FT Person of the Year for 2025: Jensen Huang. “The Nvidia chief executive has been the driving force behind the massive AI boom that has the capacity to reshape the global economy.” And TIME’s Person of thje Year 2025: “The Architects of AI.”
Steve Case: “Like the internet, AI has been many years in the making. When you look at AI, some of the core technologies can be traced back to something like 70 years ago. This is not a new idea. It just took that time for it to become a mainstream consumer phenomenon. Obviously, over the last ten to twenty years, a lot of companies have integrated AI. Most of the apps we use on our phones rely on AI to some extent. The difference is that nobody called it AI. But it was driving recommendation engines and so on; it was just more of a back-end, invisible thing. It only became an in-your-face visible technology with the success of ChatGPT. That timing dynamic reminds me of the dotcom era. The gold rush mentality does too. People feel that this is the next big thing, and they don’t want to miss out, which leads to investors pouring a lot of money into companies. A few of those will be wildly successful, many will be OK, and a good number will also probably end up hitting the wall and going out of business, which is what happened with the internet.”
Reed Hastings: “For economic reasons, we’ve had 300 years of, you know, 20 to 50 kids in a classroom and a teacher, the sage on a stage, gets up and imparts wisdom. And I think that it’s going to be better to have individualized software, but it’s almost always going to be in a school setting. So, you know, parents are working, homeschooling will be, you know, 3 to 10%. But the vast majority of people want the custodial function also of schools. But in schools, I think the teacher’s role is going to move more towards a social worker focusing on social emotional learning and discussion and you know, the mere imparting of facts, you know, what was the history of the Roman Empire or how to do fractions, those kinds of things will be software.” [via Arnold Kling]
FiveBooks: “[In 2025], to mark its 25th anniversary, the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction declared Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian to be their ‘winner of winners’, that is: the funniest book of the last twenty-five years…“A Short History of Tractors in Ukraine captures perfectly the hilarious complexity of family dynamics,” explained Tatty Macleod of the judge’s decision. “It deals marvellously with the shifting relationship with ageing parents. It’s as absurd as it is moving and a very worthy winner for the Vintage Bollinger Prize.””
