What TIME's AI100 List Says About the State of AI

0:00Today, we're breaking down everything about the Time AI100. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:17Hello, friends. Quick note. Today's episode is not broken up as normal into a headlines and main section. It is just this main section all about the Time AI 100. Time has once again put out a list of the 100 most influential, important, significant, some criteria, at least people in AI. Now, it is technically the most influential list. And in terms of how Time thinks about this list, they write that their goal is to put leaders who sometimes have different points of view into dialogue and open up their views to Time's readers. The specific examples they gave are, on the one hand, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, And on the other hand, Meredith Whitaker, a former Googler herself, who is now a huge critic of the company as the president of Signal, who, quote, expresses alarm at the dangers posed by the fact that so much of the AI revolution depends on the infrastructure and decisions of only a handful of big players in tech.

1:06Some of the themes they point out, quote, if the world of AI was dominated by the emergence of startup labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and their competitors in 2023, this year, as critics and champions alike have noted, we've seen the outsized influence of a small number of tech giants. Without them, upstart AI companies would not have the funding and computing power they need to propel their rapid acceleration. So what we're going to do is go section by section the way that they've broken things down and make note of what I think is most interesting about any of the particular selections they're in.

1:33The first category they have is leaders, and many of these are basically definitionally filled out already. There is Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, Sam Haltman, the CEO of OpenAI, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO the CEO of Meta, Demis Asabas, the CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, but a number of the other conclusions are a little bit more interesting. Sasha Luccioni is the AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, and her inclusion I think reflects both the significance of open source in the space, but also the environmental considerations that are a growing part of the conversation, at least socially, about the AI revolution.

2:10If you wondered if the AI safety movement is going to make an appearance here, well, have no doubt. That question gets resolved right away with the inclusion of Open Philanthropy President Kerry Tuna. It is way beyond the scope of this particular episode to get in the ins and outs of Open Philanthropy, but it is undeniably at the epicenter of the AI safety movement. Another theme that's clear from the leaders is the presence of China and the competition with China as a serious consideration in the development of AI. Wang Xiaoshuan, the founder of Baishuan, makes an appearance on the list. His company, which was founded just in April 2023, is now valued at$2.7 billion and represents one of the most credible Chinese LLM competitors.

2:46Liang Rubo, the CEO and co-founder of ByteDance shows up, who are obviously making a huge investment in AI, as does Zhuang Rongwen, the director of cyberspace administration in China itself. As Time puts it, Zhuang's decisions will help shape whether China can keep pace with its Western counterparts and realize its aspirations to become an AI powerhouse. Today's episode is brought to you by Fractional. When we wanted to build an AI-powered feature of Superintelligent, our AI Tool Finder, I went straight to Fractional. The Fractional team is a group of senior engineers in San Francisco working on some of the most exciting projects in applied AI.

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5:44Go to besuper.ai and check it out today. The next category is the innovators, which you'll see I think reflects the challenge of neatly drawing these lines. It's nominally a little bit more for the startup-y folks, But it also has Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, right there at the top. So which are the startups that get called out in here? Inference player Grok, which has become increasingly well-known, has their CEO, Jonathan Ross, represented. Another company in the infrastructure space, Cerebris, has their CEO, Andrew Feldman, on the list. Brett Adcock, the CEO of Robotic Startup Figure, is there.

6:16As are leaders from Mistral, Eleven Labs, Synthesia, and the much-beloved Perplexity. There's also one regulator, Lena Kahn from the FTC. It's not exactly clear why she's in the innovator section. One other interesting inclusion is Willonius Hatcher, who while you might not have heard of him, you've definitely heard his song VBL Drizzy. As Time put it, this summer as Kendrick Lamar and Drake fired vicious disses back and forth, an unlikely third party ended up creating one of the defining songs of the high-profile rap feud. The next section is thinkers, and again there are some who are fairly expected.

6:49Ray Kurzweil's there, Ilya Suitskiver, who's obviously made news with his safe superintelligence, and another ex-OpenAI leader, Andre Karpathy, who recently announced his Eureka Labs. Going back to the question of AI safety, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, who is one of the people most trying to push Sam Altman out, makes an appearance on this list, as does Jan Leakey, who used to lead super alignment at OpenAI and now leads alignment science at Anthropic. Anthropic, in fact, has a number of entrants on this list. Professor Ethan Malik, the author of the book Co-Intelligence and absolute MVP of the AI LRS episodes makes an appearance, as does fellow podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.

7:24More than anything, I would say the subcurrent in the thinker section is the fact that there are seriously big questions that lurk just underneath the surface of AI and that feel as yet unresolved. The next section, Shapers, is where most of the politicians and policy leaders reside. California State Senator and SB 1047 proponent Scott Wiener is there. Elizabeth Kelly, the director of the United States AI Safety Institute, which just signed a voluntary deal with OpenAI and Anthropic around advanced model testing. Reflecting the EU's AI Act, Thierry Britton is there, as well as some of the combatants who have been involved in legal battles around AI, like Meredith Stein, the president of the Writers Guild of America West.

8:02This is also the only section that has an appearance from Apple showing still how far comparatively behind that company is, although it might catch up soon. John Giandria, the SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple, is in this Shapers section, although if Apple Intelligence goes well, we could see more entrants, I think, next year. It's also notable that there are only a couple of investors on this list overall, including Vinod Khosla and Nat Friedman, who both appear in the Shaper section. I think if I had to sum up the theme of this year's Time 100 AI, it's big tech and big questions.

8:33We are clearly in a moment where big tech has an outsized influence on the shape of AI, and even the big startup labs are clearly the next most significant drivers. And of course, underlying all this are big questions, societally, ethically, politically, and otherwise. One thing that is extremely noticeably absent from this list is any sort of corporate or enterprise presence. Now, whether this reflects the fact that enterprise leaders don't really have a big seat at the AI influence table right now, or whether it reflects simply a blind spot for time, is something that I'll leave you to decide.

9:03Anyways, a really interesting list. I think the way to think about these is never as some sort of definitive statement, and more as an interesting thought starter and conversation piece. That, however, is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace!