Following the right people on X and LinkedIn is one of the highest-leverage information habits for anyone working with AI in 2026. The pace of model releases, research breakthroughs, and policy shifts is fast enough that any single news source falls behind quickly. Aggregating signal from a curated list of practitioners, researchers, founders, and policymakers is now standard practice for people who want to stay current.
This is the AITraining2U Editorial Team's curated list of 50 people worth following in 2026. The selection deliberately spans frontier labs, academic research, applied practice, education, investment, ethics, and Asian/SEA leadership — because the best signal comes from breadth, not from following 50 versions of the same role.
Each entry includes the person's primary affiliation, why they are worth following, and direct links to their X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and personal website where available.
Frontier lab founders & product leaders
Sam Altman
Co-founder & CEO, OpenAI
OpenAI's public face; broad strategic and ecosystem signals.
Dario Amodei
Co-founder & CEO, Anthropic
Anthropic's research direction, alignment posture, Claude roadmap.
Daniela Amodei
Co-founder & President, Anthropic
Anthropic's product, policy, and operations leadership.
Mike Krieger
Chief Product Officer, Anthropic
Product strategy at Anthropic (also Instagram co-founder).
Demis Hassabis
Co-founder & CEO, Google DeepMind; Nobel Laureate
DeepMind research, Gemini, scientific AI applications.
Sundar Pichai
CEO, Google & Alphabet
Google's overall AI strategy and product integration.
Aidan Gomez
Co-founder & CEO, Cohere
Enterprise-focused LLMs and Cohere's product vision.
Arthur Mensch
Co-founder & CEO, Mistral AI
European AI leadership and open-weight models.
AI researchers & scientists
Yann LeCun
Chief AI Scientist, Meta; Turing Award
Deep learning fundamentals, opinionated takes on AGI roadmap.
Geoffrey Hinton
Turing Award; ex-Google
Foundational deep learning research; AI safety perspectives.
Andrew Ng
Founder, DeepLearning.AI; Coursera
AI education at scale; pragmatic enterprise AI advice.
Fei-Fei Li
Stanford HAI; Co-founder, World Labs
Spatial intelligence research, AI policy, education.
Andrej Karpathy
Founder, Eureka Labs; ex-OpenAI/Tesla
First-principles AI explanations; small-model and open-source advocacy.
Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Frontier safety research; OpenAI co-founder.
Mira Murati
Founder, Thinking Machines Lab; ex-OpenAI CTO
Frontier AI engineering and safety leadership.
Jeff Dean
Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind
Systems research, large-model infrastructure.
François Chollet
Founder, Ndea; creator of Keras
Reasoning research, ARC-AGI, Keras.
Tri Dao
Chief Scientist, Together AI; FlashAttention
Inference efficiency and long-context architectures.
Christopher Manning
Stanford NLP; Director, Stanford AI Lab
NLP fundamentals; long-form research perspective.
Educators & AI communicators
Ethan Mollick
Wharton; author, Co-Intelligence
Practical, weekly updates on how AI changes work.
Simon Willison
Co-creator, Django; AI commentator
Hands-on AI experiments, security, and tooling reviews.
Jeremy Howard
Co-founder, fast.ai & Answer.AI
Pragmatic AI education; small-team frontier work.
Cassie Kozyrkov
Founder, Data Scientific; ex-Google Chief Decision Scientist
Decision intelligence and applied data science.
Bernard Marr
Author and futurist
Industry-wide AI surveys and case studies.
Allie K. Miller
AI advisor; ex-Amazon & IBM
Enterprise AI strategy and career commentary.
Steve Nouri
Founder, AI4Diversity
AI community building; daily AI signals.
Practitioners & open-source builders
Eugene Yan
Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon; ML writing
Production ML lessons, system design essays.
Nathan Lambert
RLHF / open-models researcher, AI2
Frontier-model analysis and RLHF newsletter.
Karpathy adjacents — Charles Frye
Modal Labs; full-stack ML educator
Educational threads on training and deploying models.
Tim Dettmers
Researcher; bitsandbytes / quantisation
Inference efficiency and democratising large models.
Soumith Chintala
Co-creator, PyTorch; Meta
PyTorch ecosystem and ML systems.
George Hotz
Founder, tinygrad & comma.ai
Open-source AI hardware and small-team frontier engineering.
Investors & ecosystem leaders
Reid Hoffman
Co-founder, LinkedIn; Inflection AI; Greylock
AI investing and societal-impact perspectives.
Marc Andreessen
Co-founder, a16z
AI investment thesis and ecosystem commentary.
Vinod Khosla
Founder, Khosla Ventures
Long-cycle AI investing; OpenAI early backer.
Policy, ethics & safety voices
Stuart Russell
UC Berkeley; author, Human Compatible
AI safety and governance research.
Timnit Gebru
Founder, DAIR; AI ethics researcher
Algorithmic accountability and AI fairness.
Margaret Mitchell
Chief Ethics Scientist, Hugging Face
AI ethics, model cards, responsible release practices.
Asia & SEA voices
Kai-Fu Lee
Founder & CEO, Sinovation Ventures; 01.AI
China AI ecosystem; bilingual frontier-model perspective.
How to use this list
Follow 10–15 of these to start, picked across categories. Aim for breadth over depth: a researcher, a founder, an educator, a practitioner, a policy voice. The goal is to triangulate — when three different people from three different categories reference the same model release, paper, or shift, that is the signal worth paying attention to.
Add five Malaysian and SEA voices once you have established the global signal layer. Local context matters for regulatory, funding, and hiring conversations that the global feed will not surface.
Refresh the list every 6–12 months. The names change. The discipline of following an intentionally curated list rather than whatever the algorithm serves you is the durable habit.
If you want to keep up with Malaysian-specific AI insights and our practitioner perspectives, follow AITraining2U on LinkedIn.
