Several Bay Area innovators and power players were named to Time magazine's new list of the 100 most influential people of the year.
Among them are onetime colleagues turned rivals Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
They co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but Musk left in 2018 after internal disagreements and a failed takeover attempt. The artificial intelligence research lab has catalyzed a global race to develop advanced generative AI systems since it launched its image and text generators, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, last year.
OpenAI has raised at least $3 billion since 2015, primarily from Microsoft, with which it also signed a multiyear agreement worth $10 billion.
In recent months, Musk has publicly voiced his disagreements with OpenAI, calling it "a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft" in a February tweet.
In March, Musk signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing advanced AI systems more powerful than OpenAI's most powerful capabilities. The letter was published by the Future of Life Institute, which lists Musk as an advisor.
Musk's other companies need no introduction: Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company and, as of nearly six months ago, Twitter.
Altman previously co-founded Loopt, an early location-based social app, and was president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. More recently, he also co-founded a crypto company called Worldcoin.
On Friday, he responded to the Future of Life Institute's letter during an appearance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I think moving with caution and an increasing rigor for safety issues is really important,” Altman said, according to CNBC. “The letter I don’t think was the optimal way to address it” and it was "missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause.”
The two men were not the only Bay Area players on Time's list.
Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs was also recognized on the list. Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, uses her wealth to fund investments and philanthropic ventures through an impact lens.
"She shines a light on people finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems, whether climate change, a struggling education system, or endemic poverty," musician Yo-Yo Ma wrote about Powell Jobs for Time.
Powell Jobs maintains a low profile but gave a rare interview to the Wall Street Journal last year.
“Growing wealth is not interesting to me,” Powell Jobs told the WSJ. “What’s interesting to me is working with people and listening to them and helping to solve problems. I also felt that given my life experiences, I was in a place where I was old enough that I knew I wasn’t going to change — I wasn’t going to get corrupted. I felt I was in a good place to try to deploy it.”
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist Andrea Kritcher was also named on the list.
In December, researchers at the Emeryville laboratory announced that they had achieved a milestone in nuclear fusion by producing more energy than the reaction consumed.
"Kritcher’s insights helped bring about the first-ever controlled fusion ignition in December 2022, a holy grail in physics research that had eluded scientists for decades, and another step on the road to fusion power," Time wrote.
You can read the full list of Time's "Most Influential People" of 2023 here.
