Ashwini Vaishnaw, Anil Kapoor in Time’s most influential in AI list

INDIA's information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, and actor Anil Kapoor are among the Indians named in Time magazine's 2024 list of the 100 "Most Influential People in AI".

The list, released on Thursday, highlights 15 individuals of Indian origin, including Sundar Pichai of Google and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

The magazine noted Vaishnaw’s role in leading India’s efforts to become one of the top five countries in semiconductor manufacturing, a crucial element 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," the magazine stated.

India, the world’s fifth-largest economy, is positioning itself as a significant player in AI, the magazine added.

Kapoor, aged 67, made the list following a landmark legal victory in September 2023 against the unauthorised AI use of his likeness. He took legal action after several distorted videos, GIFs, and emojis of his likeness appeared online without permission.

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and EkStep, was also featured on the list. The magazine described Nilekani as "India’s Bill Gates" and highlighted his work on digital public infrastructure in India.

"Nilekani led India's Aadhaar programme, the world's largest biometric identity card programme. He promoted the programme as a solution to welfare fraud and a tool to improve tax collection and simplify bank customer verification," Time wrote.

TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs said that while AI innovation in 2023 was driven by startup labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, 2024 has seen the influence of a few major tech companies.

The 2024 TIME100 AI list includes prominent figures such as Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft.

Women leaders like 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 also highlighted in the list.

Other Indians and Indian-origin leaders in AI who made the list include Rohit Prasad, SVP and head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon, Shiv Rao, co-founder and CEO of Abridge, Anant Vijay Singh, product lead at Proton, Dwarkesh Patel, host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, Amandeep Singh Gill, UN secretary-general's envoy on technology, and Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.

(With inputs from PTI)