10 people who shaped science in 2023

On August 23, the investigation took place Chandrayaan-3 India has added to a very small group of countries – the former Soviet Union, the United States and China – that have sent a rover to the moon. And for Engineer Kalpana Kalahastiit was the culmination of years of work: she was at the head of the team that, in 2019, witnessed the collision of the previous mission with our satellite, and it was necessary to design a machine that would benefit, while maintaining the same characteristics from the mistakes of its predecessors.

The success of the mission has been an inspiration not only to the Indian space ecosystem but to many other countries – and even companies – that now hope to reach this level as well. As for Kalpana Kalahasti, who joined the Indian Space Agency in 2000, she talks about the future: The agency wants to send a mission to recover lunar rocks.

List of the magazine’s ten key people nature It does not include scholars only: we find it among others Marina Silva As Brazil’s new environment minister, he became the de facto “protector of the Amazon.” or Eleni Merivelli As the UN’s new global heat head, his mission is to support adaptation projects or mitigation measures that will reduce deaths and the impacts of heatwaves, especially in cities.

But it was also inevitable that an AI expert would make the list, especially one who was concerned about risks. The choice fell on the computer scientist Ilya Sutskevera machine learning pioneer, became chief scientist at OpenAi, where he helped launch the blockbuster version of ChatGPT just a year ago.

It is clearly the tension between concerns about these very rapid developments, and the promises made by their promoters, that led, for a few days in November, to the firing and then return of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, a saga in which Sutskever appears to have played . A major role. But the tension is not limited to OpenAI, it will remain on the agenda in 2024.