NEW YORK (AP) — Time magazine’s Person of the Year selection on Thursday was accompanied by a magazine cover that resembled the “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo from the 1930s, showing eight “artificial intelligence architects” perched on beams.
Explaining the choice, Time editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote: “This is the year that the full potential of artificial intelligence has been revealed, and it has become clear that AI will not look back or opt out.”
The magazine was thoughtful in its selection of people—”people who imagine, design, and build artificial intelligence”—rather than the technology itself. But who were these people that digital artist Jason Seiler used to color his rendition of the famous photo? Take a look:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg has been working to revive Meta’s artificial intelligence business as it faces fierce competition from rivals such as Google and ChatGPT maker OpenAI. In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in artificial intelligence data company Scale and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to help lead the tech giant’s team developing “superintelligence.”
Zuckerberg’s growing focus on the abstract concept of “superintelligence” (which rival companies refer to as artificial general intelligence (AGI)) is the latest pivot for the technology leader, who in 2021 went all-in on the concept of virtual universes, changed the company’s name and invested billions of dollars to advance virtual reality and related technologies.
AMD CEO Lisa Su
Since Su took over as president and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, the company’s stock price has risen from around $3 to around $221. The semiconductor company recently launched a new artificial intelligence chip to compete with rival chipmaker Nvidia, providing the basis for a boom in artificial intelligence-driven business tools and striking a multibillion-dollar computing deal with OpenAI.
AMD joins a growing list of technology companies trying to capitalize on broader corporate interest in finding new artificial intelligence tools that can 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. Grok, built using massive amounts of computing power at a Tennessee data center, is Musk’s attempt to outdo rival AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini that can display their reasoning before answering a question.
Musk’s effort to position Grok as a challenger to what he sees as the tech industry’s “woke” orthodoxy on race, gender and politics has repeatedly landed the chatbot in hot water.
Musk is also the head of several technology-related companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Nvidia was an early leader in customizing its chipsets, known as graphics processing units (GPUs), from being used to power video games to helping train powerful artificial intelligence systems, such as the technology behind ChatGPT and image generators. As more and more people start using AI chatbots, demand has skyrocketed. Tech companies scramble to buy more chips to build and run them.
Huge demand for Nvidia’s chips was the main reason the company became the first company to reach a market capitalization of $5 trillion in October, just three months after the Silicon Valley chipmaker topped the $4 trillion mark for the first time. But concerns about an AI bubble remain.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI recently celebrated the third anniversary of its initial release of ChatGPT, which sparked global attention and business enthusiasm for generative AI technology and gave the San Francisco startup an early lead. But the company faces increasing competition from rivals.
Altman said this fall that ChatGPT currently has more than 800 million weekly users. But the company, valued at $500 billion, is not profitable, fueling fears of an AI bubble if the generative AI products produced by OpenAI and its rivals fail to meet the expectations of investors investing billions in research and development.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind
The artificial intelligence scientist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner established the London DeepMind research laboratory in 2010, which was acquired by Google four years later. DeepMind is responsible for Google’s Gemni artificial intelligence platform, which helped level the playing field for tech rivals that initially led in the artificial intelligence race.
He was recently awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an artificial intelligence system that can accurately predict protein folding, a breakthrough in medicine and drug discovery.
Google’s recent move to embed Gemni into the search experience has been largely successful, with more than 2 billion people now using AI Overviews every month, according to the company. By comparison, the Gemini app has about 650 million monthly users.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Founded in 2021 by former leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic is a privately held company but was recently valued at $183 billion. Its artificial intelligence assistant, Claude, competes with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to attract business customers to use it to assist with coding and other tasks.
Anthropic said it expects sales to hit $5 billion this year, but like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported a profit, relying instead on investors to support the high cost of developing AI technology for potential future returns.
Li Feifei, founder of Worldlabs
Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, is known as the “Godmother of Artificial Intelligence” and the data sets he curated accelerated the development of the computer vision branch of artificial intelligence in the 2010s.
Li launched her startup World Labs in 2024 to pursue what she calls the next frontier in artificial intelligence technology: spatial intelligence. World Labs recently released Marble, its first commercial generative world model that allows users to generate and edit 3D environments based on text prompts, photos, videos, or 3D layouts.