Indians shine on Time Magazine's 1st-ever top 100 AI list

Several Indians and Indian-origin techies have made it to Time magazine’s inaugural ‘TIME100 AI List’, highlighting the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI).

The youngest individual recognised in the list is 18-year-old Indian-American Sneha Revanur, who recently met with the Joe Biden Administration as part of her work leading Encode Justice, a youth-led movement organizing for ethical AI. Revanur is often called the "Greta Thunberg of AI”.

Neal Khosla, who co-founded telehealth startup Curai Health in 2017, is also on the list.

Romesh and Sunil Wadhwani, Co-Founders of Wadhwani AI, have also been named on the list.

Mumbai-based Wadhwani AI is a non-profit organisation with a mission to develop and deploy AI solutions for social good, including health care, education and agriculture.

Tushita Gupta, also on the list, is the Chief Technology Officer of Refiberd, a US-based company which is building an intelligent sorting for textile-to-textile recycling.

The aim is to revolutionise textile recycling by using AI to identify the composition of various textile items.

Another Indian on the coveted list is Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India. She has spent several years dedicated to breaking language barriers in technology.

The 2023 TIME100 AI issue features a worldwide cover with illustrations by Neil Jamieson for TIME, featuring 28 list-makers including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and more from the new list.

"TIME's mission is to highlight the people and ideas that are making the world a better, more equitable place," said Chief Executive Officer Jessica Sibley.

"At this critical moment of exceptional growth and advancement in AI, we are proud to reveal the first-ever TIME100 AI list to recognise the individuals leading AI innovation, including those advancing major conversations to promote equity in AI,” she added.

The list features 43 CEOs, founders and co-founders -- Elon Musk of xAI, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Andrew Hopkins of Exscientia, Nancy Xu of Moonhub, Kate Kallot of Amini, Pelonomi Moiloa of Lelapa AI, Jack Clark of Anthropic, Raquel Urtasan of Waabi, Aidan Gomez of Cohere and more.

The list features 41 women and nonbinary individuals, including CEO and co-founder of Humane Intelligence Rumman Chowdhury; cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane; COO of Google DeepMind Lila Ibrahim; Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li; artist Linda Dounia Rebeiz, artist Kelly McKernan and more.

Scientists, professors, researchers and activists recognised on the list include computer scientist and artist Joy Buolamwini; researcher Inioluwa Deborah Raji, researcher Timnit Gebru and more.