She Builds the Future

The Person

Daniela Amodei was born in San Francisco in 1987 to an Italian-American father and a Jewish-American mother. She is the younger sister of Dario Amodei (the CEO of Anthropic). She studied English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, arriving on a classical flute scholarship. Daniela is married to Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of Open Philanthropy, and together they have a son named Galileo.

"I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are very good at STEM. But the things that make us uniquely human: I think that will always be really, really important."

Daniela Amodei, Fortune interview, 2026

How She Got Here

After graduating, Daniela managed congressional communications in Washington D.C., before joining Stripe as an early employee in 2013. In 2018 she joined OpenAI and rose to become Vice President of Safety and Policy. Growing increasingly concerned about the direction of AI development, she and her brother Dario left OpenAI in 2021 to co-found Anthropic, a company built on the principle that safety and commercial success can co-exist. As President, she runs the operational engine of Anthropic. As of 2026, Anthropic is valued at $380 billion with $30 billion ARR.

How She Empowers Women

Daniela's very existence at the helm of the world's most valuable AI safety company sends a message that cannot be overstated: you do not need a STEM PhD to lead one of the most consequential technology companies in history. She has spoken frequently about the value of humanities education in the age of AI, actively championing communicators and empathetic thinkers as the workforce of the future. In a field where only about 10% of top AI CEO roles are held by women, she is a living counter-narrative.

The Person

Born Ermira Murati on December 16, 1988, in Vlorë, Albania, during the final years of the country's totalitarian regime, Mira's early years were shaped by political upheaval. At 16, she won a scholarship to attend Pearson College on Vancouver Island, Canada. She earned a B.A. in Mathematics from Colby College and a B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering.

"AI should be something people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn."

Mira Murati, on launching Thinking Machines Lab

How She Got Here

Mira started at Goldman Sachs, then Tesla, before joining OpenAI in 2018 as VP of Applied AI. She rose to become CTO in 2022, overseeing the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, Codex, and Sora. In November 2023, she briefly became interim CEO. She left OpenAI in September 2024 and launched Thinking Machines Lab, raising a record-breaking $2 billion seed round (the largest in history) at a $12 billion valuation, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and AMD.

How She Empowers Women

Mira's story, from a girl in a collapsing socialist state to the CEO of one of the most-watched AI startups on earth, is one of the most striking immigrant success stories in modern tech. Her mission at Thinking Machines is specifically to build AI that is more customisable, accessible, and understandable to more people, a vision that by design includes those currently underserved by AI development.

The Person

Dr. Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, China. At 16 she and her mother emigrated to New Jersey, where she worked weekends in the family's dry-cleaning shop while learning English from scratch. She earned a physics degree from Princeton with high honours, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Caltech. Named Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2025.

"I say that AI is a very powerful technology and I'm a mother. The most important way we should empower our kids is as humans: with agency, dignity, and timeless values."

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Bloomberg Weekend Interview, 2025

How She Got Here

Fei-Fei Li's foundational contribution to AI is ImageNet, a massive visual database of over 14 million labelled images, which became the cornerstone of the deep learning revolution. She served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, directed Stanford's AI Lab, and co-founded Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute. In 2024 she co-founded World Labs, focused on spatial intelligence: teaching AI to understand the 3D physical world the way humans do. World Labs raised $1 billion by 2026.

How She Empowers Women

In 2017, Fei-Fei Li co-founded AI4ALL, a non-profit dedicated to increasing diversity in AI by running education programmes for underrepresented young people, specifically girls and students of colour. Her memoir, The Worlds I See, published in 2023, has inspired countless young women to pursue careers in tech. She actively mentors the next generation of AI researchers through Stanford and speaks globally about why diversity in AI is not just ethical but scientifically necessary.

The Person

Dr. Joy Buolamwini was born in Edmonton, Canada in 1989, grew up in Mississippi, and taught herself to code at age nine after being inspired by MIT's robot Kismet. She studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech, earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and completed both a Master's and PhD at MIT's Media Lab. Called the "conscience of the AI revolution."

"If you have a face, you have a place in this conversation."

Dr. Joy Buolamwini, Algorithmic Justice League

How She Got Here

While building a facial recognition art project at MIT, Joy discovered the software could not detect her dark-skinned face, but recognised a white mask immediately. Her landmark 2018 study, Gender Shades, proved that commercial facial recognition systems had error rates of up to 34.7% for darker-skinned women versus 0.8% for lighter-skinned men. The findings prompted IBM and Microsoft to halt sales of facial recognition technology to law enforcement. Her 2020 documentary Coded Bias and 2023 bestseller Unmasking AI brought her work to a global audience.

How She Empowers Women

Joy's work is a master class in using personal experience as a springboard for systemic change. By proving, with rigorous data, that AI systems routinely fail the most marginalised, particularly women of colour, she has fundamentally shifted the conversation about who AI is built for and who gets left behind. The Algorithmic Justice League runs public awareness campaigns, equips advocates with research tools, and advises policymakers worldwide.

The Person

May Habib was eight years old when her family fled rural Lebanon for Canada in the 1990s. The eldest of eight children, she grew up watching her immigrant parents build small businesses by necessity. She attended Harvard, graduating with high honours in Economics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilisations, a pairing that captures her lifelong obsession: the intersection of language and business.

"AI has potential to be ten, maybe a hundred times more equity-creating, or equity-exacerbating, depending on how we shape it."

May Habib, World Economic Forum

How She Got Here

Before Writer, May co-founded Qordoba, an AI-powered localisation platform. In August 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, she co-founded Writer, building its own proprietary large language models 18 months before ChatGPT existed. That bet paid off: Writer is now a $1.9 billion AI unicorn, serving Uber, Salesforce, L'Oréal, Accenture, Vanguard, and Intuit. She has raised over $326 million.

How She Empowers Women

May's story is a direct challenge to the Silicon Valley mythology that tech founders must come from elite technical backgrounds, must be male, and must have been born in the right country. Her insistence on building Writer to support 32 languages came from a deeply personal place. She mentors other immigrant founders and has been open about the particular form of grit that comes from growing up with very little.

The Person

Dr. Timnit Gebru was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She fled the country as a teenager after the death of her mother and was resettled as a refugee in the United States, making her way to Stanford University where she earned her PhD in Computer Science in 2017. She is married to David Mimno, a computer science professor, and they have twins.

"We are building systems that affect people's lives. If we don't include diverse perspectives, we are making decisions that harm real people, and pretending that's just 'engineering.'"

Dr. Timnit Gebru, DAIR Institute

How She Got Here

After her PhD, Timnit became co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team, one of the first Black women to lead an AI research team at a major tech company. She co-authored Gender Shades (2018) and then 'On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots' (2020), raising urgent concerns about the social harms of large language models. Google fired her in December 2020 after she refused to retract the research. In 2021 she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research institute free from corporate control.

How She Empowers Women

Timnit Gebru is one of the most powerful examples in modern technology of what it looks like to refuse to be silent, and pay a significant personal price for it. Her firing from Google galvanised thousands of researchers and led to a fundamental shift in how AI ethics is discussed inside big tech. Through DAIR, she actively builds a research community that amplifies the voices of researchers from Africa, the Global South, and marginalised communities globally.