The US magazine crowns the “titans” of technology: “Competing side by side and against each other” they have taken “the steering wheel of history” into their hands. This year “whatever the question was, AI was the answer”
For Time, “the architects of artificial intelligence” are the person of the year 2025. In the last twelve months “whatever the question was, AI was the answer” writes the newspaper. And at the same time the awareness “that there will be no turning back” has grown.
The covers
For the occasion, the US magazine has created two covers. In the first, the writing “AI” is represented almost like a building under construction inside which circuits and gears appear. It is surrounded by scaffolding complete with workers in helmets and managers who appear to be giving instructions.
In the second, sitting on a beam suspended in the air, “the architects” are depicted: the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg; AMD CEO Lisa Su; xAI CEO Elon Musk; Nvidia president Jensen Huang; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; the CEO of DeepMind Technologies, Demis Hassabis; the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei; the co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered Al Institute, Fei-Fei Li. This image follows the famous photo taken in 1932 “Lunch on a skyscraper” in which eleven workers have lunch sitting on a beam 250 meters above sea level. But unlike the photo taken in the 1930s, on the Time cover the CEOs are not eating their lunch, but doing their business: they are gesticulating, they have their cell phones in their hands or their computers resting on their legs. After all, this is the celebration of how “the titans” of technology “took the wheel of history into their own hands”. And “competing side by side and against each other, they placed multibillion-dollar bets on one of the largest infrastructure projects of all time. They have reoriented government policies, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. Artificial intelligence has emerged as arguably the most important tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons.”
Why AI?
In officially announcing the winner, Time explained: «The person of the year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people who influence our lives. And this year, no one has made a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed and built AI.” So «to deliver the age of thinking machines, to amaze and worry humanity, to transform the present and transcend the possible, the AI Architects are Time’s Person of the Year 2025». And if «we now find ourselves moving in a world increasingly defined» by Artificial Intelligence, looking to the future «humanity will determine the path forward of AI and each of us can play a role in determining the structure and its future».
Potential and challenges
The magazine highlights the lights, but also the shadows of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the dynamics have already emerged “from a million debates on how disruptive, how beautiful and how ugly” AI “would be for our lives”. And among the positive aspects, Time reminds us that AI “can accelerate medical research, productivity and make the impossible possible.” He continues: «The capabilities may seem magical: we recently learned that AI could facilitate communication with whales and solve a 30-year-old unsolved math problem. Models are improving at a relentless pace, now taking seconds to do a job that once took hours.” The shadows concern “the amount of energy needed to operate these systems”, “the disinformation that proliferates”, the threat of “anti-human ideologies” as stated by Pope Leo XIV, and even the possibility of “suffering large-scale cyber attacks without human intervention”. But, Time reports, “where skeptics glimpsed a bubble, the leaders of the revolution saw the dawn of a new era of abundance.”
