John Healy's Tech Blog

Tag: OpenAI

  • 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)

  • Elevating humanity – OpenAI’s narrative for AGI

    Elevating humanity – OpenAI’s narrative for AGI

    Regarding the timeframe for achieving and qualifying Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), recently (December 4, 2024) on CNBC, Andrew Ross Sorkin interviewed Sam Altman, co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, at the New York Times annual DealBook summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

    Computer problem
    I’ve been elevated …

    Altman said that quite capable AI agents (able to choreograph complex processes) will become available for businesses in a few years.

    I wonder how this might reshape individual merit [1] and trust in the workplace. And when AGI (whatever the scope) arrives, …

    • CNBC > “OpenAI’s Sam Altman on launching GPT4” – Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, discusses the release of ChatGPT (12-4-2024)

    • The Verge > “Sam Altman lowers the bar for AGI” by Alex Heath (Dec 4, 2024) – OpenAI’s charter once said that AGI will be able to “automate the great majority of intellectual labor.”

    Nearly two years ago, OpenAI said that artificial general intelligence — the thing the company was created to build — could “elevate humanity” and “give everyone incredible new capabilities.”

    “My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it matter much less,” he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “And a lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call super intelligence.”

    We at The Verge have heard OpenAI intends to weave together its large language models and declare that to be AGI.

    Notes

    [1] The Aristocracy of Talent

    … there is one idea that still commands widespread enthusiasm: that an individual’s position in society should depend on his or her combination of ability and effort. Meritocracy, a word invented as recently as 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, is the closest thing we have today to a universal ideology. – Wooldridge, Adrian. The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (2021) (p. 1). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.

  • ChatGPT at one year – we cut our path in moving on

    ChatGPT at one year – we cut our path in moving on

    “Our future will be characterized by a tension between copilot (AI as collaborator) and autopilot (humans as sidekick to AI). The latter is more efficient and cheaper in a narrow labor economics sense but troublesome in all sorts of ways.” – Wired > email Newsletter > Steven Levy > Plaintext > The Plain View (December 8, 2023)

    Ready or not, in November, 2022, a new chatbot “tumbled into civilization’s ongoing conversation.” The legacy of Eliza … neural nets and deep learning … captivating us like a beguiling Jedi mind trick – “You will use this tool!”

    There’ll be books, movies, dramas … the rise of ChatGPT.

    Has it been a year – and only a year – since ChatGPT kicked the hornet’s nest? In this article (below), Steven Levy looks back at (and beyond) all the fuss, promise, and portent of “the fastest-growing user base in history.” In a year where there was enough international contention, conflict, & chaos, “OpenAI turned up the heat.”

    In helping a friend recently move from an old flip phone to a smartphone, once again I was struck by the power of an agile, mobile user interface. A game changer. Seductive. Easy access matters.

    Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year 2023” is “authentic.” What will authenticity look like going forward? (Levy concludes in his “Ask Me One Thing” section, that “privacy is indeed a fight that we’ve lost.”)

    As I wrote (years ago) in my poem “MORE LESSONS … (from gerbil poems)” …

    what is there to reply, to say?
    pay the beast, we cannot stay.
    we have left the trees, put up walls.
    gone the warming fire-ring without,
    the tribal whole within.
    ascending lord of neoteny,
    at home, we yet stand that grassy plain
    and cut our path in moving on

    • Wired > “The Year of ChatGPT and Living Generatively” by Steven Levy (Dec 1, 2023) – In November last year, OpenAI launched a “low key research preview” called ChatGPT. What happened next transformed the tech industry – and perhaps humanity’s future.

    Some key points

    The response shocked ChatGPT’s creators at the AI startup OpenAI as much as anyone. When I was interviewing people at the company for WIRED’s October cover feature this year, virtually everyone admitted to wildly underestimating the chatbot’s impact.

    In my first Plaintext column of 2023, I made the observation (too obvious to be a prediction) that ChatGPT would own the new year. I said that it would kick off a wet, hot AI summer, dispelling whatever chill lingered from an extended AI winter.

    ChatGPT had scrambled tech’s balance of power [triggered an AI arms race].

    Maybe most significantly, ChapGPT was a shrieking wake-up call that a technology with impact at least on the scale of the internet was about to change our lives.

    Meanwhile, during this year of ChatGPT, many AI scientists themselves have come to believe that their brilliant creations could bring about disaster.

    I appreciate ChatGPT for many things, but especially the clarity it provided us in an era of change. In the Before Days, meaning anytime prior to November 30, 2022, we already had long passed the turning point in digital technology’s remodeling of civilization.

  • Humanity’s final challenge – AI profit?

    Humanity’s final challenge – AI profit?

    Hello Dave

    Much in the news cycle. Much buzz. I’ll expect books and a movie script for something even more epic that The Social Connection.

    OpenAI’s “bizarre org chart.” Mission creep or mission miscommunication? Was a wizard workers mass exit a real scenario? The twists and turns …

    Is “the problem posed by superintelligence” really “humanity’s final challenge?” (Like in The Foundation or Dune novels?)

    • Wired > email Newsletter > Steven Levy > Plaintext > The Plain View > “OpenAI’s boardroom drama could mess up your future” (November 22, 2023) – Reflecting on a conversation with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI’s headquarters.

    OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond human level—termed artificial general intelligence or AGI—in a safe way. The company discovered a promising path in large language models that generate strikingly fluid text, but developing and implementing those models required huge amounts of computing infrastructure and mountains of cash. This led OpenAI to create a commercial entity to draw outside investors, and it netted a major partner: Microsoft. Virtually everyone in the company worked for this new for-profit arm. But limits were placed on the company’s commercial life. The profit delivered to investors was to be capped—for the first backers at 100 times what they put in—after which OpenAI would revert to a pure nonprofit. The whole shebang was governed by the original nonprofit’s board, which answered only to the goals of the original mission and maybe God.

  • AI chatbot reality check – the bottom line?

    AI chatbot reality check – the bottom line?

    The cost of AI

    Generative AI chatbots might be cool to many. But the heat (greenhouse gas emissions) and cost may deflate hype as a reality check for the botton line.

    Generative AI data center server infrastructure plus operating costs will challenge the business models and profitability of emergent services incorporating this tech [1].

    • Washington Post > “AI chatbots lose money every time you use them. That’s a problem.” by Will Oremus (June 5, 2023) – The cost of operating the systems is so high that companies aren’t deploying their best versions to the public.

    Key points
    • Chatbots lose money on every chat.
    • Better chatbot quality costs more. So, ads are probably coming to AI chatbots (but profitability will remain elusive, even with smaller, cheaper models).
    • The world’s richest [tech] companies may turn chatbots into moneymakers sooner than they may be ready to.
    • Companies that buy … AI tools [from companies building the leading AI language models] don’t realize they’re being locked into a heavily subsidized service …
    • The intensive computing AI requires is why OpenAI has held back its powerful new language model, GPT-4, from the free version of ChatGPT, which is still running a weaker GPT-3.5 model.
    • A single chat with ChatGPT could cost up to 1,000 times as much as a simple Google search.
    • Computing requirements also help to explain why OpenAI is no longer the nonprofit it was founded to be.
    • Tech giants are willing to lose money in a bid to win market share with their AI chatbots.
    • Companies adopting generative AI tools (even with all their flaws) might trim human jobs.
    Related posts

    • [1] Lords of AI – Tech giants and an International Agency > Comment 5/15/2023 > This article discusses a forecast for the industrial cost of AI services – a massive increase, despite ongoing improvements in hardware performance [1] – “As demand for GenAI continues exponentially.”