Billy Perrigo

Billy Perrigo is a correspondent at TIME based in the London bureau. He covers the tech industry, focusing the companies reshaping our world in strange and unexpected ways. His investigation ‘Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell Prize.

Recent Articles

Sam Altman

Last year was a huge one for Sam Altman. The OpenAI CEO rocketed to household name status, was sought by dozens of world leaders for his audience, and saw his personal wealth balloon, all thanks...

By Billy Perrigo

Jensen Huang

The leather-jacketed CEO of Nvidia has long been seen as something of a tech rockstar. But it was presumably a first even for Jensen Huang when, at a tech expo in Taipei in June, a...

By Billy Perrigo

Kauna Malgwi

Kauna Malgwi had just started at university in northern Nigeria when the terrorist group Boko Haram began a major insurgency. The Islamist militants, whose name means “western education is forbidden,” carried out raids on universities...

By Billy Perrigo

Jade Leung

Pay packages in the AI industry are some of the most generous in tech. Salaries in the U.K. government… not so much. So Jade Leung took a big pay cut when, in October 2023, she...

By Billy Perrigo

Dario Amodei

As a young researcher, Dario Amodei helped prove the so-called “scaling laws” of AI: the observation that neural networks perform reliably better given more data and computing power. The finding underpins almost everything about today’s...

By Billy Perrigo

Mophat Okinyi

At great personal cost, Mophat Okinyi helped to make ChatGPT a success. A former content moderator based in Kenya, his job was to read and label thousands of descriptions of toxic content—rape, child sexual abuse,...

By Billy Perrigo

Iason Gabriel

Iason Gabriel is a rare sight at a big tech company: a political theorist with a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. He’s Google DeepMind’s point-man on the philosophical underpinnings of AI “alignment,” or the...

By Billy Perrigo

Helen Toner

In mid-November of 2023, Helen Toner made what will likely be the most pivotal decision of her career. Together with three other members of OpenAI’s board, she voted to fire Sam Altman from his role...

By Billy Perrigo

Amanda Askell

Amanda Askell’s nickname at Anthropic, the AI firm where she works, is the “Claude whisperer.” Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, has a reputation in the industry for being friendly, curious, and maybe a little more creative than...

By Billy Perrigo/San Francisco

Ilya Sutskever

OpenAI’s former chief scientist has had a tumultuous year. Ilya Sutskever, once widely regarded as perhaps the most brilliant mind at OpenAI, voted in his capacity as a board member last November to remove Sam...

By Billy Perrigo

Chris Olah

Until very recently, it was a truism that nobody really understood the inner workings of neural networks. Sure, scientists could tell you that the algorithms learn to spot patterns in massive amounts of data. But...

By Billy Perrigo/San Francisco

Geoffrey Irving

Geoffrey Irving has good news and bad news. The good news: he thinks AI alignment, or the task of “making the machines do what we want” as he puts it, is a solvable problem. The...

By Billy Perrigo

Jonathan Ross

Jonathan Ross had already made his name at Google, designing the custom chips that the company would go on to train its AI models on, when Amazon and Microsoft came calling. It was 2016, and...

By Billy Perrigo/Dubai

Victor Riparbelli

Deepfakes as a service: that’s Synthesia’s business model. But it’s not what it sounds like. The London-based AI company offers businesses a platform to turn any document or webpage into an engaging video hosted by...

By Billy Perrigo

Satya Nadella

Back in 1993, the man who would eventually become Microsoft’s CEO was working as a marketing manager at the company. A video from that year shows Satya Nadella, wearing a pair of ’70s-style spectacles and...

By Billy Perrigo

Mark Zuckerberg

A couple of years ago, it looked like Mark Zuckerberg’s influence may have peaked. Beset by safety scandals, he renamed Facebook to Meta and poured billions of dollars into creating the “metaverse.” The billionaire CEO...

By Billy Perrigo

Saffron Huang and Divya Siddarth

Today, building AI is as much an infrastructural challenge as it is a scientific one: it requires the marshaling of vast quantities of computer hardware, data, and human talent. This means that only the world’s...

By Billy Perrigo

Sundar Pichai

It’s hard to imagine what modern life would look like without Google. Its search business prints hundreds of billions of dollars in yearly revenue, and starting over two decades ago, Google began channeling some of...

By Billy Perrigo

Aravind Srinivas

Online, Aravind Srinivas displays swagger. In person, the 30-year-old has the demeanor of a man not used to being the center of attention. Sitting down for an interview in May, the CEO of the AI...

By Billy Perrigo/San Francisco

Research Reveals Global Divide in AI Chip Power

A new peer-reviewed paper, shared exclusively with TIME, set out to map AI across the globe. The findings were stark.

By Billy Perrigo
More from TIME
More From TIME