Lila Ibrahim

Company: Google DeepMindTitle: Chief Operating OfficerIndustry: TechnologyNotable in 2024: Ibrahim spearheaded the release of a free AI platform to be used by scientists worldwide for research into some of society's biggest medical and environmental challenges.

Every AI opportunity is offset by a risk, and few officials within big tech juggle this tension on a daily basis as often as Google DeepMind chief operating officer Lila Ibrahim.

The AI company is behind some of the most significant breakthroughs in recent years, from well before ChatGPT was on the scene, with its AlphaGo program doing the "impossible" back in 2015 – beating a human champion of the strategy game Go. In 2020, the company launched AlphaFold, a breakthrough in biology that can model protein structures and earned the company a Nobel Prize.

Ibrahim is not an AI researcher by training. She followed in the footsteps of her Lebanese immigrant father who was an electrical engineer and raised her in the American Midwest, where she ultimately studied the same discipline at Purdue University.

"I remember [when I was] growing up, he would have these beautiful drawings on his desk at home," Ibrahim told CNN. "And then I would see these pictures turn into microchips that would go into things like heart pacemakers."

The interest in chips led her to Intel, and then to venture capital, and after that to Coursera, the online education company founded by the Stanford AI researchers Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. She joined DeepMind in between its Go and Nobel Prize wins, in 2018, after 50 hours of interviews for the job as the company's first COO.

Why she took the job, and how she sees her mission, are constant topics in her public interviews, and it often comes back to the responsibilities incumbent on the makers of AI, and every member of society. As she sees it, whether it is the COO of DeepMind or workers upskilling themselves, or corporations needing to factor AI into workplace operations and culture, we need to learn now.

"We're never going to have as much time as we have now," she said in a Think with Google video interview with Katie Couric. "I feel like I am exactly at the right job at the right time."

Ibrahim often cites the AI opportunities that exist at the level of the most fundamental understandings of the world and all the way down to the most personal aspects of our daily lives. In the field of science, such as in biology and chemistry, a billion years of PhD research time has been saved by the AlphaFold innovation now being used by nearly three million researchers across close to 200 countries.

Growing up with a sister who had cerebral palsy and graduated second in her high school class, and now as mother of twin daughters – one who is neurodiverse – Ibrahim thinks of the educational assistance that AI can offer in the form of personalized tutoring which has barely begun to be tapped.

With everything going on in gen AI, from the frontier models to the new frontiers in science and education, Ibrahim is part evangelist and part professional neurotic. "Part of my job is to worry every day," she told Couric. "How do we maximize the benefits while minimizing the risks?"

But for anyone who has not yet begun to get up to speed on AI, she offered a simple warning in a recent appearance at an Axios event:

"AI is not slowing down."