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Who are the top AI influencers? A direct answer
Karpathy, Willison, Mollick, Ng and Altman lead the list, with researchers, educators and skeptics matched to what you want to learn.
Who are the top AI influencers? The short answer: Andrej Karpathy, Simon Willison, Ethan Mollick, Andrew Ng and Sam Altman, with Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus for the skeptical side. Each of them appears on TechTwitter IO's free who-to-follow page, which lists real accounts on X by field, and the rest of this answer explains which one fits which reader.
The direct answer, by what you want
| You want | Follow | Why, in one line |
|---|---|---|
| To understand how models work | Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) | Long, clear posts from an OpenAI founding member |
| Hands-on tests of new models | Simon Willison (@simonw) | Writes up each new model, often the day it ships |
| AI at work, not in labs | Ethan Mollick (@emollick) | Wharton professor who tests AI on real tasks |
| A first course in machine learning | Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg) | Runs DeepLearning.AI and co-founded Coursera |
| Launch news at the source | Sam Altman (@sama) | OpenAI's CEO, where launches often surface first |
| The other side of the debate | Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) | AI's loudest skeptic |
People inside the labs
Some of the most useful AI accounts belong to people building the models. Alex Albert (@alexalbert__) is a researcher at Anthropic who posts about Claude and how people use it. Boris Cherny (@bcherny) created Claude Code and shares how his team works with it. Logan Kilpatrick (@OfficialLoganK) works on Gemini and Google AI Studio and announces most Gemini releases. Lilian Weng (@lilianweng), a researcher at OpenAI, writes the Lil'Log blog.
Explainers and educators
Sebastian Raschka (@rasbt) wrote Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) and turns new papers into plain language. Jeremy Howard (@jeremyphoward) co-founded fast.ai and teaches deep learning for free. Chip Huyen (@chipro) wrote AI Engineering. If you want the papers themselves, AK (@_akhaliq) posts each day's new research.
Debate and big-picture voices
Yann LeCun (@ylecun), a Turing Award winner, left his role as Meta's chief AI scientist to start AMI Labs and argues that large language models alone will not reach human-level AI. François Chollet (@fchollet) made Keras and the ARC-AGI benchmark. Following one or two of these keeps your feed from becoming a stream of hype.
Is "top" the same as "most followed"?
No. Follower counts reward fame, and a CEO will always outdraw a researcher. For learning, the top AI influencers are the ones who explain their work, test claims in public and admit what does not work. That is why the table above mixes executives with teachers and testers.
The quick way to keep up
Following a dozen AI accounts can still eat an hour a day. TechTwitter IO is the free shortcut for the lighter side: a satirical daily paper about tech Twitter, with launches, feuds and outages played for laughs and puzzles such as Connections and Who Tweeted It? It is parody, not news. Build your AI follow list from its who-to-follow page, and get straight AI headlines from a news source.
If you prefer reading to scrolling, a few newsletters from people on this list, such as Ethan Mollick's One Useful Thing or Nathan Lambert's Interconnects, may serve you better than the feed itself.