(clockwise from top left) Sanja Fidler, Raquel Urtasun, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang and Aidan Gomez (Fidler by Nina Haikara; Urtasun by Nick Iwanyshyn; Sutskever by Kimberly White/Getty Images for SSI; Frosst, Zhang and Gomez courtesy of Cohere)
7 U of T community members named in Observer A.I. Power Index
Published: October 8, 2025
Seven members of the University of Toronto community have been named in the Observer A.I. Power Index 2025.
The annual list recognizes 100 leaders who are shaping the future of AI through their influence and expertise in technology, policy, development and beyond.
Three U of T faculty members appeared in the ranking: Geoffrey Hinton, University Professor emeritus of computer science and recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, placed 20th; Raquel Urtasun, professor of computer science and co-founder of autonomous transportation startup Waabi, was ranked 44th; and Sanja Fidler, associate professor of computer science and VP of AI research at NVIDIA, ranked 62nd.
Hinton's former graduate student Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and CEO of Safe SuperIntelligence Inc., co-founder of OpenAI and recipient of a U of T honorary degree, was ranked 12th.
U of T alumni and former Hinton proteges Nick Frosst and Aidan Gomez, along with former U of T computer science student Ivan Zhang – co-founders of AI language processing startup Cohere – were ranked 31st-33rd.
