R² Index Ranks AI Researchers by Measurable Impact

Summary

R² Index is a ranking project designed to identify AI researchers and related contributors through measurable impact rather than conventional academic or professional credentials. The index includes views for authors, researchers, papers, projects, patents, institutions, founders, startups, investors, and countries, with time filters ranging from all-time results to the last year. Its creator, Henry Ndubuaku, says his background is in NeuroAI and efficient foundation-model design, training, and inference; he also describes work on the Maths, CS & AI Compendium and at Cactus Compute. He created the index to help assess applicants to Cactus without relying on the badges that might exclude less credentialed researchers. According to Ndubuaku, the results unexpectedly surfaced established AI history: the field’s “godfathers” ranked among the top three all-time, while leading universities and venture capital firms appeared in expected positions. He says this outcome increased his confidence in sharing the tool, while noting that he himself does not rank in its top 20,000 among roughly 800,000 researchers. The project was named by his co-founder, Roman Shemet.