Map of Modern AI Discourse
100 voices across 3 continents · Updated November 2026
Part 1 — Quadrant x Role by Geography
The 2x2 grid (Is AGI close? x Build fast?) with each person colour-coded by professional role. Four tabs.
How this map is built. Placements are editorial judgement, not a survey or a score. Each person is positioned on the two axes — how close they think AGI is, and how fast they think we should build — from their public statements, writing and current roles. Roles and affiliations were re-checked against public sources for the November 2026 update; where the evidence was unclear, the previous placement stands. Most voices now carry one short, sourced statement behind their placement: see the table below, or hover a name on the map. In November 2026, 26 placements were revised in line with the voices’ own recent statements (among them Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, after September’s “pace the frontier” call), and 9 quieter voices made way for new ones, from Elon Musk to MiniMax’s Yan Junjie.
Researcher / Scientist
CEO / Builder
Investor / Ecosystem
Journalist / Media
Policy / Ethics / Safety
Philosopher / Theorist
↑ AGI IS CLOSE
AGI is Close + Slow Down
We see what is coming and it terrifies us.
Ajeya Cotra 🇺🇸
Nick Bostrom 🇸🇪
Max Tegmark 🇸🇪
Connor Leahy 🇬🇧
Jan Leike 🇩🇪→🇺🇸
Sam Altman 🇺🇸
Dario Amodei 🇺🇸
Ilya Sutskever 🇮🇱🇨🇦
Chris Olah 🇨🇦
Ezra Klein 🇺🇸
Jakub Pachocki 🇵🇱→🇺🇸
Shane Legg 🇳🇿🇬🇧
Jaan Tallinn 🇪🇪
24 people. 10 Researcher, 4 Philosopher, 4 Policy, 4 CEO, 1 Journalist, 1 Investor.
AGI is Close + Build Fast
This is the defining technology — accelerate, iterate, ship.
Ray Kurzweil 🇺🇸
Mira Murati 🇺🇸
Jensen Huang 🇺🇸
Eric Schmidt 🇺🇸
Noam Brown 🇺🇸
Jack Ma (马云) 🇨🇳
Lu Qi (陆奇) 🇨🇳
Elon Musk 🇿🇦→🇺🇸
27 people. 19 CEO, 3 Investor, 2 Philosopher, 2 Researcher, 1 Policy.
← SLOW DOWN
BUILD FAST →
AGI Not Close + Slow Down
Current AI is overhyped. Focus on real harms today.
Timnit Gebru 🇺🇸
Emily Bender 🇺🇸
Kate Crawford 🇦🇺🇺🇸
Gary Marcus 🇺🇸
Rodney Brooks 🇦🇺🇺🇸
Zeng Yi (曾毅) 🇨🇳
10 people. 5 Policy, 3 Researcher, 2 Philosopher.
AGI Not Close + Build Pragmatically
AI is useful now. Ship products, educate, build infrastructure.
Andrew Ng 🇺🇸
Fei-Fei Li 🇺🇸
Andrej Karpathy 🇨🇦🇺🇸
Reid Hoffman 🇺🇸
Jia Yangqing 🇨🇳🇺🇸
Lisa Su 🇺🇸
Yann LeCun 🇫🇷
Jurgen Schmidhuber 🇩🇪🇨🇭
Xu Li (徐立) 🇨🇳
David Sacks 🇿🇦→🇺🇸
Kai-Fu Lee 🇹🇼🇺🇸
28 people. 12 CEO, 11 Researcher, 4 Policy, 1 Investor.
↓ AGI IS FAR
Media & Narrators (span all quadrants)
Three-Way Comparison: Americas vs. Europe vs. China
AMERICAS 🇺🇸 (47)
13
Close+Slow
12
Close+Build
7
Far+Slow
10
Far+Build
+ 5 media. Build-side: 52%
EUROPE 🇪🇺 (23)
7
Close+Slow
5
Close+Build
1
Far+Slow
6
Far+Build
+ 4 media. Build-side: 58%
CHINA 🇨🇳 (30)
4
Close+Slow
10
Close+Build
2
Far+Slow
12
Far+Build
+ 2 media. Build-side: 79%
The pattern is unmistakable. Each region mirrors its political economy:
Americas: The most polarised, and now split almost down the middle. A build-fast bloc of CEOs and investors faces a vocal ethics/activist camp — and since mid-2026 the frontier labs’ own leaders (Amodei, Altman, Sutskever, Pachocki) sit on the slow-down side.
Europe: No longer the most cautious. Slow-down holds 42% of non-media voices, against 48% in the Americas and 21% in China. A unique regulatory quadrant. Governance as product.
China: The most lopsided. 79% on the build side. Almost no public doomers. Ethics runs through state channels.
Researcher / Scientist
CEO / Builder
Investor / Ecosystem
Journalist / Media
Policy / Ethics / Safety
Philosopher / Theorist
↑ AGI IS CLOSE
AGI is Close + Slow Down
We see what is coming and it terrifies us.
