Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Lina Khan, Vinod Khosla, Arati Prabhakar Among Time’s Most Influential People in AI

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy director Arati Prabhakar, are among several Indian Americans included in this year’s ‘TIME100/AI,’ the second annual list of the world’s most influential people in Artificial Intelligence. The magazine says the purpose of creating the list is “to put leaders in dialogue and to open up their views to TIME’s readers.”

Ninety-one of the members of the 2024 list were not on last year’s, TIME noted, calling it “an indication of just how quickly this field is changing.” This year’s list, which comprises “companies, regions, and perspectives, offers examples of the possibilities for AI when it moves out of the lab and into the world,” TIME said.

Others on the list include Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan; Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon; Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas; Abridge co-founder and CEO Shiv Rao; Anant Vijay Singh, Product Lead at Proton; I Now Institute co-executive director Amba Kak; and Dwarkesh Podcast host Dwarkesh Patel.

Joining them are actor Anil Kapoor, Amandeep Singh Gill, United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology; Divya Siddarth, co-founder, Collective Intelligence Project; Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s Minister of Electronics and Information Technology; and Nandan Nilekani, co-founder, Infosys and co-founder and chairman, EkStep.

Sundar Pichai, who joined Google in 2004, was appointed to the top job in 2015. He told TIME that although the company wasn’t the first to build a search engine, it was “the first to build one good enough to attract the lion’s share of the market.” The same applies to “browsers, email, maps,” he pointed out. “It matters less whether Google is first, and more that its version is the best.” He told the magazine that Google’s generative AI tools are one of the biggest improvements the company has made in 20 years. “Given that we can do this in a way that touches billions of people, it’s both an extraordinary opportunity, but at the same time, we have to be very responsible in how we approach it,” he said. “There are times when we are testing things rigorously enough to make sure they’re working well. But I won’t underestimate the opportunity — in the longer run, you’re enabling access to knowledge and intelligence, which is core to our mission, at an unprecedented scale. We have work left to do to make all of this work well. But that’s the vision.”

Satya Nadella has been pushing the world towards something far bigger: artificial general intelligence (AGI). In 2019, he presided over “Microsoft’s decision to invest its first billion into an obscure AI lab called OpenAI,” TIME noted. In the years that followed, “he grew that partnership into a profit-sharing deal worth more than $13 billion. He has also proven himself to be “a shrewd corporate maneuverer,” TIME said, pointing out to the time when ”OpenAI’s board briefly fired Sam Altman in late 2023.” That’s when Nadella “offered all OpenAI employees jobs at his own company, essentially neutralizing the board’s threat and clearing the way for Altman’s return,” TIME said. Since then, Nadella has “moved to reduce Microsoft’s reliance on OpenAI, investing $16 million into the rival French AI lab Mistral, and separately hiring a team of world-leading researchers to begin a parallel effort, inside Microsoft, to build its own large language models.” The magazine added. 

Rohit Prasad was Alexa’s head scientist before he joined Amazon to run its AI team last year. “This summer, his team hired several leaders of the AI startup Adept in order to bolster its efforts, and paid the startup a licensing fee to use some of its technology,” TIME said. Referring to Amazon’s “race to integrate AI into Alexa,” Prasad told TIME that the journey “to achieve AGI” is important, not the time it takes to get here. “What matters is the journey that drives us — a relentless pursuit of developing the most advanced, trusted, and sustainable AI that anyone, anywhere can use with minimal effort,” he told the magazine. 

For the past two years, Perplexity, founded by Aravind Srinivas has been drawing the ire of online publishers for its business model which” uses AI to answer users’ questions by summarizing websites, diverting ad revenue from those sites,” according to TIME.  In June, the company launched a new feature called “Perplexity Pages,” which creates AI-generated reports in response to users’ queries. But the feature appeared to have plagiarized sections of reporting from multiple publications, while barely or inaccurately citing its sources. Two of those publications — Forbes and Conde Nast — sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter. In the wake of these incidents, Perplexity is “now highlighting its sources more prominently,” TIME said. A Perplexity spokesperson told the magazine that the company has “always cared deeply about attribution and citations in our product, and appreciate the feedback on how we can continue to refine it.”

Dr. Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, founded the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Abridge in 2018 to free clinicians from the time-sucking paperwork that comes after they see patients: jotting down detailed notes for their medical records. Abridge records their conversations with patients and uses AI to summarize them. Ten thousand clinicians are already using it and the startup is worth $850 million after raising more than $200 million in venture funding. Rao is also a faculty member and practicing cardiologist at UPMC’s Heart and Vascular Institute.

 Anant Vijay Singh, product lead at Swiss privacy company Proton, is pioneering an approach that harnesses AI to enhance privacy, not compromise it. Under his leadership, Proton introduced three privacy-preserving tools, TIME says, “Sentinel, launched last August, combines AI with human expertise for advanced account protection,” the magazine noted. Last month, “Docs, a collaborative editor challenging Google Docs, and Scribe, an AI email writing assistant, followed,” the magazine added. “Both keep users’ data fully encrypted, enabling workflows free from data-hungry giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI,” TIME said. We don’t just throw AI on everything,” said Singh. “We saw a use-case that we could solve.”

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has been a thorn in the side of Big Tech companies since her 2021 appointment, arguing that major players have become too monopolistic and powerful. Over the last year, she’s turned her focus to how these tech giants might be wielding AI to further consolidate their power. She has sent out many other warning shots to AI companies engaging in questionable practices. And she has also proposed new protections against deepfakes. “All of these actions, combined with her position of power, make Khan one of the most prominent forces working to combat AI harms today,” TIME noted. 

