Jan 01, 2026 18:00:00

'AI Mafia' shows the connections and roots of influential figures in the AI field at a glance

AI technology is booming like never before, and the world seems to be experiencing a proliferation of AI services. However, when we unravel the achievements of the influential figures in the AI field, we can get a glimpse of their connections and roots. 'AI Mafia' is a website that diagrams these relationships.

AI Mafia - Interactive Canvas

https://dipakwani.com/ai-mafia/

At the top of the site is the statement, 'Tracing the roots of today's AI leaders back to Google.' The relationship diagram shows people's names, icons, and three groups. The largest group, '

Attention Is All You Need, ' is located on the right side of the screen.

'Attention Is All You Need' is a paper about the machine learning model '

Transformer ,' published in 2017 by eight computer scientists who were working at Google at the time. Their careers are as follows, and all of them have since left Google.

Lukasz Kaiser: Google → OpenAI
Ashish Vaswani : Google → Adept AI → Essential AI
Niki Parmar : Google → Adept AI → Essential AI → Anthropic
Aidan Gomez: Google → Cohere
Llion Jones : Google → Sakana AI
Illia Polosukhin : Google → NEAR Protocol
Jakob Uszkoreit : Google → Inceptive
Noam Shazeer : Google → character.ai

The second group is ' DNN Tech '.

Listed here are the names of three people from the University of Toronto who co-developed

the convolutional neural network AlexNet .

Geoffrey Hinton: University of Toronto
Ilya Sutskever : University of Toronto → OpenAI → Safe Superintelligence
Alex Krizhevsky (misspelled as Kathsavsky on the website): University of Toronto

Geoffrey Hinton is a leading expert known as the 'father of deep learning' and the 'godfather of AI,' and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024. Ilya Satskever is also a co-founder of OpenAI and is said to have made a significant contribution to the development of ChatGPT.

The third group is DeepMind , which rose to fame by developing the Go program AlphaGo . The diagram shows the names of the three people who founded DeepMind in 2010.

The careers of the three are as follows:

Demis Hassabis : University College London → DeepMind
Mustafa Suleyman : Oxford University → DeepMind → Inflection AI → Microsoft
Shane Legge : University College London → DeepMind

DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet, known as Google DeepMind.

Also on the left side was Elon Musk 's name. Following the line, Musk had heard about AI from Suleiman, invested in DeepMind, and was involved in founding OpenAI with Y Combinator's Sam Altman and others.

The data is based on a segment called '

Google: The AI Company: The Complete History and Strategy ' on the business podcast 'ACQUIRED.' The lack of information on companies like Meta and Apple may be due to the lack of connections with Google.

Microsoft is supposed to have close ties with OpenAI, but the 'AI Mafia' doesn't seem to have many connections with others.