Ajeya Cotra 🇺🇸
Jan Leike 🇩🇪→🇺🇸
Sam Altman 🇺🇸
Dario Amodei 🇺🇸
Ilya Sutskever 🇮🇱🇨🇦
Chris Olah 🇨🇦
Ezra Klein 🇺🇸
Jakub Pachocki 🇵🇱→🇺🇸
13 people. 4 Policy, 3 Researcher, 3 CEO, 2 Philosopher, 1 Journalist.
AGI is Close + Build Fast
This is the defining technology — accelerate, iterate, ship.
12 people. 6 CEO, 3 Investor, 2 Philosopher, 1 Researcher.
← SLOW DOWN
BUILD FAST →
AGI Not Close + Slow Down
Current AI is overhyped. Focus on real harms today.
7 people. 4 Policy, 2 Researcher, 1 Philosopher.
AGI Not Close + Build Pragmatically
AI is useful now. Ship products, educate, build infrastructure.
Andrew Ng 🇺🇸
Fei-Fei Li 🇺🇸
Andrej Karpathy 🇨🇦🇺🇸
Reid Hoffman 🇺🇸
Jia Yangqing 🇨🇳🇺🇸
Lisa Su 🇺🇸
David Sacks 🇿🇦→🇺🇸
Kai-Fu Lee 🇹🇼🇺🇸
10 people. 5 Researcher, 3 CEO, 1 Investor, 1 Policy.
↓ AGI IS FAR
Media & Narrators (span all quadrants)
Americas: The Polarised Superpower
CEOs and investors pack the top-right. The people with the most to gain financially are the most bullish on AGI.
The frontier split. In September 2026 Dario Amodei called for slowing “the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”, Sam Altman agreed, and OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki hoped for “voluntary slowdowns”. All three now sit on the slow-down side, alongside Ilya Sutskever and Chris Olah, who signed July’s “Pacing the Frontier” letter from frontier-lab staff. David Sacks leads the build-fast pushback.
The activist quadrant (bottom-left) is uniquely American. Gebru, Bender, Buolamwini, Nelson — adversarial critics. No equivalent in China.
The media engine is American. All 5 major AI media voices are US-based. The narrative is set in San Francisco.
Bridge figures (Kai-Fu Lee, Jia Yangqing) connect Silicon Valley to Asia.
Researcher / Scientist
CEO / Builder
Investor / Ecosystem
Journalist / Media
Policy / Ethics / Safety
Philosopher / Theorist
↑ AGI IS CLOSE
AGI is Close + Slow Down
We see what is coming and it terrifies us.
7 people. 3 Researcher, 2 Philosopher, 1 CEO, 1 Investor.
AGI is Close + Build Fast
This is the defining technology — accelerate, iterate, ship.
5 people. 3 CEO, 1 Policy, 1 Researcher.
← SLOW DOWN
BUILD FAST →
AGI Not Close + Slow Down
Current AI is overhyped. Focus on real harms today.
1 person. 1 Philosopher.
AGI Not Close + Build Pragmatically
AI is useful now. Ship products, educate, build infrastructure.
Yann LeCun 🇫🇷
Jurgen Schmidhuber 🇩🇪🇨🇭
6 people. 3 Researcher, 2 CEO, 1 Policy.
↓ AGI IS FAR
Media & Narrators (span all quadrants)
Europe: The Regulator-Builder Paradox
Britain builds, Brussels regulates, France does both. Frontier builders (Hassabis, Suleyman) are British DeepMind alumni. The regulator (Virkkunen) is continental — and Brussels, after proposing to simplify and delay parts of the AI Act, began enforcing its rules for general-purpose models in August 2026.
The builder gap is real. Only 5 in build-fast vs. 12 Americas and 10 China.
Open-source as European strategy. Mensch (Mistral) and Delangue (Hugging Face) position open-weight as competitive counter.
The French quadrant: 3 of 6 pragmatic builders are French. France is Europe AI engine.
Researcher / Scientist
CEO / Builder
Investor / Ecosystem
Journalist / Media
Policy / Ethics / Safety
Philosopher / Theorist
↑ AGI IS CLOSE
AGI is Close + Slow Down
We see what is coming and it terrifies us.
4 people. 4 Researcher.
AGI is Close + Build Fast
This is the defining technology — accelerate, iterate, ship.
Jack Ma (马云) 🇨🇳
Lu Qi (陆奇) 🇨🇳
10 people. 10 CEO.
← SLOW DOWN
BUILD FAST →
AGI Not Close + Slow Down
Current AI is overhyped. Focus on real harms today.
2 people. 1 Policy, 1 Researcher.
AGI Not Close + Build Pragmatically
AI is useful now. Ship products, educate, build infrastructure.
Xu Li (徐立) 🇨🇳
12 people. 7 CEO, 3 Researcher, 2 Policy.
↓ AGI IS FAR
Media & Narrators (span all quadrants)
China: The Builder Consensus
The doomer quadrant is small. Andrew Yao, Zhang Yaqin, Zhou Bowen and Zhang Hongjiang are the senior voices for slowing down.
Building is the overwhelming default. 22 of 28 non-media figures are on the build side. But the biggest platform bosses (Robin Li, Pony Ma, Ren Zhengfei) now talk about steady, application-led AI rather than imminent AGI.
Ethics does not equal activism. Chinese ethics voices work within state-adjacent institutions.
