NEW YORK (AP) — Time’s annual pick of the year on Thursday is a magazine cover that resembles the 1930s “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo, showing eight of the “Architects of AI” 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 giving up,” Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in an explanation of the choice.
The magazine was deliberate in selecting people – “the individuals who imagined, designed and built AI” – rather than the technology itself. But who are these individuals that digital painter Jason Seiler used to adore his interpretation of the famous photograph? Here’s a look:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg has been pushing to revive artificial intelligence efforts at Meta as the company faces stiff competition from rivals like Google and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. In June, Meta made a $14.3 billion investment 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 focus on the abstract idea of ”superintelligence” — which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI — is the latest pivot for a tech leader who in 2021 went all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company’s name and investing billions in advancing virtual reality and related technology.
AMD CEO Lisa Su
Since Su took over as chairman and CEO of 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 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 tech companies trying to take advantage of broader interest from companies looking for new AI tools to analyze data, help make decisions and potentially replace some tasks currently performed by human workers.
xAI CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company produces the Grok AI chatbot. Built using huge amounts of computing power at a data center in Tennessee, Grok is Musk’s attempt to outdo 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 turn Grok into 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 CEO Jensen Huang
Nvidia has found an early lead in adapting chipsets known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, from use in powering video games to helping train powerful AI systems such as the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. Demand has skyrocketed as more people have started using AI chatbots. Tech companies have been looking for more chips to build and run.
The voracious 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 chipmaker first broke the $4 trillion barrier. But fears of an AI bubble persist.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI recently marked the three-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s launch, sparking global fascination and a commercial boom in generative AI technology and giving the San Francisco startup an early head start. 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, does not make a profit, raising concerns about an AI bubble if the generative AI products made by OpenAI and its competitors do not meet the expectations of investors pouring billions of dollars into research and development.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis
The AI scientist and 2024 Nobel laureate founded the DeepMind research lab in London in 2010, before Google acquired it four years later. DeepMind is responsible for Google’s Gemini AI platform, which has helped level the playing field against tech rivals that were initially ahead in the AI race.
Most recently, he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing AI systems that accurately predict protein folding—a breakthrough for medicine and drug discovery.
Google’s recent move to implant Gemini into the search experience has been largely successful, with AI Overviews now being 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 CEO Dario Amodei
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI leaders in 2021, is privately held but recently valued itself at $183 billion. Its AI assistant Claude competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others to attract business customers who use it to help with coding and other tasks.
Anthropic said it expects to make $5 billion in sales 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 future profit.
Fei-Fei Li, founder of Worldlabs
Widely known as the “godmother of AI,” Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li organized the dataset that accelerated the AI branch of computer vision 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 world’s first commercial generative model, which allows users to generate and edit 3D media from text messages, photos, videos or 3D mockups.