In a few days we will know who the Person of the Year is according to Time magazine, a symbolic recognition but what for almost 100 years it helps us come to terms with the history that passes before us. According to betting sites, the favorites are Elon Musk and Volodimir Zelensky, who have already won in the last two editions and are unlikely to do a repeat.
I rather think that if the jurors decide out of prudence to stay far from the tragedy and heroism of Gaza, the award will go to Sam Altman, considered the father of ChatGPT who triggered the great acceleration of artificial intelligence. But today an article in the New York Times helped me see things differently: the Person of the Year, writes Peter Coy, is (should be) the author of a scientific or technological discovery of which we still know nothing “because that’s how the world works”. And he gives the example of the transistor: the first time that word ended up in a newspaper was in 1948 and it was on page 46. At the bottom of everything, in short. Yet the transistor really changed the world.
The same happened with the first personal computer, the first Internet connection and with the Web: when they were created, sometimes the newspapers didn’t even report them and we rewarded the inventors many years later. As we know, same AI wasn’t invented with ChatGPT but it had been brewing for decades in research laboratories where the approach that then prevailed, that of building software inspired by the functioning of our brain, neural networks, was considered a failure. Well: the event in which the effectiveness of neural networks was demonstrated for the first time was a conference of computer vision specialists in 2012. And it was not held in Silicon Valley, but in Florence. There was a competition on the program to recognize objects in a certain number of images, and the winner was a team from the University of Toronto which included Geoff Hinton, the father of neural networks, and Ilya Sutskever, the young genius leading the research scientific of OpenAI, and therefore of ChatGPT.
In short, this year too, someone will have discovered or invented something wonderful that will improve the world: believing it, knowing it, helps us go through the autumn of our discontent.