Three VinFuture Prize Laureates Named to TIME's List of 100 Most Influential People in AI

TIME magazine published its fourth annual TIME100 AI list on August 27, 2026, naming the hundred people considered most influential in the development of artificial intelligence worldwide. Among those honored in the Thinkers category were three scientists connected to Vietnam's VinFuture Prize: Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li, and Daniela Rus.

The selection was led by editor Ayesha Javed, who spent months working with TIME journalists and contributors to identify the hundred people who best represent the key themes of the past year in AI. The editorial team solicited recommendations from industry leaders and dozens of independent experts before the final list went to print.

Three scientists, one prize

Yann LeCun, one of the pioneers of deep learning and Meta's longtime chief AI scientist, received the VinFuture Grand Prize in 2024 for his work on so-called world models, systems intended to help artificial intelligence understand the physical laws governing its surroundings. He has since founded his own research lab, AMI Labs, which raised more than a billion dollars in a seed funding round in March 2026.

Fei-Fei Li, former head of Stanford's AI lab and co-creator of the ImageNet database, also received the 2024 VinFuture Grand Prize, for her research into spatial intelligence, the ability of AI systems to understand the three-dimensional structure of the world around them. In 2024, Li co-founded the startup World Labs, which develops Marble, a product for generating three-dimensional worlds from text, images, and video.

The third honoree, Daniela Rus, leads MIT's CSAIL lab and has spent two decades researching robotics. She is also the founder of the startup Liquid AI. She joined the VinFuture Prize's Advisory Board in 2025, a year after LeCun and Li received the organization's top award. TIME placed all three in the Thinkers category, reserved for people shaping the scientific and intellectual foundations of AI development.

A Vietnamese prize on the global map

The VinFuture Prize is a science award established by the Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup, given for breakthrough achievements that accelerate scientific and technological progress worldwide. The 2024 Grand Prize, worth 3 million dollars, went to five researchers in total: alongside LeCun and Li, the honorees included Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Jensen Huang, a group that has largely shaped today's era of deep learning.

The fact that three people connected to this prize appeared on the TIME100 AI list in the same year shows how quickly the VinFuture Prize is building its standing alongside established science awards such as the Nobel Prize or the Turing Award. For Vietnam, a country investing heavily in science and technology, having laureates of its own prize appear on a prestigious American list is seen as confirmation of the initiative's international standing.

Who else made the list

The cover of the global TIME100 AI 2026 edition features a group illustration by Israel G. Vargas depicting, among others, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, and Fei-Fei Li. The Leaders category, alongside the heads of the largest AI labs, also includes people responsible for regulation and infrastructure, such as Doreen Bogdan-Martin, head of the International Telecommunication Union.

TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in the issue's introduction that AI technology underwent a transformation over the past year, moving from a curiosity to a daily tool used by millions of people. He also noted that the industry's development remains deeply divided, pulled between major promises and serious concerns.

Activity in artificial intelligence has been explosive and divisive, full of great promise and great fear - Sam Jacobs, TIME editor-in-chief

What comes next for the list

TIME100 AI has run for four years and gains significance with each edition as an informal barometer of influence in the industry, watched closely by investors, journalists, and tech companies themselves. The presence or absence of a particular name is often discussed as much as the list's overall composition, and this year's edition drew commentary over, among other things, the limited representation of some major tech companies in the Leaders category.

For the AI research community, though, the more important signal is that fundamental research, from world models through spatial intelligence to robotics, continues to be treated as a foundation for the industry's future development, alongside the commercial rollout of large language models. TIME published the full TIME100 AI 2026 list, with profiles of all one hundred people, on its website.