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🀫 Gratitude · the X & xAI community

The people who make X & xAI, X & xAI.

Gratitude to the founders, researchers, and engineers building X and xAI, and the Grok models. Celebrated from public work, with a cited source on every card.

All championsThe Apple 1024

19 of 1024 Β· celebrated from public information, cited on every card.

EM

Elon Musk

Founder and CEO of xAI and owner of X, who set the mission and open-sourced the recommendation algorithm

xAI / X

foundervisiongrokopen-source
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for founding xAI in 2023 and pushing to open-source the X recommendation algorithm so anyone can read, question, and improve the code that shapes the public conversation.

xAI (Wikipedia) β†—x.ai β†—
IB

Igor Babuschkin

xAI co-founder and chief engineer who built the Colossus supercluster and led early Grok engineering

xAI

engineeringinfrastructuregrokdeepmind-alumnus
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for bringing hard-won lessons from AlphaStar and WaveNet to xAI and standing up the training infrastructure behind Grok in record time.

Personal site β†—CNBC profile β†—

Jimmy Ba

xAI co-founder and University of Toronto professor, co-inventor of the Adam optimizer

xAI

optimizationdeep-learningresearchadam
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for the Adam optimizer and Layer Normalization, tools that quietly train nearly every modern neural network, and for bringing that rigor to Grok's research.

Homepage β†—U Toronto news β†—

Zihang Dai

xAI co-founder and researcher behind Transformer-XL and XLNet

xAI

transformerslong-contextlanguage-modelsresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for Transformer-XL and XLNet, foundational ideas for long-context language modeling that helped make today's assistants coherent over long conversations.

Homepage β†—Transformer-XL paper β†—
KK

Kyle Kosic

xAI co-founder and infrastructure lead who helped build the Colossus data center

xAI

infrastructurecomputesystemsscale
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for the unglamorous, essential work of standing up the compute backbone that let Grok train at all.

Wikipedia β†—
MK

Manuel Kroiss

xAI co-founder who led the pretraining team, formerly of DeepMind (AlphaStar, AlphaCode)

xAI

pretrainingreinforcement-learningengineeringsystems
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for carrying deep engineering craft from AlphaStar and AlphaCode into the pretraining pipeline that gives Grok its base capabilities.

Crunchbase profile β†—
TP

Toby Pohlen

xAI co-founder and research engineer, formerly six years at Google DeepMind

xAI

research-engineeringevaluationml-systemscomputer-vision
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for building the evaluation tools and research-to-production plumbing that let good ideas actually ship inside Grok.

Google Scholar β†—
CS

Christian Szegedy

xAI co-founder whose earlier work gave the field Inception, Batch Normalization, and adversarial examples

xAI

deep-learningcomputer-visionformal-reasoningresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for Inception, Batch Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples, ideas that reshaped how the whole field trains and stress-tests models.

Semantic Scholar β†—

Yuhuai Wu

xAI co-founder who led the reasoning effort behind Grok; contributor to Minerva and AlphaGeometry

xAI

reasoningmathematicstheorem-provingresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for a career spent teaching machines to reason, from Minerva and AlphaGeometry to leading the math and reasoning work that makes Grok a genuine problem solver.

Homepage β†—
GY

Greg Yang

xAI co-founder and mathematician behind the Tensor Programs framework and muP hyperparameter transfer

xAI

mathematicsscaling-theorytensor-programsresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for Tensor Programs and muP, a mathematical theory of wide neural networks that lets teams tune small models and transfer the settings to enormous ones.

Personal page β†—
GZ

Guodong Zhang

xAI co-founder helping lead core model development, with research in optimization and alignment

xAI

optimizationalignmentlarge-modelsresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for the careful study of how enormous models train and stay well-behaved, work that goes straight into making Grok both capable and stable.

Personal page β†—
MN

Michael Nicolls

President of xAI (2026) and VP of Starlink Engineering at SpaceX

xAI

leadershipengineeringsatellite-systemsinfrastructure
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for bringing the discipline of building and operating Starlink at planetary scale to the job of running xAI's engineering.

Office of Space Commerce bio β†—
NB

Nikita Bier

Head of Product at X, known for building viral social apps tbh and Gas

X

productgrowthsocialconsumer
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for bringing a builder's instinct for what makes people connect to X's product, and for doing it in the open where users can push back.

Wikipedia β†—X profile β†—
DH

Dan Hendrycks

Safety advisor to xAI and director of the Center for AI Safety; creator of the MMLU benchmark and GELU

xAI / Center for AI Safety

ai-safetyevaluationrobustnessmmlu
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for MMLU and GELU and for advising xAI on safety at a symbolic one-dollar salary, keeping the incentive squarely on doing the right thing.

Personal site β†—Wikipedia β†—
LY

Linda Yaccarino

CEO of X from 2023 to 2025, who led the platform's advertising and business turnaround

X

leadershipadvertisingbusinessoperations
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for taking on one of the hardest jobs in tech and working to rebuild advertiser trust and the business that keeps X free for its users.

Wikipedia β†—
KC

Keith Coleman

VP of Product at X and the driving force behind Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch)

X

productcommunity-notestrusttransparency
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for championing Community Notes, a rare social-media system that adds context people across the spectrum can agree on, built and open-sourced in public.

The Making of Community Notes β†—X profile β†—
JB

Jay Baxter

Staff ML engineer at X and the original ML lead for Community Notes' bridging-based ranking

X

machine-learningcommunity-notesbridging-algorithmsrecsys
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for the bridging-based ranking behind Community Notes, an algorithm that rewards agreement across viewpoints instead of majority pile-ons, and for publishing it openly.

Personal site β†—
EZ

Eric Zelikman

Former xAI member of technical staff who scaled reasoning for Grok; creator of STaR and Quiet-STaR

xAI

reasoningreinforcement-learningself-improvementresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for STaR and Quiet-STaR, ideas about models learning to reason from their own rationales, and for scaling that into the reasoning behind Grok 3 and Grok 4.

Personal site β†—

Szymon Tworkowski

xAI researcher scaling LLMs; lead author of LongLLaMA and the Focused Transformer method

xAI

long-contextscalingreasoningresearch
Why we celebrate them

Thank you for the Focused Transformer and LongLLaMA, early answers to the long-context problem, and for the reasoning and long-context work that shaped Grok 3 and Grok 4.

Personal site β†—
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What this is, and isn't.

A celebration of the X & xAI community, assembled entirely from public information as an act of credit and gratitude. It is not a claim of endorsement, affiliation, sponsorship, or partnership by anyone featured. Every person is real and publicly documented, with a cited source of truth on their card; we never invent a person or a claim, and we prize accuracy over speed. Anyone featured can ask to be updated or removed at any time. Names and marks belong to their owners.