Sundar Pichai, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Anil Kapoor among Indians on TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 List

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, actor Anil Kapoor and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani were among other leaders from India or of Indian descent who made it to the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 List. The list was released on Thursday.

Among others who featured on TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 List were Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon Rohit Prasad, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder and CEO of Abridge Shiv Rao, Product Lead at Proton Anant Vijay Singh, Indian-American businessman Vinod Khosla, co-executive director at AI Now Institute Amba Kak and United Nations Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh Gill.

Dwarkesh Patel, the host of Dwarkesh Podcast; Arati Prabhakar, Director, US Office of Science and Technology Policy and Divya Siddarth, Co-founder, Collective Intelligence Project, also found a place in the second edition of TIME magazine’s ‘TIME100 AI’ list.

The Times' top 100 list is divided into four parts – leaders, innovators, shapers, and thinkers. “They span dozens of companies, regions, and perspectives, including 15-year-old Francesca Mani, who advocates across the US for protections for victims of deepfakes, and 77-year-old Andrew Yao, one of China’s most prominent computer scientists, who called last fall for an international regulatory body for AI,” the Times said.

As many as 91 of the members of the 2024 list were not on last year’s, “an indication of just how quickly this field is changing,” the Times magazine wrote

The magazine added that, "If the world of AI was dominated by the emergence of startup labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and their competitors in 2023, this year, as critics and champions alike have noted, we’ve seen the outsize influence of a small number of tech giants. Without them, upstart AI companies would not have the funding and computing power—known as compute—they need to propel their rapid acceleration."