI organization.
Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Wharton Generative AI Labs, and one of the most widely read voices on artificial intelligence in practice. Author of the 2024 New York Times bestseller 'Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI,' his newsletter 'One Useful Thing' reaches 429,000+ subscribers. His landmark 2023 BCG study on AI and knowledge workers - the 'Jagged Frontier' research - became the empirical bedrock for how organizations understand AI's real impact on work. Named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Niraj Dawar is a Professor Emeritus of Marketing at Ivey Business School (University of Western Ontario) and one of the most influential marketing strategists working today. Author of TILT: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) - a bestseller named Best Business Book of 2014 in Marketing by strategy+business - he built his reputation arguing that competitive advantage has permanently migrated downstream, from products to customer relationships. His 1994 Journal of Marketing paper on 'Marketing Universals' (with Philip Parker) has over 1,000 citations. After retiring to emeritus status, he pivoted to applying brand strategy to nations through GeoStrategix and the Nation Brand Research Initiative, publishing in the South China Morning Post as recently as March 2026 on US-China soft power competition in Southeast Asia.
Emily Oster is a Harvard-trained economist, Brown University professor, and the mind behind ParentData - a platform transforming how millions of parents make decisions. With four consecutive New York Times bestsellers, TIME's 100 Most Influential People recognition, and over a million books sold, she wields data like a scalpel against pregnancy myths and parenting guilt, convincing readers that evidence beats anxiety every time.
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, prolific author, and one of the most widely-read economic commentators in the world. After 24 years as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, he left in December 2024 to launch a daily Substack newsletter that quickly surpassed 569,000 subscribers. A Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center, Krugman won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. With 4.3 million Twitter followers, 27 books, and a career spanning academia, policy advising, and public journalism, he remains a defining voice at the intersection of economics and politics.
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.
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, NYU Stern professor, five-time New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most outspoken voices in business and tech. Known for his unfiltered analysis of Big Tech, wealth inequality, and generational economics, he built and sold L2 Inc to Gartner for $155 million, co-hosts the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, writes the Webby Award-winning No Mercy / No Malice newsletter, and reaches millions through his Prof G Pod. His books - from The Four to The Algebra of Wealth - have made him a trusted, provocative guide to navigating capitalism in the 21st century.
Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
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.