John Healy's Tech Blog

Category: News

News, annoucements

  • Architects of AI – Time Magazine’s ‘Person’ of the Year 2025

    Architects of AI – Time Magazine’s ‘Person’ of the Year 2025

    Two years after Time’s “TIME 100 AI” cover for 2023 – the most influential people in AI … movers & shakers, shaping the good, bad, & ugly, we have a shorter list for the 2025 cover.

    A new mythology – the Titan Atlas recast as Vidi-on-us holding up the world

    I’ve read & written a lot about AI the last two years.

    Time’s article covers all the bases. Even some anecdotal tales of AI’s “Midas touch” seeping (or blending) into individual lives. It contains useful infographics:

    • the players, the lords of AI – Chip builders, Computing Providers, and Model Builders
    • the capital expenditures on AI – the deals driving investment and markets; where AI spending is going – builders, energizers, tech devs
    • how people use the ChatGPT – let’s count all the ways, pacing scaling & chatter.

    There’re the sirens of smartness, who pledge wonders and wealth – with wisdom perhaps an afterthought (yet humility not even subtext?).

    Whether bubble or historic boom … Is this a flywheel for prosperity or primrose path for the general public?

    • AI Overview

    Time magazine reveals its Person of the Year for 2025, AI …
    Time Magazine (TIME) named “The Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, recognizing the tech leaders like Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Elon Musk (xAI) who developed and shaped artificial intelligence as it became a mainstream force, impacting everything from daily life to global competition. The choice highlights AI’s rapid integration in 2025, marking a significant shift from novel tech to a fundamental part of modern existence, with its creators influencing a future filled with both opportunity and uncertainty.

    Who they are:

    • Jensen Huang: CEO of Nvidia, a key supplier of AI hardware.
    • Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT.
    • Elon Musk: Founder of xAI and other ventures.
    • Lisa Su: CEO of AMD, another major chipmaker.
    • Mark Zuckerberg: CEO of Meta.
    • Dario Amodei: CEO of Anthropic.
    • Demis Hassabis: CEO of Google DeepMind.
    • Fei-Fei Li: AI researcher and advocate.

    Why they were chosen:

    • Year of AI: 2025 was the year AI moved from early adoption to mainstream consumer use, changing how people work, search, and create.
    • Shaping the future: These individuals led the charge in creating technology that reshapes economies, information, and society.
    • Impact: Their work accelerated medical research, boosted productivity, and sparked global debates on AI’s disruptive potential.

    TIME’s reasoning:

    • TIME’s Editor-in-Chief, Sam Jacobs, noted that the people who imagined, built, and drove AI had the most profound impact on the world in 2025, ushering humanity toward a highly automated and uncertain future.

    • Time > The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year by Charlie Campbell, Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo (Dec 11, 2025) – A vibe of boom and abundance highlighted a year of AI, as “tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods.”

    Memes depict Nvidia as Atlas, holding the stock market on its shoulders. More than just a corporate juggernaut, Nvidia also has become an instrument of statecraft, operating at the nexus of advanced technology, diplomacy, and geopolitics.

    The AI boom seemed to swallow the economy into “a black hole that’s pulling all capital towards it,” says Paul Kedrosky, an investor and research fellow at MIT.

    • Axios > AI architects are Time magazine’s 2025 “Person of the Year” by April Rubin (Dec 11, 2025)

    Related posts

    • Shaping and stirring the AI boom – Time’s 10^2 influencers (2023)

  • ‘Rage bait’ – word of the year 2025

    ‘Rage bait’ – word of the year 2025

    It’s been a year of “deliberate agitation.” Witness Oxford University Press’ announcement that rage bait was Word of the Year.

    Compare with last year’s word brain rot: “outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.”

    Eliciting anger grabs attention, offers personal gain, promotes political sway – all in a marketplace of bad faith, manipulative tactics, emotional hijacking. Yeah, words have consequences.

    Which elicits the broader question: Is this who we truly are? Is this the type of society we want? Is this venal drift sustainable?

    • Oxford University Press > The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait (December 1, 2025) – The word has tripled in usage in the last 12 months

    The Oxford Word of the Year can be a singular word or expression, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit of meaning.

    Our language experts shortlisted three contenders – rage bait, aura farming, and biohack – that reflect our conversations and preoccupations over the past year. After three days of voting in which more than 30,000 people had their say, our experts chose rage bait after considering votes, the sentiment of public commentary, and their analysis of our lexical data.

    Why rage bait?

    Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.

    With 2025’s news cycle dominated by social unrest, debates about the regulation of online content, and concerns over digital wellbeing, our experts noticed that the use of rage bait this year has evolved to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention – both how it is given and how it is sought after – engagement, and ethics online. The word has tripled in usage in the last 12 months.

    Related terms

    • Clickbait
    • Resonance
    • Influencer
    • Troll
    • Edgelord
    • False consensus effect
    • Pluralistic ignorance

    Related posts

  • Shades of Victorian hubris – AI full speed ahead!

    Shades of Victorian hubris – AI full speed ahead!

    “Soar into AI war …”

    A better technology, a better humanity. A personal coach (and emotional pal) in everyone’s pocket. That’s the drift. Bet on it.

    Business is business, eh. If we don’t do it, then someone else will. If we can’t survive as a business, then no one will benefit. $$$ in play. Soft power. And so on, the pros & cons of free trade (whether it’s really free). The ongoing saga of Promethean technology.

    Anthropic’s CEO says basing their success on the political alignment of outside investors would invite bad grace. Optics need not compromise good outcomes.