No philosopher cluster. No Chinese Yudkowsky or Bostrom. Discourse is pragmatic, not speculative.
Part 2 — The 100
All 100 voices in a single unified list — 47 Americas, 23 Europe, 30 China.
| # | Name | Role / Affiliation | Geography | Tagline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eliezer Yudkowsky 🇺🇸 | MIRI founder | Americas | Shut it down! Doomed.“If an ASI ban is to accomplish anything at all, it has to be effective everywhere.” LessWrong essay (Only Law Can Prevent Extinction), Apr 2026 |
| 2 | Yoshua Bengio 🇨🇦 | LawZero founder, Mila, Turing Award | Americas | Deep learning pioneer turned safety advocate.“The companies should not be allowed to do something that could create catastrophic outcomes…” CTV Question Period via CP24, Sep 2026 |
| 3 | Tristan Harris 🇺🇸 | Center for Humane Technology | Americas | Attention economy to AI x-risk.“It is not in the interest of anyone to do recursive self-improvement before we know how to do it safely.” Democracy Now! interview, Oct 2026 |
| 4 | Leopold Aschenbrenner 🇺🇸 | Situational Awareness LP founder, ex-OpenAI | Americas | Situational Awareness. AGI by 2027.“AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible.” Situational Awareness essay, Jun 2024 |
| 5 | Zvi Mowshowitz 🇺🇸 | Blogger / Rationalist | Americas | Rationalist watchdog. Tracks everything.“We would race to superintelligence without knowing how to align, understand or control it, and all die.” Blog (Don't Worry About the Vase), Sep 2026 |
| 6 | Sam Altman 🇺🇸 | OpenAI CEO | Americas | Scale to AGI. Now: pace the frontier.“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” X post via ITV News, Sep 2026 |
| 7 | Dario Amodei 🇺🇸 | Anthropic CEO | Americas | Pace the frontier.“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” Essay (We Must Pace the Frontier), Sep 2026 |
| 8 | Daniela Amodei 🇺🇸 | Anthropic President | Americas | Scaling safety as business.“…we're now entering an era where the capabilities of the models are developing so rapidly, that the tension is about time.” Stanford GSB View From the Top, 2026 |
| 9 | Ilya Sutskever 🇮🇱🇨🇦 | SSI CEO, ex-OpenAI | Americas | Safe superintelligence first.“Future AI will be extraordinarily powerful compared to anything that exists today, and dealing with this future power will require unprecedented measures… The problem statement is real.” Pacing the Frontier letter (signatory statement), Jul 2026 |
| 10 | Ray Kurzweil 🇺🇸 | Google, futurist | Americas | Singularity is Near! Exponential optimism.“So 2029, both for human-level intelligence and for artificial general intelligence (AGI)…” Guardian/Observer interview, Jun 2024 |
| 11 | Guillaume Verdon 🇨🇦 | e/acc founder | Americas | Thermodynamic imperative!“Even if there was a deal between China and America to pause, secretly they wouldn't pause. There's too much upside…” Manifold podcast #115 transcript, Jul 2026 |
| 12 | Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 | a16z co-founder | Americas | Techno-Optimist Manifesto.“…we're now into the self-improvement breakthrough… this is the culmination of 80 years worth of… work, and this is the time it's becoming real.” Latent Space podcast transcript, Apr 2026 |
| 13 | Mira Murati 🇺🇸 | Thinking Machines Lab CEO, ex-OpenAI CTO | Americas | Shipped GPT-4 and ChatGPT.“At some point we will have super-intelligent machines… the best way to actually have many possible futures—good futures—is to keep humans in the loop…” WIRED interview, May 2026 |
| 14 | Jan Leike 🇩🇪→🇺🇸 | Anthropic, Alignment Science | Americas | Left OpenAI over safety.“Now is a good time to build institutional mechanisms to pace the frontier of AI development.” X post via Don't Worry About the Vase, Sep 2026 |
| 15 | Mark Zuckerberg 🇺🇸 | Meta CEO | Americas | Personal superintelligence. Alignment as edge.“My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind.” X post via Don't Worry About the Vase, Sep 2026 |
| 16 | Jensen Huang 🇺🇸 | NVIDIA CEO | Americas | GPU kingmaker.“We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations.” Dreamforce keynote via The Next Web, Sep 2026 |
| 17 | Satya Nadella 🇺🇸 | Microsoft CEO | Americas | Superintelligence only under human control.“Any pursuit of superintelligence has to be grounded in the core principle that if the AI we build is not helping humanity and under human control, it's not worth pursuing” X post via Fox Business, Sep 2026 |
| 18 | Sundar Pichai 🇺🇸 | Google/Alphabet CEO | Americas | Gemini era.“…there's a set of us living on the bleeding edge, firing agents, seeing what these things can do… We are living that exponential internally.” Cheeky Pint podcast transcript, Apr 2026 |
