He analyzed 1,157 X followers: half hold or pursue a PhD, 57% in academia
geoffwolfe · x · 2026-11-01
User anshuman1 published an aggregate analysis of his 1,157 X followers based on public bios, and the result looks like a research-grade audience sample:
- Education: 50% (582 people) hold or are pursuing a PhD; 57% are students or academics
- Industry: 54% come from academia (AI/ML/robotics); 15% have worked or interned at a frontier lab; 39 work on data, evals, and RL environments
- Audience size: median follower count is just 181, with 75% under 500 followers — a base of deep specialists; 23 accounts with 10k+ followers hold 71% of total reach
- Interest graph: LLMs/agents/RL form the largest cluster (297 people), robotics & embodied AI a strong second (183); 42 of the evals/safety/data crowd also work on LLMs
- Misc: 56% US-based (SF Bay Area alone 19%); 57 followers carry a conference name in their display name (EMNLP 19, NeurIPS 11, ICLR 10)
A fun snapshot of the AI community's structure: extremely dense in specialists rather than mass reach.
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