Time Magazine released its annual 100 Most Influential People list on Thursday, and for the first time, two business leaders have made it—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
Altman has emerged into the spotlight this past year for OpenAI’s release of the ChatGPT AI chatbot, while Chew’s actions are under the watchful eye of several governments considering banning TikTok due to the connection to Chinese tech company ByteDance.
In Time’s list, Altman was recognized in a blurb by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Chesky wrote, “If anyone knows where this is going, it’s Sam. But Sam also knows that he doesn’t have all the answers. He often says, ‘What do you think? Maybe I’m wrong?'”
There has been both praise and skepticism around the AI chatbot ChatGPT, as it is feared it could lead to plagiarism and the spread of misinformation, without the necessary guardrails. Altman himself has voiced his concerns around the potentials of AI, once saying that a best-case scenario for AI could be “so unbelievably good it’s hard for him to imagine,” but that a worst-case scenario could be “lights out for all of us.”
Moreover, Chew has recently testified before Congress about TikTok’s data privacy policies, following the Biden administrations’ threat to ban TikTok from the US if ByteDance does not sell its shares.
OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory, co-founded by Sam Altman and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. OpenAI focuses on developing artificial general intelligence with the mission of positively impacting humanity. The company is currently focusing on ensuring that safe, human-level artificial intelligence (AGI) is available to as many people as possible and is advancing the field of artificial intelligence in numerous domains such as robotics, language, and reinforcement learning.
Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur and startup investor. He is the current CEO of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research laboratory he co-founded in 2015, and was the former president of Y Combinator, the seed accelerator and venture capital firm. Altman is a prominent figure in Silicon Valley and beyond, he’s had notable successes with companies like Reddit, Airbnb, and Instacart. Altman is also a sought-after advisor to industry leaders and is incredibly outspoken on the potential and current perils of artificial intelligence.
