Microsoft snubbed: TIME's "Person of the Year" ignores Microsoft and Nadella in AI spotlight

This has to make for some awkward reading at the Microsoft coffee table.

Recently, Time Magazine debuted its annual "Person of the Year" cover story. The tradition began in 1927, and has since depicted individuals that have made the biggest impact on world events throughout the year — for better or worse.

Previous winners of Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" cover story include the likes of world leaders, including Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, activists like Greta Thunberg and Nelson Mandela, and often times scientists and technologists, like Elon Musk and former Intel CEO and chip architect Andrew Grove.

This year's Time "Person of the Year" edition features a group of people, titled "The Architects of AI." It's a recreation of the famous "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" photograph that showcases New York construction workers working on the city's iconic skyline — dangerously perched on a steel girder without safety equipment. Let's put the metaphor for the dangers of AI and gaping pitfall of a potential stock market "bubble" to one side for a moment, because there's an interesting omission here that underpins how Microsoft is falling behind in the race for relevancy.

The photograph features eight world leaders in technology, server infrastructure, and AI science. From left to right, we have Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame, Lisa Su of AMD, Elon Musk of xAI and Grok, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Claude, and pioneering AI researcher Fei-Fei Li.

Notice any particular absences?

All of the people depicted here are directly responsible for funding and building frontier AI models, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Grok, or Google Gemini. The lack of inclusion for Microsoft AI, run by Mustafa Suleyman and brokered by CEO Satya Nadella, showcases how far behind the frontier of AI research Microsoft actually is.

Microsoft is functioning as an investment bank in existing AI products, re-selling NVIDIA GPUs as part of Microsoft Azure and re-selling ChatGPT as part of Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft's home-grown AI models, including MAI, aren't generally used and sport limited public API access, and its benchmarks aren't public either.

The lack of representation for Microsoft really underlines the company's status as a background player in artificial intelligence, nowhere near the forefront of the race.

Forced integrations and investments aside, is Microsoft actually serious about AI?

I've written recently about how Microsoft's fumbling and panicked behavior over artificial intelligence risks undermining its customer's needs. It's certainly undermining Windows' reputation.

Windows 11 hate is going utterly mainstream, with weak and forced Copilot features in everything from Microsoft Word to Notepad tears into the company's public image, but for me, it goes beyond social media "haters" simply disliking AI — Microsoft's AI products simply aren't good.

I'm not sure exactly what Microsoft did to make its version of ChatGPT dumber, but Copilot returns weaker results than ChatGPT generally speaking. AI imaging features in Microsoft Photos are absolutely pathetic compared to Google or even Samsung's photo editing tools on Android.

Integrations in Outlook and Microsoft Edge are invariably useless compared to integrations in Gmail and Chrome, and Xbox's "Gaming Copilot" tries to make up solutions out of thin air if it doesn't have a gaming website to steal information from.

CEO Satya Nadella has previously spoken about how he wants Microsoft to be an AI-first company, while declining to provide any innovative, or perhaps more crucially, useful AI products of its own. Windows Recall was called a privacy nightmare when it was announced, and other features like Click-To-Do haven't exactly ignited a rush on Microsoft AI products.

The whole situation is eerily similar to Microsoft's haunted Windows Phone project. Microsoft partnered with Nokia, creating friction at a time where competitors were moving far faster — similar to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, which has been reportedly fractious. Microsoft's short-term thinking and half-hearted execution led to Windows Phone eventually being mothballed, and that same lack of passion and cadence for releasing half-baked products seems to be typifying Microsoft's AI products as well.

Users are making use of products like Github Copilot and Microsoft Copilot, but much like products like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, Microsoft's strategy seems to revolve around offering a weaker, cheaper alternative — rather than be at the cutting edge for quality. Given how expensive AI actually is to run, it's unclear if this can be a winning strategy for artificial intelligence.

In any case, they say photographs are worth a thousand words, and the above photo is symbolic of various things. From the arguably tone deaf nature of multi-millionaires and billionaires being depicted as construction workers literally risking their lives to build New York's skyline, to the lack of guardrails building what could end up being a superior intelligence. For better or worse, Microsoft's role in the future depicted here is one of absentia, echoing other computing revolutions the company failed to capitalize on.

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