Worldcoin co-founder and billionaire Sam Altman has been named the most powerful personality in Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Time.com.
In the list released on Thursday, Atman whose company has courted controversy in Kenya for the past two months over its controversial data mining activities, including scanning Kenyan citizens' irises, was recognised for his AI innovations.
The tech expert was recognised for his role in setting up OpenAI which developed chatbot, ChatGPT.
Time.com, while recognising the billionaire alluded to the fact that ChatGPT is currently one of the fastest-growing AI products across the globe.
"Among the signatories was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, perhaps the most powerful person in AI today. For a June cover story announcing the TIME100 Companies, our annual list of the most influential companies in the world, he told former Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal that he was at once “very optimistic, and prepared for things to go super wrong at any point.”
"By that point, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had already become one of the fastest-growing new products in the history of technology," read the report in part.
Altman was named alongside fellow investors and innovators including Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic which is behind the creative idea generation platform Claude. X, formerly Twitter, founder Elon Musk and Baidu co-founder Robin Lu were also recognised. Baidu products include the Baidu search engine and Baidu maps.
Altman reiterated that all his AI innovations are aimed at helping society cope with some of the emerging challenges.
“Society is capable of adapting, as people are much smarter and savvier than a lot of the so-called experts think,” he stated.
Various financial publications project Altman's net worth to be in the region of Ksh73 billion (USD 500 million).
Notably, Altman's recognition came a day after his Worldcoin cofounder Alex Blania appeared before the Kenyan National Assembly Ad Hoc Committee that is investigating Worldcoin's operations in Kenya.
The government banned Worldcoin's activities in the country citing data privacy and health concerns. The company has maintained that its operations are above board and denied both allegations.
According to Worldcoin, 650,000 Kenyans have downloaded the digital currency application.
