The people over at Time magazine like to make lists. Now they have a new roster of the “AI 100,” individuals with a lot of involvement in the AI revolution that is changing our world so quickly.
I found this list to be wildly interesting for a number of reasons, including my work at conferences and events, where I have seen some of these luminaries speak, and my connection to MIT, where so much of this work emerges.
So I wanted to say a few things about going over this list, and reading about everyone’s contributions to the field.
Liquid AI
First and foremost, the Time list begins with my friend and colleague Daniela Rus, who runs the MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence) Lab here, and has pioneered aspects of AI, including with the Liquid AI project (disclaimer: I was also involved in this effort) that presents us with a new type of large language model.
Simply put, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rus graces the beginning of the list.
Liquid AI is a game-changer. Building smaller, more efficient models allows for putting AI systems on edge devices, unconnected to the Internet, so that you can train your own model and interact with it away from the prying eyes of government and business, and not in the walled garden of a monolithic provider that can tailor your use to its needs instead of yours. Using techniques like input-dependent computation and gating, the liquid AI design gives us substantially greater power to access the human-like cognition, albeit imitative, of the machines.
That’s only one of Rus’s great achievements in the field, but I was happy to see it cited in Time’s survey.
The Big Ones
Unsurprisingly, the next few entries are for the heads of the “big 3” AI companies in the U.S.: Sam Altman of OpenAI (who appears along with teammates Mark Chen and Greg Brockman), Elon Musk, (who probably needs no introduction anywhere) and the twins, Dario and Daniela Amodei, who made their names founding Anthropic, a company that has generated much more than its share of headlines this past year, including a standoff with no less than the Pentagon.
Jeff Bezos also emerges later on in the list.
I think that including Altman, Musk and the Amodeis at the top shows the approach that America has taken to the AI race: this is, after all, the country where the invisible hand of the market is king, where massive corporate franchises sell us everything from coffee to healthcare, and where big enterprise is the name of the game. In China, on the other hand, where centralized government control is more the lay of the land, the focus has been much more on open source models, although companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance have their own clout.
There’s also the ongoing drama around the U.S. trying to control, not only GPU exports to China, but also, laughably, China’s use of remote cloud services. But that’s another story.
Other Notables
I’m hesitant to even name a bunch of other people on Time’s list. I’m afraid I’ll leave someone out. Or multiple someones.
I thought it was interesting that Ben Affleck made the list for his work with InterPositive. It turns out this on-screen Southie brainstormed this company to use digital twinning for improving post-production.
“Movies will be one of the last things…to be replaced by AI,” Affleck said as quoted in the list.
Contributions to Full-Stack AI
There’s also a diversity of voices and faces in the list related to various aspects of the industry.
Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie of Ricursive Intelligence get added for their work on perfecting Google TPUs. On the model side, we have those like Yang Zhilin of Moonshot, whose Pink Floyd fandom is also covered. In robotics, we have Deng Taihua with AgiBot.
To me, this fleshed-out list shows how the components of AI work together: there’s the hardware side, where Nvidia and a few others are speeding up chip design, and the LLMs, which, again, has liquid AI and Rus front and center, and then the consumer-facing services, GPT, Claude, Grok, etc. and then robotics, the physical vessels for AI, and all of the other secondary innovations happening everywhere. So check out this list, and think about where we’re headed, in Q3 and Q4 of 2026.
