People in AI.

Piotr Dąbkowski

Piotr Dąbkowski is co-founder and CTO of ElevenLabs, the AI voice technology company. Born in Poland in 1994, he holds a bachelor's in engineering from the University of Oxford and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. He previously worked as a software engineer at Opera, Google, and Tessian before co-founding ElevenLabs in 2022 with his high school friend Mati Staniszewski. He leads the company's work on text-to-speech, voice cloning, and multilingual speech synthesis. In February 2026 ElevenLabs raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation.

Reynold Xin is co-founder and Chief Architect of Databricks, where he has led core technical direction since the company's 2013 founding. He was the lead developer of Spark's GraphX, Project Tungsten, and Structured Streaming components, co-designed DataFrames, and served as release manager for Spark 2.0. He started his work on Apache Spark as a PhD student at UC Berkeley's AMPLab under Michael J. Franklin and Ion Stoica. He is a leading authority on distributed systems for big data.

Sam Altman

San Francisco, US

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Former president of Y Combinator. Leading one of the most-followed companies in AI.

Sam McCandlish is co-founder and Chief Architect of Anthropic, focusing on pre-training and large-scale model training following an October 2025 leadership restructuring. He previously served as Chief Science Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Anthropic since its 2021 founding. Before Anthropic he was a Research Lead at OpenAI from 2018 to 2020, where he contributed to foundational work on neural network scaling laws that predicted capabilities of models like GPT-3. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford and undergraduate degrees in math and physics from Brandeis.

Sarah Friar is Chief Financial Officer of OpenAI, a role she has held since June 2024 as the company's first CFO. She previously served as CEO of Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024, taking the company public via SPAC in 2021, and was CFO of Block (formerly Square) from 2012 to 2018. Earlier she was SVP of finance and strategy at Salesforce and held senior roles at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. She sits on the boards of Walmart and ConsenSys, co-chairs Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, and runs the Ladies Who Launch non-profit.