At TIME100 Impact Dinner, AI Leaders Discuss the Technology's Transformative Potential

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, researcher and Brookings Institution fellow Chinasa T. Okolo, director of the U.S. Artificial Safety Institute (AISI) Elizabeth Kelly, and Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S, discussed the transformative power of AI during a panel at a TIME100 Impact Dinner in San Francisco on Monday. During the discussion, which was moderated by TIME's editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, Kurzweil predicted that we will achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that might be smarter than humans, by 2029. "Nobody really took it seriously until now," Kurzweil said about AI. "People are convinced it's going to either endow us with things we'd never had before, or it's going to kill us." Cognizant sponsored Monday's event, which celebrated the 100 most influential people leading change in AI. Jacobs probed the four panelists--three of whom were named to the 2024 list--about the opportunities and challenges presented by AI's rapid advancement.