Have you seen the Time Magazine Person of the Year cover?
They came up with a brilliant idea: recreating the famous photo Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, of American workers having lunch on a steel beam high above the void, but replacing them with the bosses of American Big Tech: 6 gentlemen and 2 ladies.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, Elon Musk, Founder of xAI, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford’s HCAI.
The major absentee, Tim Cook of Apple, must have fallen off the beam, because he is not there. But it is true that Apple hasn’t particularly shined in this domain until now.
The metaphor is crystal clear. I hope you get it. Our billionaires are the new builders of America. Instead of making skyscrapers of concrete and steel, they are creating data centers and algorithms. And they are weaving the web of the new planetary intelligence supposed to solve almost all the world’s problems.
As for me, if I had had to choose, I would have put Sundar Pinchai, the boss of Alphabet, on my cover. While people were predicting the beginning of the end for Google, Sundar Pichai managed to turn his company around by catching up on the delay it had taken in AI against the lightning-fast start of OpenAI.
They said Google was overtaken, but I rather have the impression that it will be the future winner of the AI race and that, thanks to its advertising model, it will still retain its leadership for a few years.
And you, if you had had to choose your Person of the Year, who would you have picked?
