At TIME100 Impact Dinner, AI Leaders Raise a Glass to Centering Humanity

Leaders, innovators. and visionaries from the world of artificial intelligence gathered at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco on Monday night for the second annual TIME100 AI Impact Dinner to explore and discuss AI’s far-reaching impact across business and society. The event celebrates the third annual TIME100 AI list, which highlights the 100 most influential people in AI. This year’s list includes 84 new honorees—a testament to the dynamism of the field—with those selected ranging in age from 15 to nearly 80. The aim of the TIME list is to show how it is people, not machines, that will determine the direction of AI, and honorees were drawn from every angle of the discipline. The event culminated in four toasts delivered by 2025 TIME100 AI honorees, who highlighted the importance of guiding AI responsibly, including with regulation; protecting human creativity; and fostering collaboration between human and machine intelligence. Focusing on humanity first Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (IASEAI), delivered the first toast—a provocative call to make wise choices about how we use AI, given the high existential stakes involved. Russell, who has long warned that building AI systems more intelligent than humans when we don’t know how to control them reliably could destroy civilization, called it an “unsettling truth” that we have “no idea” where large language models (LLMs) will take us. “LLMs are trained to imitate human beings. In the process, we suspect they absorb human-like goals. … [But] this is a fundamental error,” he said, adding we need to “recognize the possibility that not only may the bus of humanity” be headed towards a cliff, “but the steering wheel is missing and the driver is blindfolded.” Yet he tempered the gloom with some optimism, noting that it was possible, “if we choose to open our eyes and act together,” to change direction. “We can still build AI systems whose only purpose is to serve the interests of human beings,” he said. He reflected that if beneficial coexistence between humanity and superior AI systems proved impossible, his hope was the “most intelligent and well-designed AI systems” would recognize this and gracefully withdraw, “allowing us to shape our own future.” He closed by raising a glass to “a better future shaped by and for humanity, with or without AI.” Advancing not stifling creativity Kakul Srivastava, CEO of music-sample marketplace Splice, delivered the next toast, which honored human creativity and emphasized the importance of technology that enables rather than restricts it. Srivastava shared her personal journey of coming to America when she was eight and how she has spent her career serving the needs of creative people, with her work at Splice now “enabling music makers,” including with AI tools. “We also know that a world without art is dangerous,” she said. She went on to highlight how creativity today was “under attack” on multiple fronts: from a society that still values “hard sciences over making art”; to social media which “absorbs our attention, leaving little time for the introspection required of art”; to some forms of AI, which “treat our artistic work as fodder for faceless training models.” Srivastava called on those “designing the tools of tomorrow” to make sure they give creative people choices and pathways to explore. “AI tools must put creators and their creative process first,” she said. She ended by raising a glass to the “quiet, difficult work of human creativity” and that it continues to be fostered. Collaboration for greater connection The next toast was given by Refik Anadol, the media artist who co-founded Dataland, a museum dedicated to AI arts, and who was behind the 2025 TIME100 AI cover art. Anadol praised the potential for collaborating with AI to help us understand and feel the world in new ways. He started by turning back time to the first human painting on a cave wall—and what that gesture meant as an act of memory, imagination, and hope. He then drew a parallel with what he is trying to do in his work today, only with experiences coming from data. “When I think about the future of AI, I see a new form of collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence that can help us understand our world in deeper, more connected ways,” he said. He explained how AI allows us, for example, to “listen to the patterns of nature” and help us translate complexity into feeling. “It can turn data into something we care deeply about, because every dataset is a record of life,” he said, stressing the importance of building AI with consent, credit, and care. He ended by raising a glass to intelligence—both human and artificial—that “helps us feel the world as something connected, beautiful, and full of wonder.” A plea for reflection The final toast of the evening came from Natasha Lyonne, actor and co-founder of the Asteria Film Co. Lyonne used her toast to appeal to those in the crowd to do far more to rein in AI.  She explained how she had come to espouse a “measure of concern around the potential for a collective tumble down into the world of AI without clear guardrails or open eyes.” Addressing the audience, whom she called “winners,” she implored AI leaders to “responsibly reassess” their own motives and the industry’s impacts and direction. “For reasons unknown, we have willingly submitted to a full surveillance state, done away with all copyright law, agreed to data theft for illusory convenience, and, perhaps most egregiously, allowed for sweeping and irresponsible data farming in our working class communities, a clear and present danger to our environment and society. What are we doing, friends?,” Lyonne lamented. “There’s no need to be quite so ruthless with our own species, folks.”  Still, she felt the bus could be turned around. “I believe we can wrestle some grace back here if we get unified around our shared humanity,” she said. “An optimist? In this economy? In this regime? And yet, here I stand humbly before you wanting to believe.” TIME100 Impact Dinner: Leaders Shaping the Future of AI was presented by PepsiCo, Cognizant, General Catalyst, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.