Architects of AI – Time Magazine’s ‘Person’ of the Year 2025

Two years after Time’s “TIME 100 AI” cover for 2023 – the most influential people in AI … movers & shakers, shaping the good, bad, & ugly, we have a shorter list for the 2025 cover.

A new mythology – the Titan Atlas recast as Vidi-on-us holding up the world

I’ve read & written a lot about AI the last two years.

Time’s article covers all the bases. Even some anecdotal tales of AI’s “Midas touch” seeping (or blending) into individual lives. It contains useful infographics:

  • the players, the lords of AI – Chip builders, Computing Providers, and Model Builders
  • the capital expenditures on AI – the deals driving investment and markets; where AI spending is going – builders, energizers, tech devs
  • how people use the ChatGPT – let’s count all the ways, pacing scaling & chatter.

There’re the sirens of smartness, who pledge wonders and wealth – with wisdom perhaps an afterthought (yet humility not even subtext?).

Whether bubble or historic boom … Is this a flywheel for prosperity or primrose path for the general public?

• AI Overview

Time magazine reveals its Person of the Year for 2025, AI …
Time Magazine (TIME) named “The Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year, recognizing the tech leaders like Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Elon Musk (xAI) who developed and shaped artificial intelligence as it became a mainstream force, impacting everything from daily life to global competition. The choice highlights AI’s rapid integration in 2025, marking a significant shift from novel tech to a fundamental part of modern existence, with its creators influencing a future filled with both opportunity and uncertainty.

Who they are:

  • Jensen Huang: CEO of Nvidia, a key supplier of AI hardware.
  • Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT.
  • Elon Musk: Founder of xAI and other ventures.
  • Lisa Su: CEO of AMD, another major chipmaker.
  • Mark Zuckerberg: CEO of Meta.
  • Dario Amodei: CEO of Anthropic.
  • Demis Hassabis: CEO of Google DeepMind.
  • Fei-Fei Li: AI researcher and advocate.

Why they were chosen:

  • Year of AI: 2025 was the year AI moved from early adoption to mainstream consumer use, changing how people work, search, and create.
  • Shaping the future: These individuals led the charge in creating technology that reshapes economies, information, and society.
  • Impact: Their work accelerated medical research, boosted productivity, and sparked global debates on AI’s disruptive potential.

TIME’s reasoning:

  • TIME’s Editor-in-Chief, Sam Jacobs, noted that the people who imagined, built, and drove AI had the most profound impact on the world in 2025, ushering humanity toward a highly automated and uncertain future.

• Time > The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year by Charlie Campbell, Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo (Dec 11, 2025) – A vibe of boom and abundance highlighted a year of AI, as “tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods.”

Memes depict Nvidia as Atlas, holding the stock market on its shoulders. More than just a corporate juggernaut, Nvidia also has become an instrument of statecraft, operating at the nexus of advanced technology, diplomacy, and geopolitics.

The AI boom seemed to swallow the economy into “a black hole that’s pulling all capital towards it,” says Paul Kedrosky, an investor and research fellow at MIT.

• Axios > AI architects are Time magazine’s 2025 “Person of the Year” by April Rubin (Dec 11, 2025)

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• Shaping and stirring the AI boom – Time’s 10^2 influencers (2023)

1 comment

  1. Mystic mirror

    Amid all the chatter about AI movers & shakers and whether AI’s a flywheel for prosperity or primrose path, it’s good to remember this article’s advice:

    “Anthropomorphizing AI gives people the wrong idea about what these systems actually are. And that has consequences.” [1]

    Marketing flourishes used to style AI interactions using human metaphors are fibs, whether intended to mislead or not. “Explain [topic] in 5 levels of understanding” is one of my favorite approches to discussing challenging topics. But AI evangelists appear to always pick Level 1 as default; then drop the mic.

    Macy Meyer offers some advice on talking about AI. Yet, when I see how many people interact with their pets, I wonder … those endearing, embraceable “you’s” [3]. Language shapes perception, and with AI it’s about profit (profitable engagement).

    • Cnet > Stop Talking About AI as if It’s Human. It’s Not by Macy Meyer (Dec 10, 2025) – Instead of pretending AI is a cognizant being with emotions, let’s examine the actual risks and limitations.

    Key points

    • AI has no soul
    • When we begin to assign consciousness and emotional intelligence to an entity where none exists, we start trusting AI in ways it was never meant to be trusted.
    • How we should talk about AI [stay grounded in reality]
    • When companies lean into anthropomorphic language [mystical metaphors], they blur the line between simulation and sentience. … And once that language sticks, it shapes our thoughts about the technology, as well as how we behave around it. [2]
    • Instead of “soul,” talk about a model’s architecture or training.
    • Instead of “confession,” call it error reporting or internal consistency checks.
    • Instead of saying a model “schemes,” describe its optimization process.
    • We should refer to AI using terms like trends, outputs, representations, optimizers, model updates or training dynamics.

    In the race to make AI models appear increasingly impressive, tech companies have adopted a theatrical approach to language. They keep talking about AI as if it’s a person. Not only about the AI “thinking” or “planning” — those words are already fraught — but now they’re discussing an AI model’s “soul” and how models “confess,” “want,” “scheme” or “feel uncertain.”

    This isn’t a harmless marketing flourish. Anthropomorphizing AI is misleading, irresponsible and ultimately corrosive to the public’s understanding of a technology that already struggles with transparency, at a moment when clarity matters most.

    Notes

    [1] Anthropomorphism applies whether one frames chimpanzee behavior as human-like, dog behavior as child-like, …

    Expecting children to behave as small adults also has consequences.

    [2] Such language stickiness is one of my ongoing struggles with the persistent use of the terms “particle” and “wave” in quantum physics. Physics phibs.

    Matt Strassler: It always bothers me when we physicists water down our science too far, so that the result is misleading or even false [physics phib]. I feel that doing so underestimates the intelligence of our readers and listeners. To make matters worse, our bad explanations often contradict our good ones, creating logical inconsistencies that make it impossible for a non-expert to make sense of what we’re saying. There has to be a more intelligent and more honest way to convey the lessons of science. – Advancing QFT visualization – further demystification?

    [3] There’s that need to connect, to feel agency around us. Even the Puritans had a penchant for mystic beings and magic. Imagine if one of your dear pets, like a parrot, started talking like ChatGPT, eh.

    Related posts

    • In AI chatbots we trust – too much

    • Chatbot redux – synthetic coherent ‘Stochastic Parrots’

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