Move over Mark Zuckerberg, AI boys are the rising stars of Silicon Valley

This is not a story about Mark Zuckerberg. That this is not a story about Mark Zuckerberg is telling in itself. The world of Silicon Valley is changing. A new technology — artificial intelligence — is taking the centre stage. And it is giving rise to a new set of superstars, some of whom are already billionaires and all of whom are driving the talk points of tech in the world of tech.

The old guard is still around. Mark Zuckerberg remains in the play, with his missionary zeal and a large money bag. Similarly, we have Google’s Sergey Brin still around. Elon Musk continues to be on top of the world. The likes of Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel continue to be the magnets around whom tech empires shift and people move. But the conversations in Silicon Valley are now largely driven by the new rising stars and not the old guard. There are new visionaries who are crafting the tech future. This is a story about them.

Alexandr out to conquer the world

Because we started talking about Mark Zuckerberg, let’s first talk about Alexandr Wang. Currently employed by Zuckerberg, Wang is one of these AI superstars who are destined to shape the future of tech, not unlike how Zuckerberg once did 20 years ago.

Although the verdict on him is still out, there is no denying the stratospheric rise of Wang. He started Scale AI when he was just 19, somewhat similar to how Zuckerberg did with Facebook. In fact, just like Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to pursue his tech odyssey, Wang dropped out of MIT.

With AI becoming a buzzword, Scale grew rapidly. So rapidly that by 2021, Wang had become a billionaire — the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 24. In 2025, Zuckerberg spent $14.3 billion to sort of — but not in a classic sense — acquire Scale AI. It was a move aimed not at buying the company but instead getting Wang and his team so that they could help Facebook build its AI platform.

With Facebook’s vast resources open to him, Wang may end-up reshaping the entire tech world, somewhat like Facebook once did. Zuckerberg has put so much faith in him, that he made Wang his chief AI scientist within months of getting him onboard. Essentially, he will be responsible for almost every new major AI announcement you’ll see from Meta now, be it Large Language Model (LLM) updates like the upcoming – but speculative – Llama Avocado to its own version of AGI, called Superintelligence.

Dario, Demis and Sam

With AI in play, the definition of a “tech visionary” in recent years has shifted from the social media or search and ad-tech moguls of the 2010s toward those leading this new AGI frontier.

Wang is not alone. New AI boys are the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, has increasingly become prophetic in talking about the future, somewhat like how Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates used to be in their heydays. With Claude AI surging and becoming a talk of dinner tables (it is a tool that a few days ago sparked SaaS stocks selloff), Dario has arguably become the most important man in Silicon Valley.

Along with Dario, there are Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. They are increasingly being viewed as the architects of the next era.

Today, Anthropic is a big reason why it feels AI is moving at breakneck speed but regardless of all the advancements, Amodei who is often cited as the principled visionary among peers, remains firmly focused on safe “constitutional AI.” Every once in a while, he is known to sound an alarm over job loss (he believes AI will wipe out 50 percent of all white-collar jobs by 2030) or the fact that selling high-end Nvidia chips to China is akin to giving nukes to North Korea. He is never short of words or ideas and has said publicly at Davos, during the World Economic Forum, that it was okay to delay AGI if it meant humans could use that time to learn to control it, a sentiment he shares with Demis Hassabis.

Hassabis, already a Nobel Prize winner, is widely regarded as the most credible visionary in the race to AGI. He describes the current scheme of things as “the most intense in 30 years,” and clearly, that is where he shines. Time and time again, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has clarified that they had all the AI firepower in the world – presumably before OpenAI took the world by storm with ChatGPT – but did not unleash it because maybe it was ahead of time and the world was not ready. As and when they did decide to fire, Hassabis was the man behind the gun and bullet.

But there is more to him than what meets the eye. Unlike leaders who focus on AI's ability to summarise emails – which Gemini does quite brilliantly these days – Hassabis is obsessed with closing the loop, creating AI systems that can hypothesise, experiment, and discover things humans haven't even thought to ask yet. His vision is purely mission-driven: use science and math to build general-purpose learning machines that solve real-world problems like climate change and diseases.

Then there is Sam Altman. Although his public image has taken a bit of a beating in the last one year, the ups and downs are part of life in the fast lane. And Sam is driving fast. And no, we are not talking about Koenigsegg Regera, which he is reportedly fond of.

In the last 10 years, Altman has made ChatGPT a household name. Without him there would not have been an AI revolution the world seems to be primed for. Currently, Sam Altman sits in the middle of the AI world, as he tries to pull together both the business and science part of artificial intelligence. He is raising funds, he is trying to attract talent to OpenAI, he is setting up AI vision for the future, but he is also trying to keep OpenAI chugging along by figuring out its revenue in the face of competition from giants like Google and Meta. And in between he is fighting a bitter court fight, as well as occasional skirmishes on social media, with Elon Musk on the nature of OpenAI. In other words, Sam Altman is everywhere in the world of tech, in ways even Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs were not in their prime.

Karp gathers (military) forces

While Dario and Sam are the public face of AI, Alex Karp is the man behind the curtains. Real-world AI is where Alex Karp comes into the picture. His company Palantir, which he co-founded with Peter Thiel, is probably one of the most mysterious companies in the world. But so important and influential this company has grown that Karp can’t help but be out in public, trying to shape the conversation.

The internet is full of videos and articles trying to explain what Palantir does but there’s always been an air of mystery – hence, curiosity – about its business even more so because it is known to work with government agencies, including those in Israel, and the US military. What we do know is that it works with data and helps its clients make sense of this data. With data becoming more and more essential in the AI era, the role of Palantir cannot be overstated.

Taking cues, Karp, who has himself been largely secretive in the past, has started to be more visible, setting talk points at various forums. At Davos, he argued that the spark in tech has moved from digital toys to systems that can bear the load of a nation. His pitch is that AI will be the backbone of the real economy in the future and AI capability will decide which nations remain superpowers and which fall behind.

While Zuckerberg’s generation built the digital playgrounds where we spent the last two decades, the likes of Wang, Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, and Karp are building the very cognitive engine of the future. They aren't just managing our data, they are engineering an intelligence that may eventually surpass our own. Whether this transition leads to a utopia of scientific discovery or a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, we can’t say for sure but what we can say is this: the hoodie has been traded for a lab coat, and the social network has been superseded by the neural network.