Why TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year is not a person

Time announced its 2025 Person of the Year on Thursday, Dec. 11. But here’s the catch: Time’s Person of the Year is not a person at all. In 2025, the magazine made a rather unconventional turn. It did not choose a single human being, or even a collective of people, but a force that has dominated and reshaped the modern day at remarkable pace – the Architects of AI.

Why the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year

The magazine’s Person of the Year is a crucial recognition. As the Time Editor-in-Chief told readers in a letter, “Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world’s attention on the people that shape our lives.”

But this year, the architects of AI not only took the cake but also ate it, for their ability to deliver the age of thinking machines with transformative technology.

“And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI,” Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs added.

The magazine has quoted a study that observed how AI’s capabilities now double nearly twice a year. The pace at which AI is moving is unprecedented. New models arrive faster, with surprising improvements in their capabilities each time, and they also reach more users than any previous technology cycle.

Jensen Huang, the President and CEO of NVIDIA and one of the most influential AI leaders in the world, told the magazine about its influence and its impact on every industry. “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” he said. “This is the single most impactful technology of our time.”

The wins and the trade-offs of AI

While AI’s exponential growth has created unprecedented benefits, these come with their own share of drawbacks. The new tools are solving problems that haunted scientists for decades. For instance, in the past few weeks alone, AI enabled communication with whales, solved a mathematical problem that had stumped scientists for 30 years, and outperformed traditional hurricane-prediction models.

But all this comes at a cost. The energy required to run these systems is draining resources, and their efficiency has threatened jobs across industries. Misinformation is accelerating at a threatening pace. Today, it is almost impossible to tell apart AI-generated posts and videos. Cyberattacks no longer need human intervention. Remember a couple of months ago when a Fox News reporter showed Donald Trump a viral video in which a black bag was thrown out of a White House window? And the US President’s response was, “If something happens, really bad, just blame AI.”

In fact, we all have a role to play in being the architects of AI. Our work has trained and sustained these models, and now our world is increasingly defined by them. “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,” Sam Jacobs said.

The magazine also released two covers. One features the letters “AI” under construction, and another is a re-creation of its “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph from 1932. The image replaces ironworkers with tech titans from the AI sector, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, xAI’s Elon Musk, AMD’s Lisa Su, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang.

For better or worse, AI has dominated this year’s headlines, and the magazine recognised the force. “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,” Sam Jacobs concluded.