Time magazine named “The Architects of AI” the 2025 Person of the Year.
In announcing the choice Thursday morning, Time’s editor in chief, Sam Jacobs, stressed the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and the technology’s usefulness in medical fields and hurricane modeling, as well as its “trade-offs” — its huge energy requirements, its ability to create and spread realistic-seeming misinformation, and its concentration in the hands of a few billionaires.
“No one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI,” Jacobs wrote. “For these reasons, we recognize a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse.”
For one of the two covers that Time commissioned for the issue, the famous 1932 photograph “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” was re-created. It features eight AI leaders: Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of xAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind Technologies, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. The second cover shows a looming scaffolding-covered construction of the letters A and I, which features the same eight people.
AI has grown rapidly as an industry in the past year, with companies racing to find ways to implement its tools to boost productivity. While a majority of Americans are open to using it to assist with everyday tasks, according to a recent Pew Research poll, about half of the respondents said that AI is more likely to erode than improve people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.Time is owned by Salesforce co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff, who bought the magazine in 2018 for $190 million. Benioff has embraced the use of AI at Salesforce, recently laying off 4,000 customer support employees as the company relies more heavily on the technology. Unlike other big players in the industry, who along with key figures in the Trump administration have urged minimal regulation of the technology, Benioff has called for the government to regulate AI more carefully to build public trust, saying last year that AI must avoid the “bad” trajectory of social media platforms.
Person of the Year is one of Time’s most recognizable franchises, generating buzz and creating a marketing bonanza for the magazine, which has, like other legacy media publications, weathered stiff economic headwinds in recent years. In 2023, Time removed its paywall, making its news content and archive freely accessible. While the number of digital subscribers fell off, Time saw an increase in advertising revenue, Adweek reported. Person of the Year, along with Time 100, is a valuable advertising opportunity for the magazine.
It’s not the first time that the magazine has chosen to honor a group of people rather than an individual. Among others were the crew members of Apollo 8 in 1968, “American Women” in 1975, and “The Silence Breakers” — people who came forward during the #MeToo movement — in 2017. In 2006, Time made the cover a reflective surface and named “You” as the person of the year, a nod to internet users’ “explosion of productivity and innovation.”
In its article, Time highlighted leading AI companies such as Nvidia, which makes the chips that power AI and recently became the first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation; President Donald Trump’s embrace of AI; and the parents of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after forming a close relationship with ChatGPT.
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