이미지: @GoogleResearch (X) · METAL LAB 편집
Summary
- Dr. Marian Croak has been included in TIME's newly published TIME100 AI 2026 list.
- Google Research's official X account personally congratulated her on the news and pointed followers to her TIME profile page.
- Dr. Croak is known for her early work on VoIP and for leading responsible AI research at Google.
What happened
Google Research's official X account posted on August 27 announcing that Dr. Marian Croak had been named to TIME's newly released TIME100 AI 2026 list. The account described it as "an honor recognizing her leadership and legacy as a pioneer in AI" and directed readers to the profile page TIME published. The tweet itself was a brief congratulatory message, but it's notable that a company's official account chose to personally amplify an external award given to one of its own people.
What this means
TIME100 AI is TIME's annual list highlighting 100 people who have shaped the artificial intelligence field. For 2026, TIME split the list into four categories: 26 Leaders, 25 Innovators, 25 Shapers, and 24 Thinkers. Dr. Marian Croak was placed in the Thinkers category.
The full TIME100 AI 2026 list
Below is the complete roster of 100 names, following the order in TIME's official full list, with joint profiles split into individual entries and a brief title or affiliation added for each person.
Leaders (26)
- Mark Chen — Chief Research Officer, OpenAI
- Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI
- Greg Brockman — President, OpenAI
- Elon Musk — CEO, SpaceX
- Dario Amodei — Co-founder, Anthropic
- Daniela Amodei — Co-founder, Anthropic
- Arvind Krishna — Chairman and CEO, IBM
- Lila Ibrahim — Chief AI Readiness Officer, Google DeepMind
- Liang Rubo — Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, ByteDance
- A.G. Sulzberger — Publisher and Chairman, The New York Times Co.
- Hock Tan — CEO, Broadcom
- Arvind Raman — Acting Director, U.S. CAISI, and Director, NIST
- Jeff Bezos — Founder, Amazon; Co-founder and Co-CEO, Prometheus
- Moustapha Cissé — Founder and CEO, Kera Health Platforms
- Josh Payne — Founder and CEO, Nscale
- Larry Ellison — Co-founder, CTO, and Executive Chairman, Oracle
- He Tingbo — Director, Huawei
- Valerii Borovyk — Founder and CEO, First Contact
- Joëlle Pineau — Chief AI Officer, Cohere
- Matt Garman — CEO, Amazon Web Services
- Ali Ghodsi — Co-founder and CEO, Databricks
- Eddie Wu — CEO, Alibaba
- Elizabeth Reid — Vice President and Head of Search, Google
- Nigel Vaz — CEO, Publicis Sapient
- Michael Intrator — Co-founder and CEO, CoreWeave
- Liang Mong Song — Co-CEO, SMIC
Innovators (25)
- Daniel Nadler — Founder and CEO, OpenEvidence
- Ben Affleck — Actor and filmmaker
- Stella Li — Executive Vice President, BYD
- Michael Truell — Co-founder and CEO, Cursor
- Azalia Mirhoseini — Co-founder, Ricursive Intelligence
- Anna Goldie — Co-founder, Ricursive Intelligence
- Yang Zhilin — Co-founder and CEO, Moonshot AI
- Peter Steinberger — Creator, OpenClaw
- Anima Anandkumar — Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Caltech
- Mohamed Moussa — Co-founder and CTO, Tarteel
- Coerte Voorhees — Writer and filmmaker
- Brendan Foody — Co-founder and CEO, Mercor
- Mikey Shulman — Co-founder and CEO, Suno
- Danielle Boyer — Founder, The STEAM Connection
- Utkarsh Saxena — Co-founder and CEO, Adalat AI
- Uljan Sharka — Founder and CEO, Domyn
- Andrew Feldman — Co-founder and CEO, Cerebras Systems
- Deng Taihua — Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, AgiBot
- Zhang Peng — CEO, Zhipu
- Winston Weinberg — Co-founder and CEO, Harvey
- Suchi Saria — Founder and CEO, Bayesian Health
- Sanjay Mehrotra — Chairman, President, and CEO, Micron Technology
- Vivek Raghavan — Co-founder, Sarvam AI
- Hon Weng Chong — Founder and CEO, Cortical Labs
- Xiao Hong — Founder and CEO, Manus
Shapers (25)
- Doreen Bogdan-Martin — Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), United Nations
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt — Co-founder, Creators Coalition on AI
