As the secrecy at multi-billion dollar Big AI companies becomes increasingly apparent, it also becomes more and more clear that true accountability is going to rely on insiders coming forward with inf...
Billy Perrigo
Billy Perrigo is a tech correspondent at TIME magazine. He mostly writes about how artificial intelligence and social media platforms are reshaping our world. He broke the news that OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning less than $2 per hour to detoxify ChatGPT—work that left many of them traumatized. He was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2022 for his article Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop. The details first revealed in that story are the basis of an ongoing lawsuit against Meta in Kenya, and preceded a successful vote to unionize by many of the affected workers.
Billy has interviewed and profiled the world's most influential AI CEOs, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis. He has authored TIME cover stories about OpenAI, Facebook, and Twitter. And he loves profiling smaller companies or nonprofits that are trying to improve the tech ecosystem like Karya, Signal, Block Party, and DAIR.
As well as reporting tech-focused stories, Billy covered news from around the globe including the COVID-19 pandemic, the fallout from Brexit in the U.K., and the transformation of India under Narendra Modi.
He graduated with a first-class degree in modern history from the University of Warwick. His dissertation was a study of how emerging communications technologies facilitated the rise of Hindu nationalism in postcolonial India. At the time, he was an investigative reporter and deputy news editor for his student newspaper, the Warwick Boar.
