Top 100 AI Influencers in the English-Speaking Region
- Key Insight: XHunt has released the English-Speaking Region AI Influence Top 100 list based on its proprietary metric, "AI KOL Followers." This ranking aims to filter out information noise and identify the most influential core figures who hold true consensus within the industry. The list is benchmarked against data from May 15, 2026, and is updated in real-time.
- Key Elements:
- Ranking: Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) tops the list with 4,221 AI KOL Followers, surpassing Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
- Coverage: The Top 100 primarily consists of tech executives and leading scientists (e.g., @karpathy, @sama, @jeffdean), considered the source of the AI storm.
- Evaluation Criteria: The list uses "AI KOL Followers" as a hard metric, only counting accounts where AI-related tweets account for ≥ 40% of their total output, thus eliminating interference from general followers.
- Core Value: By tracking the genuine attention of the core circle, this ranking helps users filter out 90% of the noise and get straight to the source of industry change.
- Upcoming: XHunt will release the "Chinese-Speaking Region Top 100 AI Influencers List" tomorrow, focusing on practitioners in the fields of application and monetization.
Original Author: XHunt Operations Team
Original Editor: Denise, Biteye Core Contributor
In the current era of information explosion, mere follower counts can no longer measure a person's true influence. To identify genuine industry consensus, XHunt exclusively launched a brand new AI Influence List.
Using the hardcore metric of "AI KOL Followers (Core Circle Followers)," the list updates in real-time with influence, helping you filter out 90% of the noise and get straight to the source of change.
*To view the complete list of the Top 100 AI Social Influencers,
please visit the XHunt website and switch to the AI category in the navigation bar: https://kol.xhunt.ai/
👇 Below is the complete list of Top 100 Influential Accounts in the English-speaking region compiled this time (arranged based on the snapshot from May 15, 2026).
This is the epicenter of the AI storm. The Top 100 seats are mostly occupied by executives of tech companies and leading scientists. There's @karpathy, who excels at explaining the principles of large language models in detail; @sama, who dictates the pace of the industry; and @jeffdean, who drives Google's AI roadmap. In their information streams, a tweet sent late at night by a researcher could evolve into consensus for the entire industry half a year later.
🏆 Complete List of Top 100 Influential Accounts in the English-speaking Region
1. Andrej Karpathy @karpathy
AI KOL Followers: 4221 | Followers: 2,455,804
Founder of Eureka Labs, former founding member of OpenAI, former Head of AI at Tesla. The man who breaks down LLM training, AI Coding, and Agents into digestible pieces. A top-tier evangelist that makes engineers want to open their IDE in the middle of the night.
2. Sam Altman @sama
AI KOL Followers: 3841 | Followers: 4,822,283
CEO of OpenAI, absolute master of GPT and Codex. A cosmic-level figure whose single update can have half the AI circle scrambling to analyze it.
3. Greg Brockman @gdb
AI KOL Followers: 3202 | Followers: 975,960
President and Co-founder of OpenAI. The man who presents products, research, developer ecosystems, and infrastructure progress like an official construction log, delivered daily.
4. Jeff Dean @jeffdean
AI KOL Followers: 3133 | Followers: 438,941
Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind/Google Research, Head of Gemini. The hardest-core navigator of Google's AI technology roadmap, showing where it came from and where it's going.
5. Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut
AI KOL Followers: 3083 | Followers: 674,642
Co-founder of SSI, former Chief Scientist at OpenAI. One of the most watched researchers of the LLM era. A deep thinking deity whose casual remarks can be interpreted intensively by the entire circle.
6. Yann LeCun @ylecun
AI KOL Followers: 2992 | Followers: 1,159,418
Co-founder and Executive Chairman of AMI Labs, former Chief AI Scientist at Meta. One of the "three giants" of deep learning, Turing Award winner. A perennial debater on AI direction, open source, world models, and the nature of intelligence.
7. Demis Hassabis @demishassabis
AI KOL Followers: 2931 | Followers: 917,939
CEO of Google DeepMind. A super-promoter of AlphaFold, scientific intelligence, and the AGI narrative. Nobel laureate. The man who moved AI from the chat window towards genuine scientific discovery.
8. Andrew Ng @andrewyng
AI KOL Followers: 2710 | Followers: 1,526,147
Professor at Stanford University. Formerly led Google Brain and Baidu's AI team. A long-time evangelist for AI education and application deployment. Master of turning high-level technology into courses, methodologies, and roadmaps that entrepreneurs can directly follow.
9. Elon Musk @elonmusk
AI KOL Followers: 2559 | Followers: 239,786,568
The super-amplifier behind xAI, Tesla, and SpaceX. Wants it all: models, robots, compute, and platforms. A cosmic-level player whose single tweet can sometimes be more explosive than a product launch.
