Posts by Sophie Clearwater
TIME100 AI 2026: Yann LeCun
Mark Zuckerberg called Yann LeCun one Sunday last November. Word had gotten out that LeCun, who built Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, was leaving to start his own venture. Zuckerberg urged him to stay. Good luck raising the money and good luck building a product the market would believe, LeCun recalls him saying. The…
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: Veronyka Gimenes
Veronyka Gimenes wants you to know AI can be used to fight back. In 2025, Gimenes and Amanda Claro, co-founders of the Brazilian advocacy group Código Não Binário, created TybyrIA, an open-source AI model for detecting anti-LGBTQIA+ hate speech. The model allowed them to categorize evidence at scale for a lawsuit against social media companies.…
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: Sanmi Koyejo
—Ananya Navale Source link
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: Wafa Ben-Hassine
Since stepping into the role of U.N. Human Rights Office’s first chief of digital technology and human rights earlier this year, Wafa Ben-Hassine has been thinking about ways to better work with decisionmakers on AI. “Instead of just writing endless papers that collect dust, what can we actually do to talk to companies about how…
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: David Autor
In February 2024, the MIT economist David Autor first published his most contrarian notion about generative AI—that, “if used well,” it would create jobs and increase pay. It was something of an about turn for Autor, who had written for decades about why technological advances had hollowed out the middle class. The intervening years have…
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: Philip Colligan
Philip Colligan’s greatest fear is that parents and educators will treat the AI revolution the way they treated the advent of the Internet—which is to say, they won’t engage in teaching children how to responsibly use it until it’s too late. “We are in the middle of those systems being introduced into healthcare, finance, criminal…
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Joseph Gordon-Levitt sees his contribution to the AI conversation as a storyteller, helping people understand what widespread adoption of the technology and the current economic structures around it could mean for them. Companies, he notes, are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. “And that’s not necessarily going to line up with the technology being good for…
Read MoreTIME100 AI 2026: Erin Brockovich
Since the release of the 2000 Oscar-winning movie about her, the name Erin Brockovich has been synonymous with grassroots activism against powerful institutions. This year, Brockovich has turned her attention to a new target: AI data centers. When Brockovich asked people online how they felt about the issue, she received a “flood” of impassioned responses,…
Read MoreTennis Matches Are Heating Up, Literally. Here’s How the Court Became a Living Laboratory for Managing Extreme Temperatures
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d2/a4/d2a4a5b3-aa84-4c59-933c-2965aa312980/img_7337.jpeg?w=1024&resize=1024,1024&ssl=1 "Tennis Matches Are Heating Up, Literally. Here’s How the Court Became a Living Laboratory for Managing Extreme Temperatures")
The sport’s hard-court surfaces can reach some 30 degrees hotter than the surrounding air. With elite players suffering heat illness on the world stage, athletes are following personalized cooling plans Anna Fiorentino | Freelance writer August 27, 2026 8:00 a.m. Tennis courts where the author played at Outbound Sedona in the Arizona heat Outbound Sedona…
Read MoreThe World’s Most Exclusive Tennis Clubs, From Wimbledon to Newport
A New York City tennis permit costs $100 and arrives in the mail about three weeks later. From the first Saturday in April through the Sunday before Thanksgiving, it buys access to roughly 500 public courts shared by 8 million people. The rest comes down to a paper sign-up sheet taped to a fence at…
Read More3 Big Questions After Meta’s $18 Billion Teen Safety Settlement
How will other tech companies respond? The settlement has an unusual quirk: Meta agreed to pay 70% of the settlement total—some $12.7 billion—over the next decade. But the remaining $5.3 billion is conditional, depending on whether YouTube and TikTok implement similar or more restrictive settings, including a one-hour daily time limit. At a time when…
Read MoreTeen develops a scary brain condition due to horrific weed ‘scromitting’ disorder
There’s a popular belief that weed can’t kill you. While it’s almost impossible to overdose on weed by itself, marijuana use can indirectly cause life-threatening complications. A 15-year-old learned this the hard way, a new case study reveals. His is one of only two recorded cases in teens in which “scromitting,” slang for cannabinoid hyperemesis…
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