| 19 | Eric Schmidt 🇺🇸 | Ex-Google CEO; Relativity Space CEO | Americas | National security AI hawk.“The race for intelligence is literally the race of a millennium.” Masters of Scale Summit via Fast Company, Oct 2026 |
| 20 | Chris Olah 🇨🇦 | Anthropic | Americas | Interpretability pioneer. Signed the pacing letter.“There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.” Vatican remarks on Magnifica humanitas (Anthropic), May 2026 |
| 21 | Noam Brown 🇺🇸 | OpenAI | Americas | Reasoning and planning AI researcher.“I do feel confident in saying that things are going faster now than they were even a year ago because of AI progress. I think that acceleration will continue.” Dwarkesh Podcast transcript, Sep 2026 |
| 22 | Timnit Gebru 🇺🇸 | DAIR Institute founder | Americas | Justice and ethics now.“…these chatbots, like Claude or ChatGPT, are designed to make you believe that there's some sort of superhuman brain behind whatever is outputting these texts. And that's hugely dangerous.” Democracy Now! interview transcript, Aug 2026 |
| 23 | Emily Bender 🇺🇸 | UW Linguistics | Americas | Stochastic Parrots.“…I am not invested in the project of “AI”, do not see it as a goal that is worthwhile (nor feasible) to work towards…” Blog (Medium), May 2026 |
| 24 | Kate Crawford 🇦🇺🇺🇸 | USC / Microsoft Research | Americas | Atlas of AI.“AI is neither artificial nor intelligent.” Guardian/Observer interview, Jun 2021 |
| 25 | Joy Buolamwini 🇺🇸 | Algorithmic Justice League | Americas | Unmasking AI.“…we do not need AI systems to have superintelligence for them to have fatal outcomes for individual lives.” Unmasking AI excerpt, MIT Technology Review, Oct 2023 |
| 26 | Gary Marcus 🇺🇸 | NYU, author | Americas | Deep Learning Wall. Hybrid AI needed.“…the current generation of synthetic agents simply cannot be trusted. Until they can be fixed, they should be removed from the market, just like a car with defective brakes.” Marcus on AI (Substack), Oct 2026 |
| 27 | Rodney Brooks 🇦🇺🇺🇸 | MIT, iRobot co-founder | Americas | Embodied skeptic.“The ratio of extraordinary hype events to actual extraordinary technologies is way too high.” Blog (Four Time Scales), Aug 2026 |
| 28 | Arvind Narayanan 🇺🇸 | Princeton | Americas | AI as Normal Technology. Debunking hype.“Our view is that while faster progress is certainly possible on narrow tasks (such as improving efficiency), we don't think it will lead to broad RSI or explosive progress.” AI as Normal Technology newsletter (with Kapoor), Aug 2026 |
| 29 | David Sacks 🇿🇦→🇺🇸 | PCAST co-chair; ex-White House AI czar | Americas | Doomers wrong. Win the AI race.“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic.” X post via Fox News, Sep 2026 |
| 30 | Alondra Nelson 🇺🇸 | Former White House OSTP | Americas | AI policy architect.“Today's AI manifesto uses dramatic language to make up often for a lack of evidence…” Tech Policy Press 'Edge Dialogues' transcript, Oct 2026 |
| 31 | Andrew Ng 🇺🇸 | Stanford / DeepLearning.AI | Americas | AI as utility. Pragmatist.“Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down.” The Batch letter, Sep 2026 |
| 32 | Fei-Fei Li 🇺🇸 | Stanford HAI / World Labs (joining AMD) | Americas | Godmother of AI.“We built the company guided by the foundational belief that language alone isn't sufficient for model development. The universe isn't made up of words; it's made of real things.” Substack essay (World Labs joins AMD), Sep 2026 |
| 33 | Andrej Karpathy 🇨🇦🇺🇸 | Anthropic (pre-training), Eureka Labs founder | Americas | AI favourite teacher. Builds in public.“Right now the agents are like interns. You still have to be in charge of aesthetics, judgment, taste, and oversight.” Blog (Sequoia Ascent 2026 fireside transcript), Apr 2026 |
| 34 | Kai-Fu Lee 🇹🇼🇺🇸 | 01.AI CEO, Sinovation | Americas | East-West bridge. AI Superpowers.“Three years ago, we set out from the AGI ideal; three years on, we are firmly heading toward industrial AI.” 01.AI 3rd-anniversary letter via NBD (每日经济新闻), Jul 2026 (translated) |
| 35 | Reid Hoffman 🇺🇸 | Greylock; LinkedIn and Manas AI co-founder | Americas | Techno-humanist.“…you don't want to be saying, 'Hey, as opposed to being the England of the Industrial Revolution, we're going to be the Poland of the Industrial Revolution.'” Semafor World Economy interview, Apr 2026 |
| 36 | Ajeya Cotra 🇺🇸 | METR, ex-Open Philanthropy | Americas | AI timeline forecasting.“Because future rogue swarms could cover their tracks better… I am not sure that we will get such a clear warning shot before it's too late.” Planned Obsolescence blog, Aug 2026 |
