Time magazine’s person of the year for 2025 is a group of people who have fostered the popularity of artificial intelligence in today’s culture.
The “Architects of AI” were announced Thursday by the magazine since AI “roared into view and when it became clear that there will be no turning back” in 2025, ABC News reported.
“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 post on X.
Time noted that the honor goes to the “individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI.” It does not go to the technology itself.
“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,” Sam Jacobs, the editor-in-chief, said, explaning the choice. “The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apple’s Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie.”
According to Thomas Husson, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, it was just a matter of time before AI got the recognition.
This year was when AI 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,” Husson said via email.
Other contenders were tech CEOs Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Sam Altman of OpenAI, Pope Leo XIV, President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Trump was named the 2024 person of the year and Taylor Swift was the 2023 person of the year.
The Person of the Year dates back to 1927, when the editors of “Time” have picked the person they believe most shaped headlines over the previous 12 months.
