The Radical AI Founders Masterclass is an exclusive annual program designed to equip AI researchers and technical entrepreneurs with the inspiration and practical knowledge to build AI products and businesses. Over four weeks, we host virtual, free sessions with world-leading AI pioneers, successful entrepreneurs, and leaders from top AI companies, complemented by tactical sessions covering AI product development, business integration strategies, and other essential areas that AI founders need to master.
Our 2025 Masterclass kicks off in early October and will feature prominent AI leaders like May Habib, CEO of Writer, and Joelle Pineau, AI pioneer, alongside tactical sessions focused on building an AI business from the ground-up.
By joining the flagship program, you’ll become a member of our AI Founders Masterclass community, with 2000+ AI researchers and entrepreneurs from the world’s top industry and university labs. Our members are associated with leading global research organizations including Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, University of Toronto, and premier AI institutes like Vector, Mila, and Allen Institute for AI. The community offers year-round events, meetups, and access to dedicated Slack channels for ongoing collaboration and idea exchange.
May Habib is the CEO and co-founder of Writer, the leading generative AI platform for enterprises. Under May's leadership, Writer has emerged as a transformative force in enterprise AI, serving major organizations including Accenture, Vanguard, and other Fortune 500 companies. A Harvard graduate with high honors in Economics, May began her career in natural language processing and machine learning, working on early applications of AI-driven language generation before the current generative AI boom. She previously held leadership roles in AI research and product development, building expertise that positioned her to recognize the enterprise potential of large language models. As a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, she has become a prominent voice on the responsible deployment of AI in corporate environments and the future of AI-assisted work.
Joelle Pineau is the Chief AI Officer at Cohere, and one of the most influential voices in AI research today. A Professor at McGill University and core member of Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, she has been at the forefront of AI innovation for years. During her nearly eight years as Meta's VP of AI Research, she led the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team and helped guide the early development of Meta's open Llama AI models alongside Yann LeCun. She also played a key role in developing PyTorch, the framework that has become foundational to modern AI development. Now as Chief AI Officer at Cohere, she continues to shape the future of AI technology with a focus on practical enterprise applications. Her perspective is invaluable for technical founders as she bridges cutting-edge research with practical applications at massive scale, offering insights on translating academic breakthroughs into real-world products.
Jonathan leads the research team at Databricks following the company’s $1.3B acquisition of MosaicML where he was a founding team member and Chief Scientist. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT in 2023 and has extensive experience across top tech companies and research institutions, including roles at Google Brain, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and as an expert advisor to the OECD on AI policy. His work spans foundational AI research to building practical systems that scale to enterprise deployment. Having built MosaicML from founding team to a $1.3B acquisition, Jonathan offers firsthand experience in scaling AI startups, leading research teams, and bridging the gap between academic research and commercial success.
Jim is a leading voice in AI agents and robotics research. As a Director & Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA, he co-leads development of the Isaac GR00T platform for humanoid robotics and heads the GEAR (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) team. Jim earned his Ph.D. from Stanford Vision Lab, advised by Fei-Fei Li. His groundbreaking work includes Voyager, the first AI agent to master Minecraft through lifelong learning; MineDojo, which won the NeurIPS 2022 Outstanding Paper Award; and Eureka, a project teaching robot hands complex dexterous tasks like pen spinning. Jim also has the unique distinction of being OpenAI's very first intern back in 2016, where he co-developed World of Bits. Jim’s perspective is invaluable for technical founders building AI agents and robotics applications, offering insights on scaling embodied AI from research breakthroughs to real-world deployments.
Artificial intelligence pioneer. Turing award winner.
Computer vision pioneer. Scientific partner at Radical Ventures; Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
CEO and founder of Insitro; Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Coursera. In 2023 Daphne was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Co-Founder of Anyscale, Co-Founder of Databricks and Professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and Co-Director of AMPLab.
Founder of stealth startup. Former product lead at Cruise; Co-Founder of Voyage.
Co-Founder of Covariant. Professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Natural Language Processing pioneer. CEO and Founder of You.com.
Autonomous driving pioneer. Founder of Waabi.