| 37 | Ezra Klein 🇺🇸 | NYT columnist | Americas | Policy wonk. Ban recursive self-improvement.“…slowing down isn't enough. We need to stop the labs from doing something they're already on the cusp of doing: recursive self-improvement…” The Ezra Klein Show (NYT) episode notes, Sep 2026 |
| 38 | Jia Yangqing 🇨🇳🇺🇸 | Intent Lab founder, Caffe co-creator, ex-NVIDIA | Americas | Built the frameworks. Now building infra.“…building an autonomous team we call "fleet" that turns intent into production software.” X post (Intent Lab launch), Jul 2026 |
| 39 | Lisa Su 🇺🇸 | AMD CEO | Americas | AI hardware challenger.“For all the promise of AI … AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information.” MIT Commencement address (MIT News), May 2026 |
| 40 | Jakub Pachocki 🇵🇱→🇺🇸 | OpenAI chief scientist | Americas | Hopes for voluntary slowdowns.“I expect and hope for voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.” Essay ('An Alien Mind', OpenAI), Sep 2026 |
| 41 | Elon Musk 🇿🇦→🇺🇸 | Tesla and SpaceX CEO; xAI founder | Americas | AI smarter than all humanity by 2030.“We might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year… by 2030 or 2031… AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.” WEF Davos via New York Post, Jan 2026 |
| 42 | Daniel Kokotajlo 🇺🇸 | AI Futures Project director, ex-OpenAI | Americas | AI 2027 author. Wants government to intervene.“They are already starting to work on training AIs to do the whole research process, not just the coding. It’s unclear when they will succeed but my team and I think it could happen any year now.” US Senate testimony (AI Futures blog), Sep 2026 |
| 43 | Kevin Roose 🇺🇸 | Machine Gods (NPR) co-host; ex-Hard Fork | Americas | Anxious mainstream voice.“I take them quite seriously… I don't think this is a marketing stunt.” Amanpour & Company (PBS) interview transcript, Oct 2026 |
| 44 | Casey Newton 🇺🇸 | Platformer; Machine Gods (NPR) co-host | Americas | Pragmatic tech reporter.“…true superintelligence is a dragon. And while I remain hopeful that it can be tamed, I believe the researchers who say we are nowhere close to being sure of it…” Platformer, Sep 2026 |
| 45 | Lex Fridman 🇺🇸 | MIT, podcaster | Americas | Optimistic host. Long-form.“…as AI commodifies intelligence more and more, we'll realize… that intelligence… is just a cherry on top… The main thing is other humans…” Lex Fridman Podcast #503 transcript, Oct 2026 |
| 46 | Dwarkesh Patel 🇺🇸 | Podcaster / Interviewer | Americas | Deep-dive interviews.“I don't think this is the final warning shot we'll get. But it's probably the last one that I'll personally be able to understand.” Blog ('The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations'), Aug 2026 |
| 47 | Kara Swisher 🇺🇸 | Pivot podcast | Americas | Tech journalism sharpest voice.“Yes. Everything is regulated. Planes are regulated.” CNN Inside Politics transcript, Jan 2026 |
| 48 | Geoffrey Hinton 🇬🇧 | Nobel laureate, Turing Award, ex-Google | Europe | Regretful Godfather. Left Google to warn.“The unique problem with AI is that if it goes wrong, if it takes over, you don’t get a second chance.” Guardian interview, Oct 2026 |
| 49 | Nick Bostrom 🇸🇪 | Macrostrategy Research Initiative (ex-Oxford FHI) | Europe | Superintelligence. Original x-risk thinker.“I don't think we are in a position any longer to rule out even extremely short timelines.” Faster, Please! interview transcript, Jun 2024 |
| 50 | Max Tegmark 🇸🇪 | MIT / FLI founder | Europe | Life 3.0. Pause and regulate.“We want to keep humans in charge here.” Fox Business interview, Sep 2026 |
| 51 | Connor Leahy 🇬🇧 | ControlAI US director, Conjecture co-founder | Europe | Ban superintelligence. Lobbies lawmakers.“…it is very plausible that we will see superintelligence within the next one, two, three years.” Carnegie 'The World Unpacked' podcast, Oct 2026 |
| 52 | Stuart Russell 🇬🇧 | UC Berkeley | Europe | Human Compatible.“For governments to allow private entities to essentially play Russian roulette with every human being on earth is, in my view, a total dereliction of duty.” AFP interview at AI Impact Summit Delhi, Feb 2026 |
| 53 | Shane Legg 🇳🇿🇬🇧 | Google DeepMind co-founder & Chief AGI Scientist | Europe | Long-time 2028 AGI forecaster.“…the rapid pace of innovation suggests we’re now approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI)… we expect those gaps to be closed soon.” DeepMind Institute launch essay (co-author), Sep 2026 |
| 54 | Matt Clifford 🇬🇧 | Anthropic, MD International Affairs; ex-PM AI adviser | Europe | UK AI Safety Summit co-chair.“…the emergence of powerful AI is the most important transition we will have to navigate in my lifetime.” Cosmos Institute Q&A, May 2026 |
