TIME Reveals the 2023 Person of the Year
The man, woman, group, or concept that had the most influence on the world, for better or worse, during the previous 12 months.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:11 She's been this light in the world this year.
00:14 She's brought so many people together.
00:16 Thank you for writing music that expresses feelings nobody else can express.
00:21 It's more of like a community too.
00:23 It's not even just her.
00:25 It just made me feel like I wasn't alone,
00:27 and I wasn't crazy for feeling the way that I was feeling.
00:30 We grew up together.
00:31 We all went through the same things together.
00:34 It's a massive stadium,
00:35 and it feels like you're with her one-on-one.
00:38 [MUSIC]
00:42 Friendship bracelets are a huge part of the Ares Tour.
00:45 These bracelets are so important.
00:47 Exchanging special handmade friendship bracelets.
00:50 It all goes back to Taylor's song,
00:52 You're on Your Own Kick.
00:54 [MUSIC]
01:00 So my friends and I got tickets to the Ares Tour.
01:02 We had about 200 bracelets made.
01:05 We just couldn't stop.
01:07 We really just had a good time doing it.
01:09 [MUSIC]
01:13 You realize 200 bracelet was way too many for us to all bring and trade.
01:17 Kim actually came up with the idea to put them on Etsy and sell them.
01:21 I went to bed, woke up the next morning,
01:23 and we had over 300 bracelets on order.
01:26 I was just refreshing the Etsy page,
01:28 and I could see the sales going up.
01:29 It was like five, six, seven.
01:31 I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to make 200 bracelets tomorrow morning."
01:35 Then finally, like, "Okay, we shut it down. We shut it down.
01:37 We only have to make like 50."
01:39 We're like, "Okay, shh. Okay, we can do that."
01:40 Fifty back then was so many.
01:42 We weren't expecting to get much money,
01:44 a couple of hundred dollars at the most.
01:46 This morning, I ran the numbers and we're at $19,000 in sales.
01:51 The Aristore is my Roman Empire.
01:54 I think about it all the time, every day.
01:56 I hear a song. That's a great bracelet song.
01:59 That's a good thing to put on a bracelet.
02:00 This business definitely keeps us in touch.
02:03 Two of us live in Massachusetts,
02:04 the other two live in Connecticut.
02:06 Now, we have to meet up and trade bracelets,
02:08 drop off, talk almost every single day.
02:10 Keep making more songs, Taylor,
02:12 so we can keep making more bracelets.
02:14 ♪♪
02:23 I went to the Reputation Tour.
02:25 I was right next to a security guard.
02:28 So we struck up a conversation,
02:30 and he told me about the gig that he has.
02:32 A couple years later, I found some free time,
02:34 so I picked up that job,
02:37 ultimately to try and work a Taylor Swift concert.
02:40 During a sold-out show,
02:42 security guard and self-proclaimed "Swifty"
02:44 Calvin Dinker was working on the floor.
02:46 I worked kind of right along the edge of her stage.
02:50 After night one, I made little pieces of paper
02:53 that asked the audience if they could take photos of me
02:56 with Taylor Swift in the background and text it to me.
02:59 ♪♪
03:07 ♪♪
03:12 When she came right behind me, there were a ton of fans,
03:14 and I had to look at the fans.
03:16 I saw all of their faces light up when she gets near them,
03:20 and it was just a sight,
03:22 even if I wasn't looking at her on that stage.
03:25 ♪♪
03:33 ♪♪
03:39 ♪♪
03:46 -Oh, my God!
03:48 Oh, my God!
03:51 -So I think the squeal is mom.
03:54 -They had me kneel up on the stage,
03:56 and I see Taylor Swift coming toward me.
03:59 -This has become a special moment
04:00 every night at the Aries Tour.
04:02 Each night, Swift picks a young fan
04:04 to give that hat to during the song "22."
04:07 -Everything I do is handmade,
04:09 and it's like a beautiful process
04:11 because it's more intimate, my connection with the hats.
04:16 I was already working with Taylor's wardrobe team,
04:20 and they approached me to do the classic fedora
04:23 for the video for "22."
04:26 ♪♪
04:29 The connection that she has with her fan in that moment,
04:33 it was so emotional for me to see.
04:36 It was so beautiful.
04:38 Taylor has been empowering so many women with her music,
04:42 and to me, to be a part of that,
04:44 always I'm trying to empower women with my craftsman
04:47 and be together.
04:48 It's so beautiful to me.
04:50 ♪♪
04:58 ♪♪
05:04 -I always knew from, like, the moment I wanted to propose,
05:07 I wanted to do it at a Taylor Swift concert.
05:09 I just never thought it would happen, you know?
05:12 I was like, "What are the logistics of that?
05:14 How long am I willing to wait?"
05:16 -It's a once-in-a-lifetime type of thing.
05:18 I was like, "Okay, I've got to figure out
05:21 how I'm going with the ring, one.
05:23 I need to see where exactly in the lyrics
05:25 I have to nail down to, you know, nail it."
