Forbes AI 50 Celebration
Kathleen Sheffer for Forbes
Forbes hosted an exclusive Forbes AI 50 Celebration in San Francisco on June 23, 2025, convening leaders from across the AI landscape to celebrate the Forbes 2025 AI 50 honorees. Forbes’ AI 50 list spotlights the most promising privately-held companies applying artificial intelligence to solve real-world challenges. The invite-only AI 50 event featured insights from visionary founders and rising stars leading the AI revolution—from foundational models and enterprise platforms to breakthrough innovations shaping the future.
The event kicked off with welcome remarks from Randall Lane, Chief Content Officer at Forbes, who honored this year’s cohort of AI 50 list makers and the fast-growing AI industry. “I’m an AI optimist, and Forbes is an AI optimist, but it’s because we’re betting on all of you [Forbes AI 50 list makers]…so that’s the conversation we want to have today.” Saluting the AI 50 list makers, Lane added: “This is an amazing list because if you look at history and assembly lines, mainframe computers, mobile, and smartphones – you didn’t know you were in that incredible era of societal and business change until you look back and realize that. This is the first time you can look at it and say you know in real time you are creating societal and disruptive change.”
Randall Lane’s Welcome Remarks at Forbes’ AI 50 Celebration
Kathleen Sheffer Photography
He later introduced a panel that was moderated by Forbes’ senior technology writer Richard Nieva and featured Eleanor Lightbody, CEO at Luminance , Ce Zhang, Cofounder & CTO at Together AI and Zachary Lipton, Cofounder & CTO at Abridge. The conversation “AI Today And Tomorrow: A Conversation With AI 50 Honorees,” took a closer look at how we are using AI today, and discussed AI infrastructure, consolidation and competition, and fundraising.
Each panelist touched on how AI is affecting each of their respective industries and the strategies that are being used to introduce it. Abridge’s Zachary Lipton discussed his company’s healthcare AI technology that has been integrated into Kaiser Permanente for the last year. Lipton shared that technology has historically been imposed on care providers rather than asked for, however Abridge has had a different experience. He added that the company considers how to explain the technology to people in a way that is going to complement them in their work flows so they do not think the technology will replace them in their roles as doctors or nurses.
Eleanor Lightbody leads the legal AI company Luminance and reflected on her optimistic approach to AI as she sees her company opening up legal advice to those that may not have had access to it in the past, and different opportunities for junior lawyers. “[Regarding] the future of law and in-house legal professions, I think you’re going to start to see that paralegals will be spending much less time on repetitive work churning, and they’ll be your data analysts, they’ll be the people at the core of the business who are almost your conductor.”
Together AI’s Ce Zhang is building the bridge between AI and companies by helping them build their AI infrastructure and accelerating their path to innovation, saying “Essentially we try to help them optimize cost and performance to get all the infrastructure requirements and all the concerns about infrastructure out of their way so that they can actually build their business and we deal with the infrastructure.” He later added, “We are really excited to help many of our customers to actually navigate the whole [AI] frontier and hopefully they can focus their efforts on actually building the application that’s going to change society.”
“At Together AI, we’re building cloud infrastructure for pioneers pushing the frontier of AI — and we were excited to join Forbes and several of our customers and partners at the AI 50 dinner,” said Ce Zhang, CTO at Together AI. “It was a pleasure connecting with other Forbes AI 50 award winners, and we look forward to helping them develop breakthrough AI models and agentic applications.”
From L to R: Richard Nieva, Ce Zhang, Zachary Lipton and Eleanor Lightbody
Kathleen Sheffer Photography
The event closed out with a celebratory toast from Lane, setting the stage for future Forbes AI events to come.
Forbes is committed to continue spotlighting the key players who are leading in AI and hosting discussions that will help the industry prepare and embrace what’s to come. In September, Forbes will be hosting its 2025 Under 30 Summit in Columbus, which will convene the world’s top young leaders, founders and creators for four days of connecting, learning, teaching and building. As a part of the Summit’s programming, for the first time ever, Forbes will be featuring a dedicated AI track focused on conversations about the space from leading AI voices such as May Habib, Founder & CEO of AI company Writer. The Under 30 Summit stage will serve as the launchpad for today’s AI leaders, convening several Forbes communities to ignite conversations and inform each other on the future of AI.
The Forbes AI 50 Celebration was presented by Together AI.
For more information on the 2025 Forbes AI 50 Celebration, click here.
To join the conversation on social, use #ForbesAI50.
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