Time Magazine's 'Person of the Year': the Architects of AI (time.com) 54
Time magazine used its 98th annual "Person of the Year" cover to "recognize a force that has dominated the year's headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME's 2025 Person of the Year."
One cover illustration shows eight AI executives sitting precariously on a beam high above the city, while Time's 6,700-word article promises "the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how [Nvidia CEO] Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods."
Time describes them betting on "one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time," mentioning all the usual worries — datacenters' energy consumption, chatbot psychosis, predictions of "wiping out huge numbers of jobs" and the possibility of an AI stock market bubble. (Although "The drumbeat of warning that advanced AI could kill us all has mostly quieted"). But it also notes AI's potential to jumpstart innovation (and economic productivity) This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible. "Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it," Huang tells TIME in a 75-minute interview in November, two days after announcing that Nvidia, the world's first $5 trillion company, had once again smashed Wall Street's earnings expectations. "This is the single most impactful technology of our time..."
The risk-averse are no longer in the driver's seat. Thanks to Huang, Son, Altman, and other AI titans, humanity is now flying down the highway, all gas no brakes, toward a highly automated and highly uncertain future. Perhaps Trump said it best, speaking directly to Huang with a jovial laugh in the U.K. in September: "I don't know what you're doing here. I hope you're right."
One cover illustration shows eight AI executives sitting precariously on a beam high above the city, while Time's 6,700-word article promises "the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how [Nvidia CEO] Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods."
Time describes them betting on "one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time," mentioning all the usual worries — datacenters' energy consumption, chatbot psychosis, predictions of "wiping out huge numbers of jobs" and the possibility of an AI stock market bubble. (Although "The drumbeat of warning that advanced AI could kill us all has mostly quieted"). But it also notes AI's potential to jumpstart innovation (and economic productivity) This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible. "Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it," Huang tells TIME in a 75-minute interview in November, two days after announcing that Nvidia, the world's first $5 trillion company, had once again smashed Wall Street's earnings expectations. "This is the single most impactful technology of our time..."
The risk-averse are no longer in the driver's seat. Thanks to Huang, Son, Altman, and other AI titans, humanity is now flying down the highway, all gas no brakes, toward a highly automated and highly uncertain future. Perhaps Trump said it best, speaking directly to Huang with a jovial laugh in the U.K. in September: "I don't know what you're doing here. I hope you're right."
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
More like "scammer of the year" 2026 will be the year of the AI hangover when reality (and the bill) sets in
Re: Nope it's the Big...Time Magazine Man Of The Y (Score:1)
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More like "scammer of the year" 2026 will be the year of the AI hangover when reality (and the bill) sets in
Then it's convenient they're all sitting on a girder, from which they can be strung. :-)
Ironic that they chose this image as if their work compares, at least in effort and danger, to the iron workers building skyscrapers in the original b/w photo: Lunch atop a Skyscraper [wikipedia.org]. None of those "AI Architects" would ever have lunch there.
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Can we please distinguish between the technology boom, and the finance bubble?
Consider the Railway Mania of 1840s Britain [wikipedia.org]
Railway Mania was a stock market bubble in the railway industry of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1840s.[1] It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, speculators invested more money, which further increased the price of railway shares, until the share price collapsed. The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km).
Need I add that was not the end of railways?
Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938 (Score:5, Insightful)
So, uh, it's not really something to aspire to I guess.
Re:Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1 (Score:5, Funny)
Godwin's law in the second post. Nice!
Re:Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget that last year they picked Trump as the 2024 person of the year. It's not an award for the "best" person, just the person (or people) who got the most news headlines.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
For the second time. Let that sink in a second. Trump was person of the year TWICE! So was Stalin! EVIL!
(So was Obama and Regan, but hey narrative says we ignore them and instead look to 2007... Putin!)
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Just as well there's no currently sitting president who has been Time Magazine's person of the year ... twice. I mean Trump has Putin (2007 person of the year) and Hitler (1938) beat, but only managed to match Stalin (1939 and 1942).
Bubble Say POP! (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is a game changing leap forward for the IT industry. It is the modern day equivalent of Apple's touchscreen iPod/Phone. It will endure.
The current AI bubble that we're in? Time's cover is an indicator that we're in the late stages of the bubble. The POP is near.
AI will remain, but the financial storm is about to collapse.
Re: Bubble Say POP! (Score:2)
Re: Bubble Say POP! (Score:1)
"the financial storm is about to collapse."
So should it affect billions who never invested? Or should the Fed ramp up QE again and cut interest rates to zero, so ATMs continue to work?
Or what if the Fed printed an indexed basic income and let financial firms fail but it wouldn't affect the little guy because they would still have access to cash to buy groceries and such?
Re: Bubble Say POP! (Score:3)
If the Fed just invented UBI by printing money, the prices of basics would skyrocket. You would forever be chasing an impossible dream.
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Re: Bubble Say POP! (Score:1)
Have you considered Fischer Black's "Noise"?
"I think that the price level and rate of inflation are literally indeterminate. They are whatever people think they will be. They are determined by expectations, but expectations follow no rational rules. If people believe that certain changes in the money stock will cause changes in the rate of inflation, that may well happen, because their expectations will be built into their long term contracts."
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Re: Bubble Say POP! (Score:1)
Would there be a physical scarcity of basics, or merely a psychological mood that created a scarcity?
What if you printed faster than noisy prices rose?
Since 2008, the Fed has increased what economists call base high-powered (because it should cause inflation) money over 500%; does the fact that inflation has increased only 50% in that time frame indicate we can increase purchasing power by, again, printing faster than prices rise?
