The Top 10 AI Visionaries Under 30 - Purpose, Sustainability and Security

What does the AI landscape look like when the lens is focused on the top 10 AI visionaries under 30? Expanding onto these success stories of innovations, breakthroughs and AI missions reveal where AI is headed, how deeply it integrates into daily life, and the industries it transforms. They showcase how data shapes society's infrastructure, while AI serves as the foundation of the evolving tech world.

These AI visionaries—each under the age of 30—are revolutionizing industries ranging from autonomous vehicles and military technology to healthcare and ethical AI governance. From Alexandr Wang building the backbone of AI data infrastructure with Scale AI to Aidan Gomez pioneering the transformer models behind today’s most powerful language models, these young innovators are precursors to the future of AI.They are making AI safer, tackling climate challenges, revolutionizing video creation, strengthening security, and advancing healthcare in cancer research.

1. Alexandr Wang (27) – Founder & CEO, Scale AI -

is leading the AI data infrastructure landscape as the founder of Scale AI, with a brief attendance at MIT, he dropped out to attend the Y Combinator accelerator and co founded Scale AI in 2016 with Lucy Guo. Alexandr Wang is one of the youngest self made billionaires in the AI space. He was quick to plummet his company's growth as a critical supplier of high‑quality annotated data to power major AI models. Scale AI’s rapid rise—from servicing autonomous vehicle companies to securing high‑profile contracts (including with the U.S. Department of Defense and tech giants like OpenAI and Tesla)—has driven its valuation into the multi‑billion-dollar range. In May 2024, Scale’s valuation reached $14 billion and by October 2024, Scale's revenue nearly quadrupled, reaching $400 million in the first half of the year, compared to the same period in 2023. Scale presents itself as a key partner for the U.S. military in its strategic competition with China, aiming to enhance data analysis, improve autonomous vehicles, and develop AI-driven chatbots to assist commanders in combat decisions.

2. Austin Russell (29) – Founder & CEO, Luminar Technologies -

Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies as a teenager, at 17. Russell’s journey—from a high‑school inventor and Thiel Fellowship recipient to leading a company that went public via a SPAC merger—has made him the world’s youngest self‑made billionaire in his field. After working on diverse photonics and optoelectronics projects, he designed a new type of LiDAR to ensure safe autonomous operation for cars, trucks, and robotaxis. His company’s partnerships with Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, and NVIDIA have fueled its $5 billion valuation. A Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, Austin was also named to MIT Tech Review’s Innovators Under 35 and ranked 36th on the 2022 Philanthropy 50 for his significant charitable contributions.

3. Aidan Gomez (28) – Co-founder, Cohere

Aidan Gomez is one of the co authors of the most transformative research papers in AI on transformers “ Attention is all you need” which eventually became the backbone of modern generative AI like ChatGPT.  Aidan launched Cohere in 2019 with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst to democratize enterprise access to LLMs. He positions Cohere as an OpenAI alternative for businesses, prioritizing data privacy with solutions deployable in private clouds to avoid sensitive data leaks. The company is now valued at $5.5 billion and raised $450 million in funding from investors including Nvidia, Oracle etc. He is an advocate for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to reduce AI hallucinations and values data over compute.

4. Demi Guo (26) – Co-founder, Pika

Demi Guo, a Stanford PhD dropout, co‑founded Pika to address a major gap in the generative video editing space. In 2022, Guo and her Stanford Ph.D. classmates attempted to create an AI-generated film for Runway’s AI Film Festival but struggled with clunky tools like Runway and Adobe Photoshop. They launched Pika, a text-to-video generator, initially deployed via Discord, and the company has raised over $130 million to date.As Pika 1.0 was launched as customizable AI video editing app, it witnessed unprecedented growth. Demi Guo believes in “Creativity isn’t about replacing humans—it’s about amplifying their vision” and ensures one-third of her team has artistic backgrounds. Currently, Pika faces competition with Sora and is committed to enhance Pika’s realism.

5. Dan Hendrycks (29) – Executive Director, Center for AI Safety -

With a PhD from UC Berkeley, he has made significant contributions—such as co‑developing the GELU (Gaussian Error Linear Units) activation function used in state‑of‑the‑art models—and now directs the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). His contributions range from technical research (developing benchmarks and frameworks) to field‑building initiatives (including educational programs and public policy advocacy). He created MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding)), a benchmark testing AI across 57 subjects and developed circuit breakers and tamper-resistant safeguards to prevent misuse of LLMs. He also co-sponsored a landmark bill that mandates AI developers to assess catastrophic risks and serves as a safety advisor for xAI ( Elon Musk).

6. Kiara Nirghin (24) – Co-founder, Chima

After studying Computer Science at Stanford University, she co‑founded Chima—a tech startup that leverages generative AI to drive sustainable solutions across industries. She gained global recognition as a teenage at 16, when she won the Google Science Fair for inventing a biodegradable superabsorbent polymer made from orange and avocado peels. Also a Thiel Fellow, Nirghin champions gender equity in STEM by collaborating with organizations such as UN Women, L'Oréal UNESCO for Women in Science, and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She also serves as a Global Ambassador for Room To Read.

7. Serena Ge (20) – Co-founder, Datacurve AI -

During a 2023 machine learning internship at Cohere (co-founded by Aidan Gomez), Ge identified a critical lack of high-quality, curated code data for training large language models (LLMs). She found an innovative solution to this problem by gamifying coding challengers for software engineers that would generate high quality data. She launched Datacurve AI in 2024 with Charley Lee. They partnered with Y Combinator securing a pre seed funding of $2.5M. The platform has 5,000+ monthly active contributors.  She goes by, “AI won’t replace engineers—it’ll empower them. But first, we need data that reflects human expertise”.

8. Anirudh Joshi (29) – Co-founder, Valar Labs -

Joshi is at the forefront of leveraging AI to revolutionize cancer treatment decisions. During his time at Stanford, Joshi worked as a Graduate Research Assistant, focusing on AI applications in healthcare. In 2021, Joshi co-founded Valar Labs with Damir Vrabac and Viswesh Krishna, aiming to reduce uncertainty in cancer treatment decisions. The company has raised $26 Million. They launched Vesta, he first AI-based diagnostic test to predict treatment response in bladder cancer and the test has demonstrated significant accuracy in prediction. Joshi emphasizes the importance of interpretability in Valar Labs’ diagnostics.

9. Ethan Perez (28) – Research Team Lead, Anthropic -

Ethan Perez leads the adversarial robustness team at Anthropic where he aims to reduce existential risks from AI systems. work focuses on improving the safety, truthfulness, and adversarial robustness of AI models. He helped develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a widely used approach for augmenting large language models with other sources of information. His research involves designing experiments and evaluation metrics that help refine AI outputs and protect against harmful behavior—a critical function as the field moves toward increasingly autonomous systems.

10. George Morgan (27) – Founder, Symbolica -

As the founder and CEO of Symbolica, Morgan is at the forefront of developing structured AI models that prioritize efficiency, transparency, and environmental sustainability grounded in mathematical category theory, which enables machines to reason more like humans while requiring significantly less data and energy. Symbolica has raised $33 Million in funding.   He compares modern AI to "alchemy," lacking the scientific rigor needed for sustainable progress.

As AI evolves and weaves itself into the fabric of human society, they are not only charting the growth but ensuring responsible and sustainable expansion of AI.