Time magazine has announced that it has awarded its 2025 Person of the Year title collectively to “The Architects of AI” — tech leaders whose AI innovations, according to Time, have taken the world into a phase from which “there is no turning back”. The choice was revealed exclusively on the TODAY show.
The chosen figures
Eight leading tech figures appear on Time’s two covers:
- Jensen Huang — CEO of Nvidia
- Sam Altman — CEO of OpenAI
- Elon Musk — CEO of Tesla
- Mark Zuckerberg — CEO of Meta
- Lisa Su — CEO of AMD
- Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic
- Demis Hassabis — head of Google DeepMind
- Fei-Fei Li — Stanford professor and founder of the Human-Centered AI Institute
In its statement Time wrote: “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.”
2025: the year of AI transformation
According to Time’s editor, 2025 was the year AI leaders moved beyond debating how to build the technology and entered a serious race to deploy it. Examples of this shift:
- ChatGPT users more than doubled to about 10% of the world’s population (700–800 million weekly users)
- AI coding tools such as Cursor reached USD 1 billion in annual revenue
- In October 2025 Nvidia became the first company worth more than USD 5 trillion
- Nvidia’s output almost quadrupled while its headcount only doubled
Global competition and geopolitical pressure
In January, Chinese start-up DeepSeek released a model it claimed matched US rivals at lower cost and on weaker chips — challenging Silicon Valley’s dominance.