| 55 | Demis Hassabis 🇬🇧 | Google DeepMind CEO | Europe | Nobel laureate. Cautious architect.“It's soon… I'm updating nearer and nearer.” WSJ Magazine interview via Tom's Guide, Oct 2026 |
| 56 | Mustafa Suleyman 🇬🇧 | Microsoft AI CEO | Europe | The Coming Wave. Containment problem.“…capabilities improving at an eye watering pace ahead of pretty much every forecast. The time to act has clearly arrived.” Blog ('The Humanist AI Code of Conduct'), Sep 2026 |
| 57 | Emad Mostaque 🇬🇧 | Intelligent Internet founder, ex-Stability AI CEO | Europe | Generative AI democratiser.“…a couple of years from now, almost all cognitive work would be economically irrelevant.” Doom Debates podcast transcript, Apr 2026 |
| 58 | Shakir Mohamed 🇬🇧 | Google DeepMind, Director of Research | Europe | AI for social good.“…build where others are not going to build for us.” Wits University profile interview, Oct 2026 |
| 59 | Henna Virkkunen 🇫🇮 | EU Commission EVP, Tech Sovereignty | Europe | Runs the AI Act. Now enforcing it.“The Commission has been loud and clear: AI must remain under human direction, oversight and control and we stand ready to take all necessary steps…” Speech, International AI Summit Dublin, Oct 2026 |
| 60 | Jaan Tallinn 🇪🇪 | FLI & CSER co-founder; Skype founding engineer | Europe | No self-sustaining AI, please.“…they’re probably years, not decades… a positive future would be something where we would slow down a lot…” Manifold podcast transcript, May 2026 |
| 61 | Luciano Floridi 🇮🇹 | Yale / Bologna | Europe | AI ethics philosopher.“Let's leave superhuman machines that escape control to Hollywood, because these systems act without understanding or wanting anything… A race the participants cannot stop is the very reason rules exist.” Milano Finanza interview, Oct 2026 (translated) |
| 62 | Yann LeCun 🇫🇷 | AMI Labs executive chair, ex-Meta, Turing Award | Europe | No AGI via LLMs. Need new architectures.“…saying, ‘AI can kill us all’ is incredibly destructive for everybody…” Fortune interview, Oct 2026 |
| 63 | Francois Chollet 🇫🇷 | Ndea co-founder, ARC Prize (ex-Google) | Europe | ARC keeper. Now sees AGI before 2030.“[AGI by ~2030?] Sooner, given progress is happening faster than I expected.” X post, Sep 2026 |
| 64 | Arthur Mensch 🇫🇷 | Mistral AI CEO | Europe | Europe frontier lab. Open-weight.“If we don't move fast enough… we'll end up in a situation where we have no choice left.” National Assembly hearing via Business Insider, May 2026 (translated) |
| 65 | Clement Delangue 🇫🇷 | Hugging Face CEO | Europe | Open-source AI for everyone.“I think we're in an LLM bubble, and I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year…” Axios BFD event via TechCrunch, Nov 2025 |
| 66 | Jurgen Schmidhuber 🇩🇪🇨🇭 | IDSIA / KAUST | Europe | LSTM co-inventor.“AI will beat all fields of science by 2028? Hardly. … at some point we'll have superhuman physical AI. But it will take longer than 2 years.” X post, Sep 2026 |
| 67 | Azeem Azhar 🇬🇧 | Exponential View | Europe | Newsletter and podcast.“Companies are only just now starting to get the results that might get them excited.” Microsoft Signal magazine interview, Sep 2026 |
| 68 | Hannah Fry 🇬🇧 | BBC / Cambridge | Europe | Mathematician and AI communicator.“…people whose lives have genuinely been ruined by the decision of an algorithm…” Open University / BBC 'AI Confidential' release, Feb 2026 |
| 69 | Benedict Evans 🇬🇧 | Tech analyst / newsletter | Europe | AI market analysis.“…with every previous platform shift, the stuff that actually mattered was the stuff that wasn't even possible before…” Blog, Sep 2026 |
| 70 | Simon Willison 🇬🇧 | Developer / blogger | Europe | AI tools and open-source.“With hindsight, my LLM predictions were pretty unambitious. I said ‘it will become undeniable that LLMs write good code’—I think we’re there now.” Blog, Sep 2026 |
| 71 | Andrew Yao (姚期智) 🇨🇳 | Tsinghua, Turing Award | China | AI safety advocate in China.“Since it is a partner, it may make mistakes; we need to build mechanisms to filter out these errors.” WAIC 2026 keynote via The Paper, Jul 2026 (translated) |
| 72 | Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋) 🇨🇳 | DeepSeek CEO | China | 2025 breakout. Open-source disruptor.“Large language models may be the necessary path to AGI, and already show early features of AGI.” Waves (暗涌) interview, May 2023 (原文: 「语言大模型可能是通往AGI的必经之路，并且初步具备了AGI的特征」) (translated) |
| 73 | Robin Li (李彦宏) 🇨🇳 | Baidu CEO | China | ERNIE Bot. Search-to-AI pivot.“AGI is still quite a few years away… I think [it] is more than 10 years away.” VivaTech Paris, via CNBC, May 2024 |
