The 'architects of AI', Person of the Year 2025 according to 'TIME' magazine

TIME magazine on Thursday named the "architects of Artificial Intelligence (AI)" on the grounds that their work in developing this cutting-edge technology is transforming humanity.

"This is the year we feel like the people who were designing, imagining and building artificial intelligence stopped debating about how to create this technology and started racing to deploy it, and there are enormous consequences for society," said TIME editor-in-chief, Sam Jacobs, to Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin during an exclusive interview with TODAY.

"This reminds me of the Gilded Age ," Jacobs said. "I think never before since then has so much power been concentrated in so few individuals, and we know what happened then — amazing progress, but also incredible inequality."

The architects of AI

Jensen Huang, of Nvidia; Sam Altman, from OpenAI; and Elon Musk, from xAI, are among the entrepreneurs who "have taken the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate and our livelihoods," the magazine noted.

"They reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons," TIME added.

The magazine depicted on one of its covers eight big tech entrepreneurs sitting on a beam suspended over a city, in an illustration that recreates an iconic 1932 photograph of a group of construction workers during their break in a New York.

The entrepreneurs in the image are the head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg; Lisa Su, of semiconductor company AMD; Elon Musk, of xAI; Jensen Huang, of Nvidia; Sam Altman, of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, of the AI division of Google, DeepMind; Dario Amodei of Anthropic and, finally, Stanford University expert Fei-Fei Li, considered the "godmother" of AI.