05:28 -All I could think of is, "What is the line
05:30 I need to go down on one knee on?"
05:32 ♪♪
05:34 [ Cheers and applause ]
05:36 ♪♪
05:47 -Two to three weeks before the actual date of the tour --
05:50 yeah, I never told you this --
05:52 I would play the song whenever I would go to work
05:55 and whenever I would come back just to make sure,
05:58 "Okay, this is the part that I have to nail down."
06:01 ♪♪
06:08 [ Cheers and applause ]
06:10 ♪♪
06:20 -We got so many different angles of the proposal.
06:23 I have some of them saved as, like, Swiftie section 326.
06:27 -I mean, I've never seen so much brightness
06:30 and glitter around all in one spot.
06:33 I've never been a part of such a supportive community like that.
06:38 ♪♪
06:40 -I just knew that when I proposed to Nick,
06:43 I needed Taylor to be a part of it
06:45 because she's been such a momentous,
06:48 impactful person for Nick his whole life.
06:51 And as much as I love her, too,
06:53 it just felt like this is something
06:55 I want Nick to remember forever.
06:57 I want everything he loves to be a part of the experience for him.
07:02 ♪♪
07:06 -She's been there on the hardest days of my life,
07:10 and she's been there for the best days of my life.
07:13 ♪♪
07:22 For her to be able to successfully relate
07:24 to so many people in the way that she has, it's amazing.
07:28 ♪♪
07:40 Definitely one of the confusing parts of this technology
07:43 is just the overall power.
07:47 -If it seems like everyone is suddenly talking about AI,
07:51 that is because they are.
07:53 -At this point, I'm sure you've heard of ChatGPT.
07:55 -ChatGPT.
07:56 -You're gonna say, "Yeah, man, ChatGPT."
07:58 -Well, it was developed by the American company OpenAI.
08:01 -OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman
08:03 testifying on Capitol Hill later today.
08:05 He's gonna face questions about artificial intelligence
08:08 and the rapid growth of ChatGPT.
08:10 -As this technology advances,
08:12 we understand that people are anxious
08:14 about how it could change the way we live.
08:16 -At the most consequential technology of our time,
08:18 artificial intelligence.
08:20 -Their attempts to instill AI as a normal operating procedure
08:25 is literally dehumanizing the workforce.
08:28 -The CEO of OpenAI was ousted, and now he's back in.
08:32 -The company's board of directors
08:34 said it had lost confidence in Altman.
08:36 Well, now all but one of those board members is being replaced.
08:40 -In a deep sense, AI is the technology that the world,
08:49 the society, people have always wanted.
08:51 Sci-fi has been talking about this for a very long time.
08:53 -Hello, I'm here.
08:55 -Hi.
08:56 -Hello.
08:57 -Hi.
08:58 -Wake up, daddy's home.
09:00 -Welcome home, sir.
09:01 -A chat interface is very powerful.
09:03 We all know how to use that.
09:05 You can represent a lot of simple or complex concepts in language,
09:09 and the new abilities that you give someone
09:12 with an interface like this, I think, clearly resonated.
09:15 -So you can kind of date the beginning of 2023
09:19 really to November 2022,
09:22 which is when OpenAI released ChatGPT.
09:25 They weren't necessarily the first to have developed this technology in-house,
09:29 but they were the first to release it into the world.
09:32 ChatGPT was followed by GPT-4,
09:36 which is significantly more powerful and capable than ChatGPT.
09:40 -It understands images and can express logical ideas about them.
09:45 For example, it can tell us that if the strings in this image were cut,
09:49 the balloons would fly away.
09:51 -People extrapolated from the capabilities of ChatGPT
09:54 to the capabilities of GPT-4 and began thinking,
09:57 "Okay, what's the technology that's going to come out in five years
10:01 going to look like?
10:02 What's the technology that's going to come out in 10 years going to look like?"
10:05 -We think it's very important to our mission to deploy things like ChatGPT
10:09 so that people gain some experience and feeling
10:13 of the capabilities and limitations of these systems.
10:16 -Now, there are some criticisms of this.
10:20 One is that it creates so-called race dynamics,
10:23 companies all fighting to be first to market,
10:26 to release these tools potentially dangerously,
10:28 cut back on safety research in order to move faster.
10:31 -I don't think it's helpful to just sort of pretend like,
10:34 "Oh, it's all certain to be fine."
10:35 We can manage this. I am confident about that.
10:37 But we won't successfully manage it if we're not extremely vigilant
10:41 about the risks and if we don't talk very frankly
10:43 about how badly it could go wrong.
10:46 -Sam Altman is a very capable public speaker and public operator.
10:51 Over the course of 2023, he's really been on what you could call
10:54 a victory tour and you could call a listening tour as well.
10:57 He has been around the world.
10:59 He has testified in front of the Senate committee.
11:02 He has this kind of unique ability to be many things to many people.
11:06 And that requires a combination of skills.
11:09 It requires understanding the core scientific problems, sure,
11:11 but it also requires being effectively a businessman
11:16 and also a politician.
