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Time Magazine has named the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year in an homage to the leaders and organizations who have played a key role in shaping this year’s year of generative AI . In a feature article for the magazine Time Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs described how AI came of age in 2025 when “artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view” and society became “locked in” to the age of AI with “no turning back or opting out.” The group of people recognized by Time Magazine this year from prominent companies and labs including Nvidia OpenAI Meta Microsoft and AMD are being called the “Architects of AI.” As is tradition with the annual award the group was selected not for embodying world events but for having the greatest impact on the course of events over the past year. Who are the “Architects of AI”? Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) Elon Musk (Tesla CEO) Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO) Lisa Su (AMD CEO) Demis Hassabis (CEO of Googles DeepMind division) Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) Fei-Fei Li (AI pioneer and founder of World Labs) These are just some of the technology leaders and researchers who have been included in Time’s magazine cover art for the year 2025 which is a stylized riff on the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph with the architects of AI “perched on a beam hundreds of feet above the street” at the height of their power. Why is it significant? AI and AI-related technology has had a significant effect on culture and society in 2025. Everyday people industry and governments have incorporated AI technologies across industries such as healthcare defense entertainment education and commerce on a scale not seen before in previous years. AI adoption and use has skyrocketed this year: Generative text models and other tools like DALL-E have become widely available to consumers with tools like ChatGPT now reaching hundreds of millions of users globally and become baked into daily workflows. Generative AI and machine learning startups have boomed and raised billions of dollars to support innovation this year and AI is rapidly creating new economic activity redefining business education and culture in a wide variety of ways both expected and unexpected. Companies and key leaders have played a significant role in this year’s AI industry driving not only technological breakthroughs but policy and competitive dynamics that shape how the industry is structured globally and how nations are positioning themselves geopolitically around AI leading to intense competition for talent and resources in particular between the U.S. and China. AI has a complicated legacy for 2025 Time Magazine has noted that 2025 was not only a year of progress for AI with advances in productivity and scientific research. AI is also blamed by some for economic challenges including workforce displacement misinformation social stresses associated with rapid change and wealth concentration into the hands of a few AI-first companies. Issues around ethics regulation and AI safety have come to the forefront in part due to controversial incidents tied to AI tools: including high profile legal cases this year where generative chatbots have been blamed for people’s suicides drawing attention to potential risks of unbridled development and deployment. Why is it a turning point? Honoring the “Architects of AI” this year is as much about the technological shifts that have been happening as it is about the societal cultural and economic implications of AI reaching a new turning point in 2025 and becoming a core part of global society and economy. The award by Time Magazine is not so much about the tech sector as it is about society becoming fully integrated with AI in 2025.