NEW YORK– Time’s annual Person of the Year selection Thursday comes with a magazine cover that resembles the 1930s “Lunch on Top of a Skyscraper” photograph showing eight of the ” AI architects » sitting on the beam.
“This was the year when the full potential of artificial intelligence emerged, and when it became clear that there would be no turning back or retreat,” wrote Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs to explain the choice.
The magazine deliberately selected people – the “individuals who imagined, designed and built AI” – rather than the technology itself. But who are these individuals who digital painter Jason Seiler used to adorn his interpretation of the famous photograph? Here is an overview:
Zuckerberg has pushed to revive AI efforts at Meta as the company faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in AI data company Scale and recruited its CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead a team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant.
Zuckerberg’s growing interest in the abstract idea of ”superintelligence” — which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot from a technology leader who, in 2021, has gone all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company’s name and investing billions in advancing virtual reality and related technologies.
Since Su took over as CEO of Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, its stock has risen from around $3 to around $221. The semiconductor company recently unveiled a new artificial intelligence chip in its race to compete with rival chipmaker Nvidia in providing the foundations for a boom in AI-powered business tools, and struck a multibillion-dollar computing deal with OpenAI.
AMD joins a growing list of technology companies trying to capitalize on broader corporate interest in new AI tools that can analyze data, help make decisions and potentially replace some tasks currently done by human workers.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company produces the Grok AI chatbot. Built using massive amounts of computing power in a Tennessee data center, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini by creating an AI assistant that shows its reasoning before answering a question.
Musk’s deliberate efforts to make Grok a challenger to what he sees as the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics have repeatedly landed the chatbot in trouble.
Musk is also the head of a number of technology-related companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.
Nvidia got an early lead in adapting its chipsets known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from using them to power video games to training powerful AI systems, like the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. Demand has skyrocketed as more people have started using AI chatbots. Tech companies raced to get more chips to build and run.
Nvidia’s voracious appetite for chips is the main reason the company became the first $5 trillion company in October, just three months after the Silicon Valley chipmaker was the first to break into the market. 4 trillion dollars barrier. But the fears of a The AI bubble persists.
OpenAI recently celebrated the third anniversary of ChatGPT’s first release, sparking a global fascination and commercial boom in generative AI technology and giving the San Francisco startup an early lead. But the company faces increased competition from rivals.
Altman said this fall that ChatGPT now has more than 800 million weekly users. But the company, valued at $500 billion, is making no profit, amplifying fears of an AI bubble if generative AI products made by OpenAI and its rivals fail to meet the expectations of investors pouring billions of dollars into research and development.
The AI scientist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner established the DeepMind research lab in London in 2010 before Google acquired it four years later. DeepMind is responsible for Google’s Gemni AI platform, which has helped level the playing field against tech rivals who initially got ahead in the AI race.
He recently shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry to develop AI systems that accurately predict protein folding – a breakthrough for medicine and drug discovery.
Google’s recent move to implement Gemni into the search experience has been largely successful, with AI insights now used by more than 2 billion people every month, according to the company. The Gemini app, by comparison, has around 650 million monthly users.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives in 2021, is privately held but recently valued itself at $183 billion. Its AI assistant Claude competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others for business customers who use it to help with coding and other tasks.
Anthropic has said it expects to make $5 billion in revenue this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, instead relying on investors to support the high costs of developing AI technology for potential gain in the future.
Widely known as ” godmother of AI“, Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford, curated the dataset that accelerated the computer vision branch of AI in the 2010s.
Li launched her own startup, World Labs, in 2024 to pursue what she calls the next frontier in AI technology: spatial intelligence. World Labs recently released Marble, its first commercial generative global model, which allows users to generate and edit 3D environments from text prompts, photos, videos, or 3D layouts.