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Accompanying Time’s annual Person of the Year selection Thursday is a magazine cover that resembles a 1930s “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo, showing eight. architects “Sitting on the beam” of AI.
Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in explanation of the choice, “This was the year when the full potential of artificial intelligence came to the fore and when it became clear there would be no turning back or out.”
The magazine deliberately selected people rather than technology – “individuals who conceived, designed, and built AI”. But who are the people that digital illustrator Jason Seiler used in his rendition of the famous photo? Here’s a look:
meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg is pushing to revive AI efforts in Meta as the company faces tough competition from rivals Google and OpenAI, creator chatgptIn June, Meta invested $14,3 billion in AI data company Scale and recruited its CEO Alexander Wang to help lead a team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant,
Zuckerberg’s growing focus on the abstract idea of ”superintelligence” — what rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot for a tech leader who went all-in on the idea of the metaverse in 2021, changing the company’s name and investing billions in advancing virtual reality and related technology.
AMD CEO Lisa Su
Since Su took over as president and CEO at Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, its stock has risen from about $3 to about $221. The semiconductor company recently unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip in a race to compete with rival chipmaker Nvidia in supplying the foundation of a boom in AI-fueled business tools, and struck a multibillion-dollar computing deal with OpenAI.
AMD joins a growing list of technology companies that are trying to take advantage of the widespread interest from businesses looking for new AI tools that can analyze data, help make decisions and potentially replace some of the tasks currently performed by human workers.
xAI CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company Grok produces AI chatbots. Built using massive amounts of computing power in a Tennessee data center, Grok is Musk’s attempt to beat rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building an AI assistant that shows its reasoning before answering a question.
Musk’s deliberate efforts to mold Grok as a challenger to the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics have repeatedly landed the chatbot in trouble.
Musk also heads several tech-related companies like Tesla and SpaceX.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Nvidia has designed its chipsets to power what’s known as a graphics processing unit, or GPU, for everything from powering video games to helping train powerful AI systems like ChatGPT and the technology behind Image Generator. As more people started using AI chatbots, the demand skyrocketed. Tech companies were scrambling to make more chips and get them running.
The huge appetite for Nvidia’s chips is the main reason the company became the first $5 trillion company in October, just three months after the Silicon Valley chip maker broke the $4 trillion barrier. But fears of an AI bubble persist.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
OpenAI recently celebrated the third anniversary of the first release of ChatGPT, driving global traction and a commercial boom in generic AI technology and giving the San Francisco startup an early lead. But the company is facing increasing competition from rivals.
ChatGPT now has more than 800 million weekly users this fall, Altman said. But the company, valued at $500 billion, doesn’t make profits, raising concerns about an AI bubble if generative AI products made by OpenAI and its competitors don’t meet the expectations of investors who have poured billions of dollars into research and development.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind
The AI scientist and 2024 Nobel laureate founded the London-based DeepMind research laboratory in 2010, which was acquired by Google four years later. DeepMind is responsible for Google’s Gemeni AI platform, which helped level the playing field against tech rivals that initially took the lead in the AI race.
He recently shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an AI system that accurately predicts protein folding – a breakthrough for medicine and drug discovery.
According to the company, Google’s recent move to incorporate Gemeni into the search experience has been mostly successful, with the AI overview now being used by more than 2 billion people every month. By comparison, the Gemini app has about 650 million monthly users.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, is privately held but was recently valued at $183 billion. Its AI assistant competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others in attracting business customers who use it to help with cloud coding and other tasks.
Anthropic said it expects sales of $5 billion this year, but like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, instead relying on investors to cover the high costs of developing AI technology for potential profits in the future.
Fei-Fei Li, Founder of WorldLabs
Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li, widely known as the “Godmother of AI”, created the dataset that sparked the computer vision branch of AI in the 2010s.
Li launched her own startup, World Labs, in 2024 to build what she calls the next frontier in AI technology: spatial intelligence. World Labs recently released its first commercial generative world model, Marble, which allows users to create and edit 3D environments from text prompts, photos, videos, or 3D layouts.