Since 1801, American leaders have gathered in Washington, D.C., to attend the Inauguration of a new President. It is a day of great tradition, one that often brings together the most powerful people in the country. Prominent at Donald Trump’s return to office in January were the chiefs of U.S. technology companies, which long have led the world. But something unexpected was happening offstage: that same day, a little-known Chinese firm called DeepSeek released a new artificial-intelligence model that spooked markets and led to a rallying cry from Silicon Valley.
The next day, tech titans Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, and Masayoshi Son appeared at the White House with an announcement of their own. They pledged to invest up to $500 billion to build AI data centers around the U.S., calling the project Stargate. Those two days foretold the year to come: global competition, astounding innovation, massive sums of money, and the alchemizing forces of public and private interests.
This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out. Whatever the question was, AI was the answer. We saw it accelerate medical research and productivity, and seem to make the impossible possible. It was hard to read or watch anything without being confronted with news about the rapid advancement of a technology and the people driving it. Those stories unleashed a million debates about how disruptive AI would be for our lives. No business leader could talk about the future without invoking the impact of this technological revolution. No parent or teacher could ignore how their teenager or student was using it.
These new tools can feel like magic. In the past few weeks alone, we’ve learned that AI could facilitate communication with whales, solve an unsolved 30-year-old math problem, and outperform traditional hurricane-prediction models. These systems are improving at a blistering pace, taking seconds to perform work that once took people hours. AI’s capabilities double nearly twice a year now, according to one study. The speed of adoption has been without precedent. “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Jensen Huang, who leads Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company and one of the world’s most influential AI leaders, tells TIME. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.”
All this progress comes with trade-offs: The amount of energy required to run these systems drains resources. Jobs are going poof. Misinformation proliferates as AI posts and videos make it harder to determine what’s real. Large-scale cyberattacks are possible without human intervention. There is also an extraordinary concentration of power among a handful of business leaders, in a manner that hasn’t been witnessed since the Gilded Age. If the past is prologue, this will result in both significant advancements and greater inequality. AI companies are now lashed to the global economy tighter than ever. It is a gamble of epic proportions, and fears of an economic bubble have grown. Trump captured some of our unease in September when he said, “If something happens, really bad, just blame AI.”
The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year
Students of history know that this moment has been a long time coming. Seventy-five years ago, a computer named Mark III appeared on the cover of TIME. A $500,000 behemoth built for the Navy, it roared “louder than an admiral” and was helping scientists imagine a new future. The story’s headline? the thinking machine. We are now living in the world that the thinking machine—and its makers—have created.
Person of the Year is one of media’s longest-running traditions. We have come a long way since TIME selected Charles Lindbergh as Man of the Year for 1927, in an effort to make up for the fact that editors hadn’t put the aviator on the cover following his pioneering transatlantic flight. Since then, the recognition has evolved as its focus expanded. We’ve named not just individuals but also groups, more women than our founders could have imagined (though still not enough), and, on rare occasions, a concept: the endangered earth, in 1988, or the personal computer, in 1982. The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apple’s Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie.
Click here to buy your copy of this issue
This selection is the third in a series that has captured the key moments in the technological revolution of the past half-century. The rise of the personal computer in the 1980s transformed the economy. The emergence of digital communities was captured famously—and infamously—by TIME naming “You” as Person of the Year in 2006, with a mirrored cover. Hindsight shows how prescient those picks were. Now, the social internet made possible by personal digital devices is giving way to a new era, the age of artificial intelligence.
Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives. And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI. Humanity will determine AI’s path forward, and each of us can play a role in determining AI’s structure and future. Our work has trained it and sustained it, and now we find ourselves moving through a world increasingly defined by it. Even as the growth of these models relies on neural pathways that appear to copy our own—they learn, speak, argue, cajole, and, yes, their ability to do these things can be as frightening as it is astonishing—we know that there is a difference between us and our creation.
Click here to buy your copy of the Person of the Year Collection
For these reasons, we recognize a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.
The post Why the Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year appeared first on TIME.