| 74 | Yang Zhilin (杨植麟) 🇨🇳 | Moonshot AI (Kimi) | China | Young frontier builder.“In this year, next year and the coming years, the way AI research and development is done will undergo major changes; more and more research will be led by AI.” Zhongguancun Forum speech via NBD, Mar 2026 (translated) |
| 75 | Zhang Peng (张鹏) 🇨🇳 | Zhipu AI CEO | China | Tsinghua-backed ChatGLM.“The company judges that the road to achieving AGI is still very long.” 科创板日报 (CLS) interview, Jan 2026 (原文: 「公司判断实现AGI的路程还很长」) (translated) |
| 76 | Li Dahai (李大海) 🇨🇳 | ModelBest (面壁智能) CEO | China | Efficient on-device models (MiniCPM).“Cloud compute is larger, so AGI will arrive a bit faster there; on-device usually lags the cloud by one to two years.” 21st Century Business Herald interview, Jul 2026 (translated) |
| 77 | Wang Xiaochuan (王小川) 🇨🇳 | Baichuan AI CEO / ex-Sogou | China | Pivoted Baichuan to medical AI.“Language is the central axis of intelligence; the breakthrough in language AI marks the arrival of the strong-AI era.” Baichuan all-staff letter via TMTPost, Apr 2025 (translated) |
| 78 | Pony Ma (马化腾) 🇨🇳 | Tencent CEO | China | WeChat AI integration.“A year ago we thought we'd boarded the boat, then found it was leaking… we still hope the boat can go a bit faster.” Tencent AGM via The Paper, May 2026 (translated) |
| 79 | Zhang Yiming (张一鸣) 🇨🇳 | ByteDance founder | China | AI-first recommendation then LLMs.“ByteDance cannot miss AGI, just like any other Chinese internet company cannot miss AGI.” Internal speech via EqualOcean, Apr 2023 |
| 80 | Jack Ma (马云) 🇨🇳 | Alibaba founder | China | Qwen models. Cloud AI.“…this change will come very fast; we must change quickly, helping children learn, starting now, to coexist with AI and adapt to this huge change.” Yungu School remarks via Jiemian/Sina Tech, Mar 2026 (translated) |
| 81 | Ren Zhengfei (任正非) 🇨🇳 | Huawei founder | China | AI chips and infra under sanctions.“AI is about application, not invention… inventing AI makes an IT company; applying AI makes a nation strong.” Xinhua, Dec 2025 (translated) |
| 82 | Zhou Bowen (周伯文) 🇨🇳 | Shanghai AI Lab | China | State-backed frontier research.“Our improvement in AI safety capability still lags far behind performance… this imbalance makes AI's development crippled.” WAIC 2024 plenary speech via QbitAI, Jul 2024 (translated) |
| 83 | Yao Shunyu (姚顺雨) 🇨🇳 | Tencent chief AI scientist, ex-OpenAI | China | AI's second half. Tencent's young AI chief.“Whether we can actually lead a new paradigm — that may be the only problem China's AI industry has to solve today.” AGI-Next summit via Huxiu, Jan 2026 (translated) |
| 84 | Fu Sheng (傅盛) 🇨🇳 | OrionStar robotics | China | Active AI commentator.“We may never actually meet an 'all-purpose' technology; all technologies must ultimately be combined with specific scenarios.” Jiemian interview, World Robot Conference, Aug 2024 (translated) |
| 85 | Li Zhifei (李志飞) 🇨🇳 | Mobvoi founder | China | AI voice and LLMs.“But recently I've rediscovered my faith in AI, and even come to believe in AGI, in superintelligence. It's an unimaginable shift.” Mobvoi launch speech via GeekPark, Jun 2025 (translated) |
| 86 | Shen Xiangyang (沈向洋) 🇨🇳 | HKUST Council Chairman, ex-Microsoft EVP | China | Ex-Microsoft AI and Research chief.“The more compute, the more intelligence grows; nobody has touched the ceiling yet.” Young Scientists 50² Forum keynote via BAAI Hub, Sep 2024 (translated) |
| 87 | Zeng Yi (曾毅) 🇨🇳 | Chinese Academy of Sciences | China | AI ethics and governance.“Better to slow the pace slightly and build a solid foundation of safety than to rush for quick gains and lead human society into irreversible peril.” People's Daily dialogue via China News, Jan 2026 (translated) |
| 88 | Xu Li (徐立) 🇨🇳 | SenseTime Chairman & CEO | China | Navigating AI governance.“AI's development is boundless; we see it moving toward AGI and ASI, full of infinite possibilities. But the key to using AI well is building reasonable boundaries for its use.” WAIC 2026 keynote, SenseTime transcript, Jul 2026 (translated) |
| 89 | Zheng Nanning (郑南宁) 🇨🇳 | Xi'an Jiaotong Univ. | China | CAS Academician. Perception pioneer. |
| 90 | Hao Jingfang (郝景芳) 🇨🇳 | Hugo Award SciFi writer | China | Sci-fi author co-writing with AI.“Outside literature, I don't think there's any possibility: if you don't use AI, there will be no room left for you to survive.” China Newsweek interview via Guancha, Jun 2026 (translated) |
