Pulse News

**20 Rising Stars at OpenAI and Its Rivals**

By Stephanie Palazzolo, Kalley Huang, Rocket Drew, Aaron Holmes, and Jon Victor

Mar 10, 2025, 11:43am PDT

Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other artificial intelligence leaders dominate headlines as they raise unprecedented funds. But talent, not capital, has separated the winners and losers in generative AI. We've identified 20 up-and-coming researchers who have been at the forefront of their firms' successes but whose names typically aren't found in news articles. We chose them based on conversations with employees and managers who work with or compete against them.

**The Takeaway**

- Fourteen of our picks are from outside the U.S.

- Such researchers can earn millions of dollars a year in compensation.

- Three of our picks changed companies in recent weeks.

These people are among the scores of little-known researchers who work for Altman, Musk, and other executives, and who deserve much of the credit for the conversational AI models that power the most important consumer products of the last decade. Their work has also created more than $1 trillion worth of stock value across several companies over the past two years.

Our list includes researchers from 10 companies or universities, in addition to OpenAI. The ChatGPT creator has the most people on our list—five. Other firms represented include Google, Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Scale AI. Fourteen came from outside the U.S., including China, France, and Israel, highlighting how important immigration has been to the success of the leading American AI firms. Two of the researchers are women.

These people are experts in areas like math, statistics, computing techniques, and creating experiments that turned large language models into useful tools for everything from summarization and image analysis to chatbots and agents that handle multistep tasks. Some work on preventing the use of these models as weapons. One of our picks helped invent a key technique for improving AI performance: retrieval-augmented generation. Another co-created a reinforcement learning algorithm that OpenAI uses to reward desired behaviors in its AI models.

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**'Without Its People'**

When dozens of OpenAI leaders tweeted the phrase "OpenAI is nothing without its people" during an attempted boardroom coup against Altman in late 2023, they weren't exaggerating. One startup co-founded by former OpenAI executives, Safe Superintelligence, already has a $30 billion valuation. Another startup filled with former OpenAI leaders, Thinking Machines Lab, could raise capital at a valuation north of $8 billion based on the résumés of its small staff. Two researchers from Thinking Machines Lab are on our list.

Other OpenAI employees have decamped to big rivals including Anthropic and Google. Recruiting battles have been fierce among all those firms. Last year, OpenAI offered annual cash and stock packages worth $5 million to $10 million a year to some AI researchers at Google, for instance. And since our team started work on this list in recent weeks, three of the researchers we picked moved to new homes. One went to Anthropic from Google; two went to Thinking Machines Lab from OpenAI and Mistral AI, respectively.

Erin Woo also contributed to this project.

Stephanie Palazzolo is a reporter at The Information covering artificial intelligence. She previously worked at Business Insider covering AI and at Morgan Stanley as an investment banker. Based in New York, she can be reached at stephanie@theinformation.com or on Twitter at @steph_palazzolo.

Kalley Huang is a reporter covering Meta, social media, and artificial intelligence for The Information. Contact her via a non-work device at kalley@theinformation.com, @kalley.57 on Signal, and @KalleyHuang on Telegram.

Rocket Drew is a reporter at The Information covering AI. He can be reached at rocket@theinformation.com, on Signal at (530) 400-4184, or on Twitter @rocketalignment.

Aaron Holmes is a reporter covering tech with a focus on enterprise and cybersecurity. You can reach him at aaron@theinformation.com or on Signal at 706-347-1880.

Jon Victor is a reporter at The Information covering enterprise software and AI. He can be reached at jon.victor@theinformation.com or on Twitter at @jon_victor_.