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

Today 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. Hello 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 Times readers. The specific examples they gave are on the one hand, sundarpichai, 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, expressed his 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. Some 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 outsize 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. The 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 of Meta Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co founder of Google DeepMind. But a number of the other conclusions are a little bit more interesting. Sasha Luciani 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. If 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 Shaoshuan, the founder of Baixuan, 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 competitor. Liang 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 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. Working with them is basically like hiring an absolute top flight AI engineering team, but in a way that you can customize exactly for your particular needs. Like I said, that AI Tool Finder feature that we built with them is already a key part of the Super Intelligent platform and we are working on something new as well. Fractional works with everyone from startups to the Fortune 500 and to request a free consultation, you can go to Fractional AI. 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We've just launched super for Teams, so if you have a group of people at your company that want to figure out how to use AI together, I highly suggest you check it out. But for those of you who are using superintelligent as an individual, once again, if you sign up for Super Intelligent between now and the end of the month using Code Soback, you will get your first month 100% free. Go to be super 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 you folks, but it also has Lisa Su, the CEO of amd right there at the top. So which of 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. Cerebras has their CEO Andrew Feldman on the list. Brett Adcock, the CEO of Robotic Startup Figure is there, as are leaders from Mistral, 11 Labs, Synthesia, and the much beloved Perplexity. There's also one regulator, Lina Khan from the ftc. It's not exactly clear why she's in the Innovator section. One other interesting inclusion is Walonius Hatcher, who while you might not have heard of him, you've definitely heard his song BBL 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. Ray Kurzweil's there Ilya Sutskever, who's obviously made news with his Safe superintelligence, and another ex OpenAI leader, Andrej 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 Yann 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 Cointelligence and absolute MVP of the AI LRS episodes, makes an appearance, as does fellow podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. More 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 Britain 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. This 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 Jandria, the SVP of machine learning and AI strategy at Apple, is in this Shaper 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. We 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. Anyways, 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.