11:18 -When we first started, we thought we could just be a nonprofit,
11:21 but the costs of compute for these systems is quite intense.
11:26 And so we thought really hard and designed a structure
11:28 where our nonprofit has full control and governance
11:32 over a capped for-profit subsidiary that can make a certain amount of money
11:37 for its investors and employees to let us do what we need to do
11:40 because these models are extraordinarily expensive.
11:44 -Sam Altman, who has drawn comparisons to tech giants like Steve Jobs,
11:49 was dismissed by the Open AI Board Friday.
11:52 -The board didn't come through with further information
11:56 about why it had chosen to make such a substantial decision.
11:59 Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, said that Altman and Brockman
12:03 could start up a new AI lab within Microsoft.
12:06 And many of Open AI's employees signed an open letter
12:10 saying that they would go and join Microsoft.
12:13 And what this did was it backed the board into a very difficult position.
12:16 Altman's ability to basically engineer himself back onto the CEO's chair
12:21 of Open AI is testament to the incredible power that he wields.
12:25 One of the questions is now, is Open AI trending towards a future
12:30 where it's a traditional tech company, where it sells its AI services
12:34 to customers and where the incentives are largely to stay ahead of competitors?
12:40 And to what extent is it going back to its original roots as a research lab,
12:44 one that is willing to take decisions that might hurt its financial incentives
12:49 if it means developing AI slightly more safely?
12:52 -Lino Messi is Times Athlete of the Year over several excellent candidates.
13:12 The reason Messi stands out is because of the football fever that he brought
13:18 to the United States and really to the world throughout the year.
13:23 Messi's had better statistical years than 2023,
13:26 but starting late last year, he won his first ever World Cup.
13:30 -That's true. We cannot stop talking about the World Cup final.
13:33 It lived up to the hype and then some.
13:36 -It was a crowning achievement of Lino Messi's singular career.
13:40 And since that time, everything he's done has just been incrementally
13:45 more important and more relevant to sports fans around the world.
13:49 -It's over! The first ever League's Cup champions are Lino Messi and the Dividers!
13:56 -So let's just talk about his on-field ability.
14:01 He's like 5'6", 5'7". He's not a huge guy, but that hasn't stopped him at all.
14:06 His left foot is magical. He'll see passing angles that nobody else sees.
14:09 He'll know where the ball is going before anybody else does.
14:12 He kind of approaches the game like a game of chess, always moving and thinking.
14:16 And he's an unselfish player. He's always threading the needle with beautiful passes.
14:20 Throughout his career, he set the standard of excellence on the field,
14:24 and that's pretty influential. There's a lot of kids around the world that play soccer.
14:28 Many, if not most of them, are trying to play like Messi. Messi is the standard.
14:33 -Breaking news. Lionel Messi set to leave PSG at the end of the current season.
14:39 After his contract ran out in Paris Saint-Germain, there was all this talk about where Lionel Messi would play.
14:46 Would he stay in Paris? Would he go to Barcelona, the club that signed him when he was just a 13-year-old boy?
14:53 Would he take more than a billion dollars, reportedly, from a team in Saudi Arabia?
14:58 He kind of defied a lot of expectations by signing with Inter Miami,
15:03 which at the time was a last place club in Major League Soccer, but more relevantly,
15:09 isn't thought of by world soccer fans as one of the top leagues in the world.
15:14 -It's a new era for American soccer.
15:17 The impact was he's changed forever the trajectory of soccer in America,
15:24 which is just one country in the world, but also happens to be the biggest commercial sports market on the planet.
15:30 -Tickets for Tuesday night's game sold out in minutes.
15:33 -The most expensive Major League Soccer game ever.
15:36 -When Messi came here and the way he came here, he just captivated soccer fans and non-soccer fans alike.
15:43 -Messi!
15:45 -He scored 10 goals in his first seven games in Inter Miami, scoring in the final of the League's Cup,
15:51 which helped put the game into penalty kicks and give Inter Miami that championship.
15:55 -It is Messi's moment. It is Messi's night.
15:58 -He was so big that the media partner of MLS, Apple, decided we're going to give him a cut of every additional subscription
16:08 we get to our service because he's here.
16:11 -Messi is here!
16:12 -The day before Messi played his first game in Miami, Apple signed about 6,000 new subscribers.
16:19 The day of his debut, over 100,000 people signed up for Apple TV+.
16:26 -And you just see it. Lionel Messi. He comes to New York, everybody has a message here.
16:30 In Miami, everybody just wants to be around him.
16:32 -Messi!
16:37 -Messi!
16:39 -Soccer has grown here. It's become more popular. European League games are broadcast here.
16:44 Kids talk about their favorite players overseas.
16:46 So it's not to say that soccer in the U.S. hasn't been on the upswing, but the growth is going to be accelerated now.
16:53 The interest is going to be accelerated now.
16:55 All because of one person.
16:57 -Messi!
17:01 -Couldn't have been any other way!
17:06 [Messi's World Cup]
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17:52 (upbeat music)