- Pat Grady — Co-lead, Sequoia Capital
- Alfred Lin — Co-lead, Sequoia Capital
- Bernie Sanders — U.S. Senator, Vermont
- Paris Hilton — Deepfake harm-prevention advocate
- David Sacks — Co-chair, U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
- Angle Bush — Founder, Black Women in Artificial Intelligence
- Alessandra Sala — Co-chair, UNESCO Women for Ethical AI; Senior Director of AI and Data Science, Shutterstock
- Max Tegmark — Founder and Chairman, Future of Life Institute
- Jack Clark — Co-founder and Head of Public Benefit, Anthropic
- Garrett Lord — Co-founder and CEO, Handshake
- Andrea Bartz — Author
- Joe Dominguez — President and CEO, Constellation Energy Group
- Erin Brockovich — Founder, Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
- Sunny Gandhi — Co-Executive Director, Encode
- Bernadette Meehan — CEO, Wikimedia Foundation
- Philip Colligan — CEO, Raspberry Pi Foundation
- Sarah Guo — Founder, Conviction
- Meetali Jain — Executive Director, Tech Justice Law
- Liz Shuler — President, AFL-CIO
- Geoff Ralston — Founder, SAIF
- Wafa Ben-Hassine — Head of Digital Technology and Human Rights, Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
- Andy Konwinski — Co-founder, Databricks, Laude, and Perplexity
- Max Spero — Co-founder and CEO, Pangram Labs
Thinkers (24)
- Mira Murati — Co-founder and CEO, Thinking Machines Lab
- Ilya Sutskever — Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Safe Superintelligence
- Fei-Fei Li — Co-founder and CEO, World Labs; Founding Co-director, Stanford HAI
- Marian Croak — Vice President of Responsible AI and Human-Centered Technology, Google
- Emil Michael — Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and CTO, U.S. Department of Defense
- Yann LeCun — Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs
- Ravi Kumar S — CEO, Cognizant
- Zhou Bowen — Director and Chief Scientist, Shanghai AI Laboratory
- Chelsea Finn — Co-founder, Physical Intelligence
- Beth Barnes — Founder and CEO, METR
- Veronyka Gimenes — Co-founder and Executive Director, Código Não Binário
- Hank Green — YouTuber
- Daniela Rus — Director, MIT CSAIL; Co-founder, Liquid AI
- Owain Evans — Director, Truthful AI
- Ayoung Kim — Artist
- Sanmi Koyejo — Co-founder, Virtue AI
- Karine Perset — Deputy Head of AI and Emerging Digital Technology, OECD
- Alex Rives — Head of Science, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
- Newton Campbell Jr. — Senior AI Researcher, NASA OCIO; Board Member, The Planetary Society
- Josh Parker — Head of Sustainability, Nvidia
- David Autor — Professor of Economics, MIT
- Darío Gil — Under Secretary for Science, U.S. Department of Energy
- Andy Masley — Researcher and writer
- Chad Edwards — Co-founder and CEO, CuspAI
Dr. Croak is known for having led engineering organizations at Google over a long career. In the 1970s and '80s, while at AT&T Bell Labs, she is widely credited with contributing to the early development of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the technology that lets voice calls travel over the internet. After moving to Google, she reportedly went on to lead work related to responsible AI research and has also been recognized as an inventor holding hundreds of patents. Her career trajectory — moving from a long tenure in engineering leadership at a major tech company to a broader focus on AI safety and responsibility — reflects a pattern seen among a number of industry veterans in recent years.
Why it matters
The recognition itself doesn't signal a new technology or product launch. But it does offer a window into how outside media are evaluating leadership across the AI industry, and how a company like Google chooses to publicize awards given to its own people. No separate domestic coverage of this list has surfaced yet, but for Korea's AI industry, it's a useful reference point for seeing how global tech giants spotlight their talent's leadership and safety-research credentials.
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