HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TNND) — Time magazine named the “architects of AI” its person of the year on Thursday.
The cover depicts several tech businessmen and women, including Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, X head Elon Musk, OpenAI executive Sam Altman and Lisa Sui, chair of chip manufacturer AMD, sitting on a steel beam above New York City. The picture is a remake of “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” the 1932 photo of construction workers.
Time’s 6,400-word story on the declaration explains how artificial intelligence has affected the world. The magazine’s editor in chief, Sam Jacobs, said in his own article that the tech has “dominated” this year’s headlines, “for better or for worse.”
“Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives,” Jacobs wrote.
“And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.”
He noted that businessmen and women like those depicted on Time’s cover are major players in a new age of “thinking machines” and are “transforming the present” while “transcending the possible.” The tech leaders are also “wowing and worrying humanity,” Jacobs said, pointing to artificial intelligence’s uncertain future.
“Humanity will determine AI’s path forward, and each of us can play a role in determining AI’s structure and future,” he wrote. “Our work has trained it and sustained it, and now we find ourselves moving through a world increasingly defined by it.”
“Even as the growth of these models relies on neural pathways that appear to copy our own—they learn, speak, argue, cajole, and, yes, their ability to do these things can be as frightening as it is astonishing—we know that there is a difference between us and our creation,” Jacobs added.
Some of the artificial intelligence “architects” featured on the cover have previously been named Time’s person of the year. Musk was chosen four years ago for “creating solutions to an existential crisis,” “embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans” and “driving society’s most daring and disruptive transformations.”
Zuckerberg, who created Facebook, was named in 2010. Time said he “wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network.”
“It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale,” former Time tech writer Lev Grossman wrote. “We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.”
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