As we were finishing this year’s TIME100 AI, I had two conversations, with two very different TIME100 AI honorees, that made clear the stakes of this technological transformation. Sundar Pichai, who joined Google in 2004 and became CEO of the world’s fourth most valuable company nine years ago, told me that introducing the company’s billions of users to artificial intelligence through Google’s products amounts to “one of the biggest improvements we’ve done in 20 years.” Speaking that same day, Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee and critic of the company who, as the president of Signal, has become one of the world’s most influential advocates for privacy, expressed alarm at the dangers posed by the fact that so much of the AI revolution depends on the infrastructure and decisions of only a handful of big players in tech. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Our purpose in creating the TIME100 AI is to put leaders like Pichai and Whittaker in dialogue and to open up their views to TIME’s readers.