Community-voted list crowns Jeff Dean top AI angel investor, heavy ex-OpenAI presence

typewriters · x · 2026-09-24

Chris Barber polled people on "who are the best active angels in AI" and compiled the Frontier List. Jeff Dean leads with 5 votes, followed by Umesh Khanna (xAI) with 4, and Sholto Douglas (Anthropic) and Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) with 3 each. Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Noam Brown, Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel also appear. The 50+ person list skews heavily toward current and former employees of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Scale AI, illustrating how big-lab talent is flowing into early-stage angel investing.

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