TIME 100 Most Influential Companies is live
I wrote about Scale AI, G42, DeepL, and more...
TIME’s annual list of the 100 most influential companies on the planet (in no particular order) has gone live minutes ago. Those in the AI industry continue to account for a substantial chunk of the list, many of which I had the privilege of writing about:
G42, the Emirati national champion, which, it was announced in May, will build the largest AI infrastructure project outside the U.S. Some have expressed concerns about giving an autocratic state with a history of surveillance and human rights abuses a greater hand in AI development. Chief marketing and communications officer Faheem Ahamed told me he sees things differently, however: “My humble view is that [the] UAE has one of the strongest democratic values as a society.”
Scale AI, the data-labelling industry titan that has been in the news recently after its founder jumped ship to Meta. A newer side of Scale’s business, which builds AI applications for large organizations, is “growing extremely fast,” interim CEO Jason Droege told me.
DeepSeek, the Chinese upstart that took the world by storm—but perhaps not for the reasons you’ve heard before.
SandboxAQ, the Alphabet spinout building models to help crack hard problems.
DeepL, the Germany-based AI translation company that has managed to stand out from Big Tech and win 200,000 customers, including governments and half of the Fortune 500.
While not an AI company, I also wrote a fun one about Nintendo that’s worth checking out. Also, my talented colleague, Andrew Chow, wrote a cover story about self-driving taxi company Waymo (I took my first Waymo while in San Francisco in February, and it kind of blew my mind.)