10. François Chollet @fchollet
AI KOL Followers: 2392 | Followers: 663,386
Creator of the Keras deep learning framework, former Chief AI Researcher at Google. Author of "Deep Learning with Python." Known for a strong pragmatic perspective and profound insights into the nature of neural networks.
11. Mira Murati @miramurati
AI KOL Followers: 2378 | Followers: 528,503
Founder of Thinking Machines, former CTO of OpenAI. A practical filter that pulls cutting-edge models, AI products, and next-gen intelligent systems back from mysticism into products and code.
12. Jim Fan @drjimfan
AI KOL Followers: 2377 | Followers: 406,748
Key figure in NVIDIA's robotics direction. A hardcore project commentator who pulls Agents, simulation, embodied intelligence, and Physical AGI out of the screen for you to see.
13. Geoffrey Hinton @geoffreyhinton
AI KOL Followers: 2319 | Followers: 590,509
One of the founders of deep learning. Nobel laureate in Physics. A clear-headed elder on the long-term impacts of AI risks, neural networks, and machine intelligence. A stabilizing force in practical safety discussions.
14. Fei-Fei Li @drfeifei
AI KOL Followers: 2314 | Followers: 662,302
Professor at Stanford, CEO of World Labs. A long-time promoter of visual intelligence and human-centered AI. A true world understander who works and points the way simultaneously.
15. Logan Kilpatrick @officiallogank
AI KOL Followers: 2307 | Followers: 306,018
Key disseminator of the Google AI Studio/Gemini API ecosystem. A practical partner that pulls developer tools back from magic into products, code, and revenue.
16. AK @_akhaliq
AI KOL Followers: 2300 | Followers: 492,866
AI papers radar in the Hugging Face/Gradio ecosystem. Frequently shares models, papers, and open-source projects. Widely recognized as the most influential "top-tier information hub" with the strongest reach in the AI developer community.
17. Patrick Collison @patrickc
AI KOL Followers: 2293 | Followers: 852,722
CEO of Stripe, Co-founder of Arc Institute. A player with a macro perspective, putting AI into the context of scientific organizations, infrastructure, and entrepreneurship.
18. hardmaru @hardmaru
AI KOL Followers: 2242 | Followers: 405,741
CEO of Sakana AI, former head of the Google Brain Tokyo team. An inspiration-from-nature proponent of agents, evolutionary algorithms, and swarm intelligence. A hardcore research interpreter with high information density.
19. Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp
AI KOL Followers: 2208 | Followers: 228,237
Host of the top-tier tech podcast, Dwarkesh Podcast. Known for highly insightful, long-form interviews with core AI scientists and hardcore academics, regarded as one of the best interlocutors in the global tech scene.
20. Noam Brown @polynoamial
AI KOL Followers: 2194 | Followers: 106,294
Top AI researcher at OpenAI. Led the development of milestone AIs that defeated humans in poker and diplomacy (Pluribus, Cicero). A leading figure in the fields of game theory and LLM inference compute.
21. Lilian Weng @lilianweng
AI KOL Followers: 2191 | Followers: 218,811
Co-founder of Thinking Machines, former Head of Research at OpenAI. Her blog posts and notes have long been a go-to resource for developers and researchers, serving as a systematic refresher.
22. John Schulman @johnschulman2
AI KOL Followers: 2172 | Followers: 74,482
Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Thinking Machines Lab, Co-founder of OpenAI. As the first author of the PPO algorithm and a core figure behind ChatGPT's development, he is a titan in the fields of reinforcement learning and AI alignment.
23. clem @clementdelangue
AI KOL Followers: 2167 | Followers: 292,471
CEO of Hugging Face. A long-term, ambitious driver of open-source models and the developer community. The infrastructure builder who cultivated the open AI ecosystem.
24. Jack Clark @jackclarksf
AI KOL Followers: 2165 | Followers: 129,669
Key figure in Policy and Communications at Anthropic, Author of Import AI. A calm signpost pointing out AI safety, policy, and industry dynamics.
25. Soumith Chintala @soumithchintala
AI KOL Followers: 2126 | Followers: 300,733
Co-creator of PyTorch, former core leader at Meta AI, CTO of Thinking Machines Lab. A practical leader pulling underlying tools, robotics, and AI engineering culture back into products, code, and revenue.
26. Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang
AI KOL Followers: 2115 | Followers: 454,990
Founder of Scale AI (and Head of Meta AI according to some contexts, but primarily Scale AI). The doer of the dirty work for data, labeling, and training infrastructure.
