The importance of covering AI

As we were finishing this year’sTIME100 AI, I had two conversations, with two very different TIME100 AI honorees, that made clear the stakes of this technological transformation.Sundar Pichai, who joined Google in 2004 and became CEO of the world’s fourth most valuable company nine years ago, told me that introducing the company’s billions of users to AI through Google’s products amounts to “one of the biggest improvements we’ve done in 20 years.”

Speaking that same day,Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee and critic of the company who, as the president of Signal, has become one of the world’s most influential advocates for privacy, expressed 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.

Our purpose increating the TIME100 AIis to put leaders like Pichai and Whittaker, who was on our2023 list, in dialogue and to open up their views to TIME’s readers. That’s why we’re excited to share with you the second edition of theTIME100 AI list. We built this in the spirit ofTIME100, the world’s most influential community.

This year’s list offers examples of the possibilities for AI when it moves out of the lab and into the world. Innovators are showing the real-world potential for AI to improve how we live and work.

Since launching theTIME100 AI last September, we’ve been able to gather members of this group together in San Francisco and Dubai. We look forward to convening this group again in San Francisco and London later this fall as we continue to grow this community. Email me atSam@TIME.comto let me know what you think of the list.