South African professor featured in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI
Benjamin Rosman is one of three South Africans to be featured in Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI list, receiving the recognition in 2025 for driving South Africa’s theoretical contributions.
He is a professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, head of the MIND Institute and a leader of top AI research programmes in the country.
In Time’s list, he was named alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Strive Masiyiwa and many other influential individuals driving the technology.
Though his academic career began at Wits, Rosman earned his PhD in Intelligent Robotics and a Master’s in AI at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this, he earned several degrees at Wits.
He first earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Computational and Applied Mathematics, then received two Honours degrees in the field.
Rosman’s unique stance on generative AI, which Bill Gates said was the “most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface”, is aggressively African.
His insight into foreign AI and its impact on South Africans and people across Africa is hinged on pragmatism.
Soon after being listed by Time, he wrote that American AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta’s LLaMA were holding back South African innovation and advancement in the field.
“These impressive technologies are the digital equivalent of massive foreign-owned refineries,” he wrote.
“They process vast amounts of data and produce powerful insights, but are overwhelmingly shaped by priorities, values and assumptions from outside the continent.”
When used in African contexts, the models frequently produce bias and misunderstand local cultures, harvesting data from users and turning them into hapless products to be mined.
“To avoid this fate, South Africa must urgently invest in building and operating its own AI refineries,” he said.
“If we fail to do so, we will remain dependent on foreign-controlled AI systems, surrendering control over critical aspects of our social and economic future.”
Driving the next generation of AI researchers in South Africa
In 2019, before becoming the head of Wits’ AI think tank and before ChatGPT changed the world in November 2022, Rosman, as a senior lecturer, said that AI would disrupt “every aspect of our lives.”
“We cannot afford to take a back seat in one of the most important pursuits of modern science. If the aim is to target a number of flaws in society, then we should be at the helm,” he said at the time.
Since then, he has been involved in advancing the local implementation of the technology. He is one of the co-founders of Lelapa AI, a research lab building LLMs designed for African languages.
In March 2025, Microsoft President Brad Smith revealed that Lelapa AI was one of the tech giant’s global startup partners. Lelapa mostly deals in languages and translation.
It developed Vulavula, a natural language processing platform that can transcribe, translate and analyse text when spoken to in local languages.
Rosman remains the chief science officer at Lelapa AI, though part-time, with efforts focused more on expanding local AI research and supporting young researchers in the field.
In this, he runs the Robotics, Autonomous Intelligence and Learning (RAIL) Laboratory at Wits, a research and learning lab dedicated to conducting science in AI systems.
Its vision is to serve as a prominent centre of excellence and a hub for AI activities in Africa. One of its most recent publications centred on how humans communicate with robots.
In 2024, he founded the MIND Institute, an acronym for Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery, a platform to invest in and promote research and development from Africa’s AI experts.
A year later, the institute received a R16.5 million grant from Google, part of a R612 million investment the tech giant pledged towards companies and institutes across the African continent.
The company said the investment in Wits’ MIND Institute aligned with its mission to accelerate scientific discovery through external collaborations that create practical impact.
International acclaim and Google grants
Rosman was also made a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in Learning in Machines and Brains, pursuing the discovery of how machines become intelligent.
The institute combines aspects of both neuro and computer science to investigate how brains and AI systems learn, expanding research in neuroscience and improving AI engineering.
Rosman was also a National Geographic Explorer, a 2017 recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award in machine learning, and a 2021 recipient of a Google Africa Research Award.
In 2020, he was made a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world’s largest technical professional organisation.
Despite international acclaim, his efforts are focused squarely on South Africa and how technology can improve the lives of South Africans.
“The choice before us is clear: either invest in the refining capacity of our AI industry today or remain perpetually dependent tomorrow,” he wrote in 2025.
“The future of South Africa’s digital sovereignty rests on the decisions we make now.”
Benjamin Rosman
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