27. Jeremy Howard @jeremyphoward
AI KOL Followers: 2068 | Followers: 293,506
Co-founder of fast.ai/Answer.AI, former founding President of Kaggle. The master of deconstructing tutorials to teach AI to ordinary developers. An Alpha player making tools truly user-friendly.
28. Garry Tan @garrytan
AI KOL Followers: 2062 | Followers: 804,098
CEO of top accelerator Y Combinator. Views AI from the perspective of entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. An "idea hunter" turning demos into companies.
29. Thomas Wolf @thom_wolf
AI KOL Followers: 2000 | Followers: 117,486
Co-founder of Hugging Face. A long-term ambitious player for open-source models, the developer ecosystem, and AI moonshots.
30. Chris Olah @ch402
AI KOL Followers: 1992 | Followers: 143,978
Interpretability researcher at Anthropic. An explorer of the model's interior, reverse-engineering the black box of neural networks for you to see.
31. Oriol Vinyals @oriolvinyalsml
AI KOL Followers: 1990 | Followers: 201,743
VP of Research at Google DeepMind, one of the heads of Gemini. An on-site commentator for DeepMind's model roadmap, including the AlphaStar, AlphaFold, and AlphaCode series.
32. Jan Leike @janleike
AI KOL Followers: 1961 | Followers: 129,811
Head of Alignment Science team at Anthropic, former Head of Alignment team at OpenAI. A long-time thinker considering the more serious side of AI safety.
33. David @davidsholz
AI KOL Followers: 1953 | Followers: 99,340
Founder and CEO of Midjourney. The driver of aesthetic evolution, turning generative images into tools for mass creative scenarios.
34. Miles Brundage @miles_brundage
AI KOL Followers: 1933 | Followers: 70,891
Founder of AVERI, former Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness at OpenAI. An AI policy and governance researcher. A calm observer of institutional design, working on the braking system for AI amidst the technological race.
35. John Carmack @id_aa_carmack
AI KOL Followers: 1926 | Followers: 1,608,322
Founder and CEO of Keen Technologies, founder of Id Software, former CTO of Oculus. An old-school engineer now working on AGI. A hard-charging future master pulling AI back from magic into products, code, and revenue.
36. Aravind Srinivas @aravsrinivas
AI KOL Followers: 1907 | Followers: 509,159
CEO of Perplexity. A practical rewritter who uses AI search and answer engines to redefine the search entry point.
37. Jason Wei @_jasonwei
AI KOL Followers: 1867 | Followers: 107,565
AI Researcher at Meta (background includes OpenAI/Google). A hunter of model capabilities who clearly explains LLM reasoning, emergent abilities, and scaling limits.
38. Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai
AI KOL Followers: 1851 | Followers: 6,768,992
CEO of Google/Alphabet. The helmsman steering the giant, implementing Gemini, AI search, and full-stack AI integration across Google.
39. Sara Hooker @sarahookr
AI KOL Followers: 1847 | Followers: 61,061
Researcher (background includes Cohere/Google Brain/DeepMind). An explorer of another path for open models and continuously evolving intelligent systems.
40. swyx @swyx
AI KOL Followers: 1827 | Followers: 157,451
Co-host of the Latent Space newsletter and podcast, core curator of the AI Engineer Summit, and long-time promoter of the AI Engineer community. A "party atmosphere detector" who connects developers, entrepreneurs, and the tool ecosystem, sniffing out what builders are actually talking about.
41. sarah guo @saranormous
AI KOL Followers: 1818 | Followers: 141,702
Founder of Conviction, investing exclusively in AI-native companies. An Alpha investment hunter seeing which new workflows capital and entrepreneurs are betting on.
42. Robert Scoble @scobleizer
AI KOL Followers: 1815 | Followers: 580,237
Silicon Valley tech observer. Former executive at Microsoft, Rackspace, and Fast Company. Author of eight books on future technology. A long-time tracker of the next wave of cool things in AI, robotics, spatial computing, and new hardware (comes with a filter).
43. Lex Fridman @lexfridman
AI KOL Followers: 1796 | Followers: 4,818,744
Host of a long-form interview podcast. Research Scientist at MIT. A thinker connecting AI, robotics, science, and humanity into a single network of technology and life.
44. Eric Jang @ericjang11
AI KOL Followers: 1778 | Followers: 126,619
Former Senior Researcher at Google DeepMind Robotics. A robotics and machine learning researcher. An engineering thought machine outputting AI applications from papers to robotic hands and feet.
45. Ethan Mollick @emollick
AI KOL Followers: 1727 | Followers: 353,712
New York Times bestselling author. Professor at Wharton. A "boss share button" explaining AI, innovation, and entrepreneurship in terms of "how regular
