The AI players to watch in 2026

Artificial intelligence is the most exhaustively covered technology since the dawn of the internet. As any tech editor will tell you, it can be challenging to find stories about AI that are not merely new but big.

So when our editorial director, Jill Bernstein, forwarded me a pitch from journalist John Pavlus, who wanted to write about a “mad scientist” attempting to “stomp out hallucinations and other gen-AI nonsense from Amazon’s cloud security/ chatbots/robots/agents,” I said yes in seconds. (He actually used a more pungent term than “nonsense,” but for decorum’s sake, I’m keeping that to myself.) 

And then I braced myself. 

The pitch promised to explain the “abstruse formal mathematics” behind “neuro-symbolic AI,” a totally different kind of AI that is not based on the kind of large language models that power ChatGPT and just about every other AI product that has infiltrated our lives over the past three years. The mad scientist was Byron Cook, who heads up Amazon’s automated reasoning group. 

Reader, I trust your intelligence, but this sounded like heady stuff. My concern was not that the piece wouldn’t be smart or interesting. It was that you might need to be Byron Cook himself to understand it. 

I needn’t have worried. I’ve worked with countless reporters over my three-decade career, and many of them dazzled me with their brilliance. But I’m not sure I’ve worked with anyone as gifted as Pavlus at translating the difficult into the digestible, let alone the delightful. See his story, “Amazon’s hallucination hunter.”  

This article closes out our third annual AI 20 package. For this year’s list, global technology editor Harry McCracken and senior editor Max Ufberg set out to identify the unheralded “scientists and ethicists, CEOs and investors, and Big Tech veterans and first-time founders” of the AI universe, as McCracken writes in the introduction. “Household names, they’re not. Yet they’re already changing our world, with much more to come.” 

You may have noticed that I’ve now spent nearly 300 words touting our AI coverage without using the word bubble. That was intentional, and a bit superstitious. Do you have any idea how nerve-racking it is to produce a quarterly print magazine, in the age of AI, amid one of the frothiest stock markets in history, hoping that the tech reporting will hold? 

Because of course it’s a bubble. The question is when it will pop, and how loudly, and how long it will take for the market (and the industry) to recover and settle into a more sustainable trajectory, with costs and revenue in alignment and real value returned to shareholders. A bubble can be a bubble and still be revolutionary, as we learned after the dotcom crash of the early 2000s. 

Not everyone agrees, of course, especially the publicist, gadfly, podcaster, and mini media mogul Ed Zitron, who has become famous predicting that AI isn’t just a bubble but a colossal fraud. He makes his case to McCracken in “Meet Ed Zitron, AI’s original prophet of doom.”

View the full article