The “Architects of AI” were named Time magazine’s person of the year for 2025 on Thursday.
The magazine cited 2025 as the year when the potential of artificial intelligence “roared into view” with no turning back.
“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,” Time said in a social media post.
The magazine was deliberate in selecting people — the “individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI” — rather than the technology itself, though there would have been some precedent for that.
“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,” wrote Sam Jacobs, the editor-in-chief, in an explanation of the choice. “The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apple’s Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie.”
It made sense for Time to anoint AI because 2025 was the year that it shifted from “a novel technology explored by early adopters to one where a critical mass of consumers see it as part of their mainstream lives,” Thomas Husson, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said by email.