| 91 | Lu Qi (陆奇) 🇨🇳 | MiraclePlus (YC China) | China | Ex-Baidu COO. Ecosystem builder.“This inflection point… will develop very, very fast, faster than we imagine.” MiraclePlus talk via The Paper, May 2023 (translated) |
| 92 | He Kaiming (何恺明) 🇨🇳 | MIT / Google DeepMind | China | ResNet inventor.“I expect in 10 or more years, everyone will be using some kind of AI in some way for their research.” MIT News profile, Feb 2025 |
| 93 | Zhu Songchun (朱松纯) 🇨🇳 | BIGAI director | China | Cognitive AI.“The topic of 'AGI bringing a human existential crisis' was widely hyped… this is a media-driven narrative.” Zhongguancun Forum speech via The Paper, Apr 2025 (translated) |
| 94 | Eddie Wu (吴泳铭) 🇨🇳 | Alibaba Group CEO | China | Alibaba's road to superintelligence. Qwen and cloud.“Over the past year AI developed beyond our expectations… A year ago, we judged AGI is only the starting point; AI will continue toward self-iterating superintelligence, ASI.” Apsara (Yunqi) Conference keynote via QbitAI, Sep 2026 (translated) |
| 95 | Wang Jian (王坚) 🇨🇳 | Alibaba Cloud founder; Zhejiang Lab director | China | City Brain. CAS Academician.“The AI race is a marathon; we are definitely still in the early stages.” Bloomberg interview via 36Kr, Jul 2025 (translated) |
| 96 | Zhang Hongjiang (张宏江) 🇨🇳 | Zhiyuan Research Institute | China | Ex-MSRA head.“National interests must yield in the face of risks to humanity's future survival.” Yicai Global interview, Sep 2026 |
| 97 | Luo Zhenyu (罗振宇) 🇨🇳 | Dedao platform | China | Knowledge and AI evangelist.“The essence of AI may not be pushing people out or replacing them, but lifting people up.” New Year's Eve speech via China Daily, Jan 2026 (translated) |
| 98 | Wu Xiaobo (吴晓波) 🇨🇳 | Author / commentator | China | Business and tech commentary.“We are in AI's biggest bubble period, and the AI bubble has not yet reached its peak.” Year-end speech via Yicai, Dec 2025 (translated) |
| 99 | Yan Junjie (闫俊杰) 🇨🇳 | MiniMax founder & CEO | China | MiniMax founder. AGI-first builder.“The next breakthrough is whether AI can be AI's own AI researcher… some in the industry think disruptive development will come in 2027.” Global Times interview via The Paper, Jan 2026 (translated) |
| 100 | Zhang Yaqin (张亚勤) 🇨🇳 | Tsinghua AIR founding dean, ex-Baidu president | China | Don't race to superintelligence.“Racing toward superintelligence without a solid foundation of controllability, reliability and safety is dangerous, irresponsible and unnecessary.” Bandao Morning Post interview via Sina Finance, Oct 2026 (translated) |
Part 3 — The Original 24
The people mapped in the original PDF, on two axes: Acceleration vs Deceleration and True Believers vs Skeptics.
| # | Name | Original Group | Tagline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Eliezer Yudkowsky | Safety / Doomer | Shut it down! Doomed. |
| 2 | Max Tegmark | Safety / Doomer | Pause and Regulate. |
| 3 | Geoffrey Hinton | Safety / Doomer | Regretful Godfather. |
| 4 | Zvi Mowshowitz | Safety / Doomer | Rationalist Watchdog. |
| 5 | Ilya Sutskever | Safety / Doomer | Safe Superintelligence First. |
| 6 | Ezra Klein | Safety / Doomer | Policy Wonk, Nuclear Analogy. |
| 7 | Timnit Gebru | Ethicists and Critics | Justice and Ethics Now. |
| 8 | Emily Bender | Ethicists and Critics | Stochastic Parrots. |
| 9 | Gary Marcus | Ethicists and Critics | Deep Learning Wall. |
| 10 | Rodney Brooks | Skeptic | Embodied Skeptic. |
| 11 | Kevin Roose | Skeptic | Anxious Mainstream Voice. |
| 12 | Yann LeCun | Pragmatic Scientist | No AGI via LLM. |
| 13 | Francois Chollet | Pragmatic Scientist | Reasoning Needed, Not Scaling. |
| 14 | Dario Amodei | Builders and Futurists | Responsible Race to Top. |
| 15 | Ray Kurzweil | Builders and Futurists | Singularity is Near! |
| 16 | Dwarkesh Patel | Builders and Futurists | Deep Diver. |
| 17 | Demis Hassabis | Builders and Futurists | Cautious Architect. |
| 18 | Sam Altman | Builders and Futurists | Scale to AGI. |
| 19 | Marc Andreessen | Builders and Futurists | Techno-Optimist Manifesto. |
| 20 | Lex Fridman | Builders and Futurists | Optimistic Host. |
| 21 | Guillaume Verdon | e/acc | Thermodynamic Imperative! |
| 22 | Casey Newton | Media | Pragmatic Reporter. |
| 23 | Mark Zuckerberg | Builders and Futurists | Open Source Champion. |
| 24 | Andrew Ng | Pragmatic Scientist | Pragmatist, AI as Utility. |
This is a curated map of the 100 most influential voices in artificial intelligence as of 2026, spanning the United States, Europe and China - plotted by two questions: is AGI close, and should we build fast?
Last updated: November 2026
See also: 200 AI Tools · AI Reality Map · Test your AI proficiency · Executive AI Days