In the spring of 2023, as ChatGPT was becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history, Amba Kak was skeptical of the AI revolution. Rather than marking a paradigm shift in the power of Silicon Valley, she believed, AI would further consolidate it in the hands of a few Big Tech firms. The AI Now Institute, where Kak is co-executive director, has dedicated itself to studying the consequences of that power. Under her leadership, the AI Now Institute is emerging as one of the leading critics of the industry. Last year, the institute released a seminal 103-page-report discussing how AI is concentrating power within the tech industry. Since then, they’ve advocated for producing an FDA-style body to regulate new AI models, interrogated the impact of the data centers used to power AI on climate change, and released policy frameworks for governments on how to tackle the social risks of AI. Today, Kak regularly advises members of Congress, the White House, the European Commission, and the U.K. government on AI policy. 

Over the past four years, Dwarkesh Patel, a 23-year-old Bay Area resident, has built one of the most deeply researched podcasts on artificial intelligence. He has quickly become known for his thorough and technical explorations of the subject, becoming a vital listener for those working on the technology. His work has earned him praise from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, who appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast in April. While he finds the world “infinitely interesting,” Patel is focused on AI because he considers it “the most multidisciplinary and intellectually stimulating topic” around, he told TIME. Patel frequently engages with figures twice his age—from CEOs and professors to industry researchers—with the confidence of a colleague and the casualness of a dinner guest. Still, he remains awestruck at his position. “It’s insane that I can just read a book, and if I find it interesting enough, I can email the author, and pepper them with questions for two hours.”

As the United Nations Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology, Amandeep Singh Gill coordinates digital cooperation among member states, industry, and civil society, as well as within the U.N. He implements U.N. Secretary-General Antуnio Guterres’ priorities on AI, helping stakeholders to understand what is going on with the technology and shaping international engagement. In October 2023, the U.N. formed a 39-member “High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence,” drawing from governments, the private sector, and academia including Gill himself. In December, the body put out an interim report that laid the foundations for how to govern the proliferation of AI globally. Their key recommendations included bridging the gap between AI adoption in the West and the Global South and producing unbiased scientific reports on AI’s progress, similar to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

After President Biden signed a sweeping Executive Order on AI  last October, Arati Prabhakar and her team have been “responsible for ensuring all parties keep the technology’s risks and benefits in mind,” according to TIME. “Consumers aren’t going to use this technology if they don’t trust it,” she told TIME, stressing that safeguarding users will be key to adoption in the United States. Prabhakar, who spent 15 years working in Silicon Valley including a stint at VC firm Venture Partners, is optimistic about the technology’s potential upsides. In June, she hosted an event to highlight how the federal government hopes to use AI to tackle big challenges including climate change and improving education.

Divya Siddarth co-founded the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) with Saffron Huang to direct technological development towards the collective good. “They believe that AI can help us unlock new ways of harnessing our collective intelligence and that the incentive structures already built into the tech industry can be bad for society at large,” TIME said. In a seminal study, they brought together 1,000 everyday people to write a list of values that an ideal AI assistant should possess. Their responses were then tested by AI company Anthropic whether the rules those people agreed upon could effectively govern their chatbot, Claude. “The research found that doing so made Claude slightly less biased without negatively impacting its performance,” TIME said. 

Aishwini Vaishnaw, India’s electronics and information technology minister is leading the effort to make his country a major player in the world of AI. While India has yet to create binding AI laws, for the past year, it has chaired the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence — an international initiative to support states in governing AI. As part of its chairmanship, India hosted the Global IndiaAI Summit in July, attended by over 2,000 AI experts, including senior leaders from OpenAI and Microsoft, and delegates from over 50 countries. Under Vaishnaw’s leadership, India hopes to become one of the top five countries for semiconductor manufacturing—a key component for modern AI systems—within the next five years. Yet, he faces significant challenges in realizing these ambitions. India’s tech sector struggles with low private R&D investment and a lack of advanced manufacturing ecosystems.

Nandan Nilekani, the billionaire co-founder of Infosyspopularly known as “India’s Bill Gates,” has spent fifteen years in and out of government developing digital public infrastructure in the country. He is optimistic about AI’s potential but has thoughts on how to ensure the technology’s rewards are distributed widely. His latest project — Adbhut India—  is a nonprofit collective aiming to create the public infrastructure to enable AI developers to meet India-specific needs. It is developing datasets of Indic languages and India-specific benchmarks and use cases.

When Vinod Khosla had a skiing accident in 2011 that led to an ACL injury in his knee, doctors gave conflicting opinions over his treatment. Frustrated with the healthcare system, the leading venture capitalist proffered, in a hotly debated article, that AI algorithms could do the job better than doctors. Since then, Khosla’s firm has invested in several robotics and medtech companies, including Rad AI, a radiology tech company. “Almost all expertise will be free in an AI model, and we’ll have plenty of these for the benefit of humanity,” he told TIME. His venture capital firm Khosla Ventures has subsequently placed big bets on green tech, healthcare, and AI startups around the world—including an early investment of $50 million in 2019 in OpenAI, now one of the world’s most valuable.  He is a firm believer that AI can replace jobs, including those performed by teachers and doctors, and enable a future where humans are free from servitude. “Because of AI, we will have enough abundance to choose what to do and what not to do,” he said. 

Last year, actor Anil Kapoor won a landmark victory in a New Delhi high court in September over unauthorized AI use of his likeness. He took up the case after a large number of distorted videos, gifs, and emojis bearing his likeness began circulating online. He also sought protection over the use of his iconic phrase, “jhakaas,” or “awesome” in Hindi —first uttered in the 1985 Hindi film, Yudh. His victory has also paved the way for others to seek protection over their personality rights, TIME noted.