As we were finishing this year's TIME100 AI, I had two conversations, with two very different TIME100 AI honorees, that made clear the stakes of this technological transformation. Sundar Pichai, who joined Google in 2004 and became CEO of the world's fourth most valuable company nine years ago, told me that introducing the company's billions of users to artificial intelligence through Google's products amounts to "one of the biggest improvements we've done in 20 years." Speaking that same day, Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee and critic of the company who, as the president of Signal, has become one of the world's most influential advocates for privacy, expressed alarm at the dangers posed by the fact that so much of the AI revolution depends on the infrastructure and decisions of only a handful of big players in tech. Our purpose in creating the TIME100 AI is to put leaders like Pichai and Whittaker in dialogue and to open up their views to TIME's readers. That is why we are excited to share with you the second edition of the TIME100 AI.

What is unique about AI is also what is most feared and celebrated--its ability to match some of our own skills, and then to go further, accomplishing what humans cannot. AI's capacity to model itself on human behavior has become its defining feature. Yet behind every advance in machine learning and large language models are, in fact, people--both the often obscured human labor that makes large language models safer to use, and the individuals who make critical decisions on when and how to best use this technology. Reporting on people and influence is what TIME does best. That led us to the TIME100 AI.

We’re entering a “new era of science”--we finally have enough data and technology to truly enable better drugs for patients, says insitro CEO Daphne Koller.

It takes courage to speak truth to the most powerful technology companies in the world. Timnit Gebru is a truth teller. Gebru was the most senior Black woman to lead a team of AI ethicists at Google, hired to find issues and improve the technology. She was ultimately fired after co-authoring a paper that did just that; it exposed racial discrimination and environmental harm in large-scale artificial intelligence systems at the company. Her ousting sparked protests by scholars and Google employees around the world.

Artificial intelligence is transforming our world. The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang. In 2003, amid great skepticism, Huang directed his company Nvidia to adapt chips designed to paint graphics on computer screens, known as graphics processing units or GPUs, to perform other, more general-purpose computing tasks. The resulting advancements--and powerful chips--laid a foundation that could accommodate much bigger neural networks, the programs behind much of today's AI. In the process, he has helped enable a revolution that allows phones to answer questions out loud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs--with more wonders to come.

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg has been named one of the ten most influential people in science in 2019 by the journal Nature. The 16 year old has been named alongside a neurologist who brought pig brains back to life and a palaeontologist who shook up humanity's family tree. The prestigious British science journal, which celebrated its 150th anniversary this year, says the Swedish campaigner'channelled the rage of a generation'. She had outshone scientists who couldn't'galvanise global attention' the way she did and many are cheering her along, according to Nature. The ten most influential list also includes a physicist building quantum computers, a biologist editing genes in adult humans and a microbiologist fighting Ebola.

This paper presents a framework for generating adventure games from open data. Focusing on the murder mystery type of adventure games, the generator is able to transform open data from Wikipedia articles, OpenStreetMap and images from Wikimedia Commons into WikiMysteries. Every WikiMystery game revolves around the murder of a person with a Wikipedia article and populates the game with suspects who must be arrested by the player if guilty of the murder or absolved if innocent. Starting from only one person as the victim, an extensive generative pipeline finds suspects, their alibis, and paths connecting them from open data, transforms open data into cities, buildings, non-player characters, locks and keys and dialog options. The paper describes in detail each generative step, provides a specific playthrough of one WikiMystery where Albert Einstein is murdered, and evaluates the outcomes of games generated for the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

"Robots will replace massively humans in the next 10 years." Pierre Pinna aka @ipfconline1 on AI, Big Data and how to react – as C-suite, company and individual. Pierre Pinna, CEO of IPFCONLINE is – on social media – better known as @ipfconline1 on Twitter. Pierre can be counted to the top influential people on the web on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Marketing providing the community with high quality content and insights. Besides that he manages as CEO IPFCOnline a web agency focusing on helping traditional companies in the digital transformation.

Social media marketer Salorix has upgraded its analytics product, Amplify, which is a machine learning program that focuses on social networks. The purpose of Amplify is simple: it searches social media for conversations related to your business. But the program goes beyond just looking for people talking about you. It looks for conversations that are relevant to the products and services you provide - giving you an opportunity to market your product. "It allows brands to build preapproved messages and target people that would be interested in them," Salorix CEO Santanu Bhattacharya told me.