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If the Fed just invented UBI by printing money, the prices of basics would skyrocket.
Steady inflation is healthy. It devalues hoarded cash. The wealthy currently have unprecedented cash reserves. (This is trivial to look up. Hundreds or even thousands of articles have been published about it by major media outlets.) If we are unwilling to institute a wealth tax then we will need to ramp up inflation in order to effectively get that money back from them. If they would spend it like they claim they do then it could employ people, but since they are sitting on it they are reducing the velocity
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Steady inflation is healthy. It devalues hoarded cash. The wealthy currently have unprecedented cash reserves.
Yeah, but they don't put it under a rock. They put it into short term investments, where it will mostly keep up with inflation. So that strategy doesn't do anything to rich people, it only hurts unsophisticated people.
Re: Bubble Say POP! (Score:5, Insightful)
No they don't. They put it into assets, which have a limited supply. This is the cause of house price inflation, and many other forms of asset inflation. This impoverishes everyone else because the rest of us simply can't compete for these assets against people who effectively have an unlimited supply. So it ends up with the wealthy owning all the assets then renting them back to the people who actually need them. This helps keep wages down because people need to work to pay these rents and so can't afford to withhold their labour. And so the cycle continues, the wealthy get even more of the available wealth,m and the rest of us suffer.
This is the inevitable result of Neoliberal, or more accurately named Neofeudal, economics. Post 1945 Governments were providing increasing amounts of the essential services, including housing, and this held prices down and kept wages up. Oil cartels started the reversal of this by causing artificially high prices, then Neofeudal economics caused the sell-off of Government assets, and all the gains we'd made since 1945 went into reverse.
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Yeah, but they don't put it under a rock. They put it into short term investments
When I said cash reserves, I meant it literally. They are in fact doing the equivalent of putting it under a rock, and again, at unprecedented levels, and this is (again, again) very well documented such that anyone who actually cares about this already knows. Why don't you care enough to know?
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Websites are still around, online commerce still exists, but all the companies who are overcommitting in hopes of entrenching themselves before the gold rush burns out are likely to face a major wakeup call within the next year or two.
We are yesterday's jam for them (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: We are yesterday's jam for them (Score:1)
See how vibe coding works yet?
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If Time really thinks the CEOs of companies that launched AI chatbots are the architects of AI then they're even more out of
Of what year? 1958? (Score:2)
Since McCarthy did the "AI thing" in lisp almost 70 years ago...
Re: Of what year? 1958? (Score:1)
Was McCarthy able to implement his Advice Taker? Has the attention mechanism used simple counting of token co-occurrences to realize his dream, without all the symbolic rules he thought would be needed?
Someone tell slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
So the person of the year (Score:4, Insightful)
And of course the article is about the skeezy businessman looking forward to eliminating wages and not the actual mathematicians that made this all possible because of course it is. And because fuck actual science and math.
Now if you'll excuse me it's time for my ivermectom and colloidal silver milkshake. Raw milk of course.
Basic Income doesn't work (Score:1)
What I have learned in the last few years is that people who call themselves capitalists ain't. Bill gates, Elon musk,
Re: Basic Income doesn't work (Score:1)
"Monopolies just Jack up prices and absorb the money back in."
Can we print faster than they raise prices? If the Fed printed 40% more money in 2020 and prices only rose 9%, is that a gain in purchasing power?
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People who work for me are building what I am telling them and they are getting paid by our clients. They can definotely choose to do what I chose back in 2009, stop getting paid and work for themselves, all they have to do for that would be the same thing I did, save for a few years prior to that and live on savings while building their own thing. Why should anyone else pay them to do what they want without their ideas being actually useful to anyone? That is what governments do now, they tax everyone to
Time has been irrelevant for decades (Score:1)
The people of AI is lame and they are quite behind the time on that one.
When people looked at the thing, then it got people talking- now, the only time we hear about TIME is their time person of the year and nothing much is READ about why; which is where they could inform and provoke thought. Neither of which, is done by the majority today.
It should be Trump. Nobody has been fucking up more of the world than Moron Mussolini (an accurate label) and his cult of retards (remember he projects.) Next year? Trump
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Yes, until he finally gets canceled. Nobody is doing more harm. AI is just hype now; the damage it's going to cause hasn't really started yet.
fucking lame (Score:4, Insightful)
what AI really is (Score:4, Funny)
architects != archetypes (Score:5, Insightful)
The architects are people like LeCun and Hinton, and many others going back to Minsky and McCarthy, not execs. The execs are the architects of *selling* AI.
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Huang maybe belongs on the list. He founded NVidia in 1993 and has stuck with it ever since. Also they saw people trying to use GPUs for other stuff, what used to be called GPGPU, and got in on it early. Then they noticed that ML was gaining ground in CUDA and released CUDNN less than two years after AlexNET.
Regardless of the hype, their hardware is very powerful, and usable as well (something AMD only appeared to realize is important about 15 years after the horse bolted).
Fitting (Score:5, Funny)
That the cover of the issue is a ripoff of someone else creative work.
Guess who owns Time magazine (Score:2)
Marc Benioff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Money over Humanity (Score:2)
Questionable motives.. (Score:1)
As (Marc & Lynne Benioff LLC) own Time Magazine since 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], I'm sure that's got nothing to do with it.
Seriously, we've all had 'AI' screeming at us from every single device, now we need it in printed text as well--I'm sick and tired of it.
Word, now Person of the year and. (Score:2)