According to Inc, Time magazine revealed its 2025 Person of the Year on December 11, awarding the title to the “Architects of AI.” The honor goes to eight specific leaders: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. The magazine stated 2025 was the year AI’s full potential became undeniable and that there’s “no turning back.” Editor Sam Jacobs said this group had the greatest impact by imagining and building AI. The announcement features two covers, one a play on the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo and another with the group around giant “AI” letters.
A business award, not a moral one
Here’s the thing about Time’s Person of the Year: it’s not necessarily an endorsement. The magazine’s own criteria say it’s for the person or persons who “most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill.” So this isn’t a pure celebration. It’s an acknowledgment of sheer, world-bending influence. And in 2025, that influence is concentrated in the hands of these eight people and the trillion-dollar companies they run or advise. The covers themselves are telling—they literally frame these CEOs as the construction workers building our new reality. It’s a powerful, and slightly unsettling, metaphor. Are they building a skyscraper or a cage?
The hardware players get their due
What’s interesting is who’s included. It’s not just the software and model folks like Altman and Hassabis. They put Lisa Su of AMD and Jensen Huang of Nvidia right there on the cover. That’s a tacit admission that the AI boom is, at its foundation, a hardware boom. You can’t have thinking machines without the insane computing power these companies provide. Think about it: without Nvidia’s GPUs, does ChatGPT even exist? Probably not. By including them, Time is subtly making a point about the entire supply chain of intelligence, from silicon to software. It’s all connected.
A year of “no turning back”
The magazine’s statement that 2025 is the year it became clear there’s “no turning back” is the real headline. That’s a massive declaration. It suggests we’ve crossed some Rubicon where AI is no longer a curious tool or a lab experiment, but the fundamental layer on which everything else operates. That has huge implications for business, security, creativity, you name it. But it also raises a question: if we can’t turn back, who’s steering the ship? This group on the cover, apparently. And that’s where the “worrying humanity” part of Time’s description really kicks in.
So, what’s the takeaway? Time has officially codified what we all feel: AI is the story of our time, and a shockingly small group of individuals controls its trajectory. It’s a recognition of power, for better or worse. Now we get to live in the world they’re building.
