Sam Jacobs, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
FROM THE EDITOR
WHAT IS UNIQUE ABOUT AI IS ALSO WHAT IS MOST FEARED and celebrated: its ability to match some of our own skills, and then to go further, accomplishing what humans cannot. Yet behind every advance in machine learning are, in fact, people—both the often obscured human labor that makes large language models safer to use, and the individuals who make critical decisions on when and how to best use this technology. Reporting on people and influence is what TIME does best. That led us to the TIME100 AI.
The cover of TIME has always reflected the forces shaping society. Generative AI first landed there in February. “This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since social media,” correspondents Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo wrote then. By May we gathered a selection of voices on the potential risks presented by this new technology. That issue, with a cover asking if AI could mark the end of humanity, went online days after hundreds of leading AI scientists and CEOs released a startling statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Among the signatories was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, perhaps the most powerful person in AI today. For a June cover story announcing the TIME100 Companies, our annual list of the most influential companies in the world, he told former TIME editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal that he was at once “very optimistic, and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point.” Then, for a July cover story, Billy traveled to Karnataka, India, to interview Manu Chopra, CEO of startup Karya, about the new model he is piloting to help the rural poor benefit from the AI boom.
It becomes apparent why journalists at TIME have tried to underscore that the most important thing to understand about AI is how fast it’s growing. “The level of innovation I’m seeing now is stronger than I’ve ever seen in my entire life by orders of magnitude,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told senior correspondent Vera Bergengruen in an interview for the TIME100 AI. “I’ve been through time-sharing and the PC industry, the web revolution, the Unix revolution, and Linux, and Facebook, and Google. And this is
