Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he contributes to global policy development and continued standardization and spread of the Internet. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

From 1994 to 2005, Cerf served as the senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Source: Internet Hall of Fame

OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”.

As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.

Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the chief executive officer of OpenAI since 2019 (he was briefly dismissed and reinstated in November 2023).  He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy.

Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019. Altman’s net worth was estimated at $1.1 billion in January 2025.