    Jensen Huang of Nvidia is threading the same needle. Sidestepping hypocrisy. Downsides, but …

    Well, maybe at least there’ll be a conversation. Usage policies. Rather than a political kerfuffle.

    And, as noted below, there’s Fidji Simo, the incoming CEO of applications at OpenAI. Just think of the opportunities – truly historic. Power to the people. All those “high-profile business partnerships.”

    Data centers – in the lands of Energy Lords – will rival Victorian architecture in grandeur (scale) and control (agency). The Grid and networked structures a statement of dominance over nature and a display of wealth and power.

    • Wired > “Leaked Memo: Anthropic CEO Says the Company Will Pursue Gulf State Investments After All” by Kylie Robison (Jul 21, 2025) – “Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a note to staff obtained by WIRED.

    In his memo, Amodei acknowledged that the decision to pursue investments from authoritarian regimes would lead to accusations of hypocrisy. In an essay titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” Amodei wrote: “Democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.”

    By pursuing a “narrowly scoped, purely financial investment from Gulf countries,” the company hopes to avoid the risks associated with allowing outside investors to gain “leverage” over the company, the memo says.

    He added: “It’s perfectly consistent to advocate for a policy of ‘No one is allowed to do x,’ but then if that policy fails and everyone else does X, to reluctantly do x ourselves.”

    • Wired > “OpenAI’s New CEO of Applications Strikes Hyper-Optimistic Tone in First Memo to Staff” by by Kylie Robison (Jul 21, 2025) – OpenAI’s products will be the great equalizer.

    Soon-to-be former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo sent a memo to OpenAI staff Monday laying out her vision for how AI will change the world.

    “If we get this right, AI can give everyone more power than ever,” Simo wrote, striking a hyper-optimistic tone, according to a copy of the memo viewed by WIRED. “But I also realize those opportunities won’t magically appear on their own.”

    “AI can compress thousands of hours of learning into personalized insights delivered in plain language, at the pace that suits us, responsive to our specific level of understanding,” Simo writes. “It doesn’t just answer questions – it teaches us to ask better ones. And it helps us develop confidence in areas that once felt opaque or intimidating, growing both personally and professionally.”

    “If AI can help people truly understand themselves, it could be one of the biggest gifts we could ever receive,” Simo writes.

  • Breaking bottom of career ladder – AI transformation

    Breaking bottom of career ladder – AI transformation

    So, the CEO of Anthropic (“one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence”) says we need to “get real” about entry-level white-collar jobs in the next few years. Pay attention! “Eyes open” to the coming job displacement.

    This Axios article (much in the news cycle this past week) heralds the challenge which AI poses to the workforce. The need to build awareness, generally and among public officials. Beyond public-facing search engines and chatbots. The need for transparency on all sides (beyond the hype). The need for collective steering.

    “What’s different here is both the speed at which this AI transformation could hit, and the breadth of industries and individual jobs that will be profoundly affected.”

    “Market forces are going to keep propelling AI toward human-like reasoning.”

    • Axios > Behind the Curtain > “AI jobs danger: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath” by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen (May 28, 2025) – AI is breaking ‘the bottom rungs of the career ladder.’

    (quotes)
    Few are paying attention. Lawmakers don’t get it or don’t believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won’t realize the risks posed by the possible job apocalypse — until after it hits.

    Here’s how Amodei [CEO of Anthropic] and others fear the white-collar bloodbath is unfolding:

    1. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and other large AI companies keep vastly improving the capabilities of their large language models (LLMs) to meet and beat human performance with more and more tasks. This is happening and accelerating.
    2. The U.S. government, worried about losing ground to China or spooking workers with preemptive warnings, says little. The administration and Congress neither regulate AI nor caution the American public. This is happening and showing no signs of changing.
    3. Most Americans, unaware of the growing power of AI and its threat to their jobs, pay little attention. This is happening, too.
  • AI image generators – sufficiently good?

    AI image generators – sufficiently good?

    No AI image generator is perfect

    I’ve tried some Apple Intelligence features built into Mac apps like Pages, but not any image generators yet (although I’ve read some articles with examples).

    And I’ve noticed the importance of prompt engineering tools; support for long, complex queries; and privacy policies re training AI on your content. T&C.

    This Cnet article highlights some popular AI Image Generators.

    • Cnet > “Best AI Image Generators of 2025” by Katelyn Chedraoui (1-4-2025) – No AI image generator is perfect.

    (quote)
    CNET reviewers have spent months reviewing every program on this list, generating hundreds of images and creating everything from cartoon safaris to dramatic sci-fi scenes and photorealistic stock imagery. At some point during our testing, every service on this list spat out a wonky or unusable image – no AI image generator is perfect. The test of a truly superior AI image generator is how well-equipped it is to handle those quirks and fix flaws. Editing tools and customization options are a big part of that, which is why we test those extensively. Privacy policies, including how generators potentially train on your content, are also important considerations when selecting the best services.

    TOP PICKS

    Best overall AI image generator
    • Dall-E 3 (OpenAI account subscription for $20 / month)

    Best free AI image generator
    • Leonardo AI (Leonardo AI free account)

    Leonardo offers a free tier that includes a daily quota of tokens. These can be used for your creative projects within our platform. This free offering doesn’t come with an expiry date, so you can use it for as long as you like.

    Our paid subscriptions come with extra benefits: an increased token allowance, faster image generation, and access to premium features. To find out more about our subscription plans, click the “Upgrade” button at the top left of the page.

    Best AI image generator for professionals
    • Adobe Firefly (Adobe Creative Cloud subscription account)

    Best basic AI image generator for beginners
    • Canva (Canva free account or annual subscription)

    Martian burb fantasy