Caltech Professor and Alum Among TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI
Anima Anandkumar. Courtesy TIME
Anima Anandkumar and Fei-Fei Li (PhD '05) are honored alongside AI power players from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
by Kimm Fesenmaier
Anima Anandkumar, the Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences; and Fei-Fei Li (PhD '05), a winner of the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award in 2020, have been named to the 2026 TIME100 AI list, which ranks the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.
The wide-ranging list is broken up into leaders, innovators, shapers, and thinkers. It features familiar names such as Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos of Prometheus, and Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, as well as perhaps less-expected inclusions such as actor/filmmaker Ben Affleck and YouTuber Hank Green.
The accompanying piece on Anandkumar cites her pioneering work in "AI-powered techniques to model physical processes with lightning-fast speed." In 2020, she introduced the concept of neural operators, AI models that work with continuous mathematical functions rather than discrete data points. These neural operators are well suited for making scientific predictions that are grounded in the continuous, physical world. Anandkumar has worked to apply neural operators in a variety of scientific contexts such as weather forecasting and the optimization of computer chip manufacturing.
Anandkumar is also a member of the United Nations Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board. The TIME story says: "Her focus is on bringing balance and scientific grounding to conversations on how AI can benefit people across the world, particularly in the Global South, at a time when misinformation around the technology is rife."
Anandkumar co-founded Accelerated Understanding, a company scaling such methods into a universal AI model for physical simulation and engineering, and recently announced reaching a milestone of 5 trillion context length to accommodate large spatiotemporal data
Distinguished alumna Li, founding co-director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI institute, was co-advised at Caltech by computer vision expert Pietro Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of Information Science and Technology, and neuroscientist Christof Koch now of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Li is perhaps best known for developing ImageNet, an enormous database of millions of labeled images that helped computers recognize objects, a major boost for AI.
Li is co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a company that aims to develop spatial understanding in artificial intelligence. The TIME piece on Li suggests that the company's technology "could help create 3D worlds for machines to train in before entering the physical world."
The full list appears in TIME.