--- title: Piotr Dabkowski: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 description: Find out why Piotr Dabkowski made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. canonical: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012732/piotr-dabkowski/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-09-05T11:04:41.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T11:54:21.349Z article:section: Business og:title: TIME100 AI 2024: Piotr Dabkowski og:description: Find out why Piotr Dabkowski made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence og:url: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012732/piotr-dabkowski/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8d770525f4ce4db8/698a5a93b3fce368eb0cd90d/NEW-TIME100-AI-2024-INNOVATORS_Piotr-Dabkowski-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME100 AI 2024: Piotr Dabkowski og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME100 AI 2024: Piotr Dabkowski twitter:description: Find out why Piotr Dabkowski made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8d770525f4ce4db8/698a5a93b3fce368eb0cd90d/NEW-TIME100-AI-2024-INNOVATORS_Piotr-Dabkowski-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Sep 05, 2024 # Piotr Dabkowski by [Tharin Pillay](https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/) ## Tharin Pillay Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source: Courtesy of Piotr Dabkowski) With just a few minutes of an audio sample, ElevenLabs can [clone](https://elevenlabs.io/voice-cloning) your voice. The unicorn start-up, co-founded by two Polish friends, Piotr Dabkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski, has developed a model that can generate a variety of realistic voices from text or pre-existing speech, and be used for [dubbing](https://elevenlabs.io/dubbing), so that one can appear to sound fluent across 29 languages. While only two years old, the company is valued at $1.1 billion and [received](https://www.reuters.com/technology/voice-ai-startup-elevenlabs-gains-unicorn-status-after-latest-fundraising-source-2024-01-22/) $80 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others in January. The startup has since partnered with several large brands including HarperCollins, the Washington Post, and TIME. ElevenLabs’s model is more robust, has a lower latency, and higher quality than competitors. Dabkowski expects the model to soon hit a “quality ceiling,” where the AI is indistinguishable from any human it mimics. This poses an obvious safety challenge as it could be used to fraudulent ends, but Dabkowski says that their systems monitor usage to minimize the threat. “We can trace back every single generation, and you need to use your credit card to have access to voice cloning—so it's like using a gun that is connected to the internet,” he says. ElevenLabs has developed a[ speech classifier](https://elevenlabs.io/ai-speech-classifier) that can identify whether any audio was generated using their model. The company is also a member of the U.S. AI Safety Institute’s Consortium. Open-source AI audio solutions are a larger concern, Dabkowski adds. Still, some have found ways [around](https://www.404media.co/elevenlabs-block-on-cloning-bidens-voice-easily-bypassed/) some of ElevenLab’s safeguards, and the [terrain is constantly evolving](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/elevenlabs-ai-voice-cloning-deepfakes/678288/), so preventing its misuse may not be so simple. [_Buy your copy of the TIME100 AI issue here_](https://magazineshop.us/TIME100AI) _\*Disclosure: TIME and ElevenLabs have a technology agreement to create audio accessible content._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012732/piotr-dabkowski/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012732/piotr-dabkowski/"},"headline":"Piotr Dabkowski","datePublished":"2024-09-05T11:04:41.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:21.349Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012732/piotr-dabkowski/","keywords":["Tech"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8d770525f4ce4db8/698a5a93b3fce368eb0cd90d/NEW-TIME100-AI-2024-INNOVATORS_Piotr-Dabkowski-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Tharin Pillay","jobTitle":"Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/tharin-pillay/"}],"creator":"Tharin Pillay","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8d770525f4ce4db8/698a5a93b3fce368eb0cd90d/NEW-TIME100-AI-2024-INNOVATORS_Piotr-Dabkowski-NEW.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2024/7012732/piotr-dabkowski/","name":"Piotr Dabkowski"}}]}] ```