Ashwini Vaishnaw, Anil Kapoor among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI

Union Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and actor Anil Kapoor are among Indians who have been honoured in Time magazine's prestigious list of the 100 "Most Influential People in AI 2024".

The list, released on Thursday, features 15 Indian or Indian-origin people. Among them are Sundar Pichai of Google, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft.

Writing about 54-year-old Vaishnaw, the magazine said under his leadership, India hopes to become one of the top five countries for semiconductor manufacturing—a key component for modern AI systems within the next five years.

"Yet, Vaishnaw faces significant challenges in realising these ambitions. India's tech sector struggles with low private R&D investment and a lack of advanced manufacturing ecosystems. Its educational system is also catching up to produce the specialised workforce needed for cutting-edge AI and semiconductor development," it said.

India—the world’s fifth largest economy—is trying to become a major player in the world of AI, it said.

Kapoor, 67, has been included in Time’s AI list after a landmark victory in September 2023 over unauthorised AI use of his likeness.

The actor took up the case after a large number of distorted videos, gifs, and emojis bearing his likeness began circulating online.

Nilekani, 69, is the Co-founder of Infosys and Co-founder and chairman of EkStep.

"Nilekani, the billionaire co-founder of Infosys, has spent fifteen years in and out of government developing digital public infrastructure for the world’s most populous country, earning him nicknames like 'India's Bill Gates'," the magazine wrote about the entrepreneur.

"Nilekani led India’s Aadhaar programme, the world’s largest biometric identity card programme. He promoted the programme as a salve to welfare fraud, alongside a means to help improve tax collection, and ease bank customer verification, among other benefits," the magazine added.

“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...," TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs said.

The 2024 TIME100 AI list featured 40 CEOs, Founders and Co-founders, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Pichai of Google, Nadella of Microsoft and Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity, among others.

Amba Kak, Co-executive Director, of AI Now Institute; Arati Prabhakar, Director of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy; and Divya Siddarth, Co-founder of Collective Intelligence Project, were among the women leaders featured in the list.

Other Indians or Indian-origin leaders in AI in the list include Rohit Prasad, SVP and head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence, Amazon; Shiv Rao, Co-founder and CEO, Abridge; Anant Vijay Singh, Product Lead at Proton; Dwarkesh Patel, Host, Dwarkesh Podcast; Amandeep Singh Gill, United Nations Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology; and Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures.