TIME Magazine Snubs Elon Musk in 2024 ‘100 Most Influential in AI’ List, Includes Scarlett Johansson

(L) Tesla CEO Elon Musk leaves the Phillip Burton Federal Building on January 24, 2023 in San Francisco, California. / (C) A protester steps on a picture of Time Magazine in 2017. / (R) Scarlett Johansson attends the “Fly Me To The Moon” photocall on July 11, 2024 in Madrid, Spain.

TIME Magazine placed actress Scarlett Johansson in the running, but left out tech mogul and AI program creator Elon Musk off of its yearly list of the “100 Most Influential People in AI.”

For its 2024 cover, the magazine combined images of eighteen AI leaders, led by Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, with a large image of the “Black Widow” hero.

Released on Thursday, the second annual TIME100 AI edition featured prominent CEOs in the rapidly expanding area, such as Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI, in addition to founders and influencers.

BREAKING: TIME magazine didn’t include Elon Musk in its list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Elon Musk’s xAI has the most powerful AI training system in the world. pic.twitter.com/RNIDhHoiUz

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 5, 2024

Musk was noticeably missing from its list. Musk introduced xAI last summer, and his AI chatbot Grok has gained popularity over competitors like ChatGPT.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose software company has made huge investments in AI startup Anthropic and created a $500 million AI fund to support new startups, is the owner of the old magazine.

“Disclosures are included throughout the TIME100 AI list for any companies mentioned that are backed by Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Salesforce, where TIME’s owner and co-chair, is CEO,” a Time spokesperson told reporters.

Social media backlash followed TIME’s perplexing decision to pass over the founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI .

“Every person on this top 100 list, if asked, would say Elon should be on this list,” one user said on X.

The billionaire established Neuralink in 2016, and the company gained notoriety at the beginning of this year when it successfully implanted a brain chip in a paralyzed patient, enabling him to use his thoughts to surf the web and play video games.

Musk also launched Colossus, the most powerful Nvidia GPU supercomputer in the world, online this past week.

“I thought it was cute that Elon Musk wasn’t on the cover of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI,” another user posted on X. “I had to check for myself when I heard he didn’t make the list at all. My f*cking car drives itself lol.”

Additionally, culture and media critics questioned the inclusion of YouTuber Marques Brownlee and Hollywood actor Anil Kapoor on the list of celebrities which also included actress Scarlett Johansson, who had a falling out with OpenAI over the owner’s alleged use of her voice to train a chatbot without her consent.

Rivals of Musk, such as Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, were also included on the list.

“If the world of AI was dominated by the emergence of startup labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and their competitors in 2023, this year, as critics and champions alike have noted, we’ve seen the outsize influence of a small number of tech giants,” said Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs. “This year’s list offers examples of the possibilities for AI when it moves out of the lab and into the world.”

According to a news release, the list was compiled by TIME’s editors and reporters, who solicited suggestions from numerous “industry executives.”

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