NEW YORK — Thursday’s cover of Time magazine’s annual Person of the Year selection resembles a 1930s “Lunch on a Skyscraper” photo of eight “AI architects” sitting on beams.
“This was the year that the full potential of artificial intelligence was realized, and it became clear that there was no turning back or opting out,” Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs wrote in explaining the selection.
The magazine deliberately chose people, “the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI,” rather than the technology itself. But who are these people that digital painter Jason Seiler used to stage his famous photo? Here’s how.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg is pushing to revive Meta’s AI efforts as Meta faces stiff competition from rivals such as Google and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in AI data company Scale and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to help lead the tech giant’s “superintelligence” development team.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who has increasingly focused on the abstract concept of “superintelligence” that rivals call artificial general intelligence (AGI), is the latest pivot for a technology leader who has gone all-in on the Metaverse idea in 2021, changing its name and investing billions in advances in virtual reality and related technologies.
AMD CEO Lisa Su
Since Hsu became president and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, the company’s stock price has risen from about $3 to about $221. The semiconductor company recently announced new artificial intelligence chips and signed a multibillion-dollar computing deal with OpenAI in a race to compete with rival chipmaker Nvidia in providing the foundation for a boom in AI-powered business tools.
AMD joins a growing list of technology companies looking to capitalize on widespread interest from companies looking for new AI tools that can analyze data, support decision-making and replace some tasks currently performed by humans.
xAI CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is developing the Grok AI chatbot. Built using vast amounts of computing power in a Tennessee data center, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outperform rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in building AI assistants that make inferences before answering questions.
The chatbot has repeatedly run into trouble due to Mr. Musk’s deliberate efforts to cast Mr. Grok as a challenger to what he sees as the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics.
Musk is also the head of many technology companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Nvidia was an early pioneer in customizing its chipsets, known as graphics processing units (GPUs), for everything from using them to enhance video games to helping train powerful AI systems like ChatGPT and the technology behind image generators. As more people started using AI chatbots, demand skyrocketed. Tech companies scrambled for more chips to make and run them.
Nvidia’s voracious appetite for chips is a key reason why it became the first US$5 trillion company in October, just three months after the Silicon Valley chipmaker became the first to break the US$4 trillion barrier. However, concerns about an AI bubble persist.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI recently celebrated three years since we first released ChatGPT. This sparked a global frenzy and commercial boom in generative AI technology, giving the San Francisco startup an early lead. However, the company faces increasing competition from rivals.
Altman said this fall that ChatGPT now has more than 800 million weekly users. But the $500 billion market capitalization company is not profitable, fueling fears of an AI bubble if OpenAI and its competitors’ generative AI products fail to meet the expectations of investors who pour billions into research and development.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis
The AI scientist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner founded the DeepMind Institute in London in 2010, which was acquired by Google four years later. DeepMind is responsible for Google’s Gemni AI platform, which initially helped level the playing field with technology rivals who were ahead in the AI race.
He recently won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an AI system that accurately predicts protein folding. This is a breakthrough in medicine and drug discovery.
Google’s recent efforts to incorporate Gemni into its search experience have been largely successful, with the company saying its AI Overview is now used by more than 2 billion people each month. In comparison, the Gemini app has around 650 million monthly users.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, Anthropic is privately held and recently valued at $183 billion. The company’s AI assistant, Claude, competes with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to appeal to enterprise customers who use it to assist with coding and other tasks.
Anthropic has said it expects sales to be $5 billion this year, but like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported a profit and instead relies on investors to support the high costs of developing its AI technology for potential future returns.
Feifei Li, Worldlabs Founder
Stanford University computer science professor Fei-Fei Li, widely known as the “Godmother of AI,” has handpicked the datasets that accelerated the computer vision field of AI in the 2010s.
Lee launched her 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 commercially generated world model. It allows users to generate and edit 3D environments from text prompts, photos, videos, or 3D layouts.
