Time Magazine’s annual Person of the Year issue has always been a barometer of global influence. Not necessarily a celebration, but a recognition of the individual or idea that shaped the world the most over the year. In 2025, Time made a bold, unprecedented choice: instead of naming one person, it named a group of leaders behind artificial intelligence and called them “The Architects of AI”.
This group includes the CEOs, researchers and visionaries at the helm of the most powerful AI companies with people like Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Elon Musk (xAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Lisa Su (AMD), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Fei-Fei Li (World Labs) as the minds behind the tools rewriting the rules of technology and society.
Why This Matters
According to Time, 2025 was the year artificial intelligence shifted from experimental novelty to an unavoidable global force. A technology that’s woven into everything from business operations and scientific research to how people communicate, create and even think. AI is no longer a “futuristic promise”. It’s here, reshaping industries at warp speed.
Time’s editors pointed to two covers for the 2025 edition: one showing the giant letters “AI” as an industrial construction project and another echoing the iconic 1932 Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photograph but this time featuring the world’s top tech leaders sitting on a steel beam. Both images capture the essence of this movement: AI is under construction and those building it are perched high above the landscape of society itself.
For Better or Worse
What’s remarkable about this choice isn’t just who was named but what it symbolizes. Time doesn’t choose winners by virtue of positivity. It selects those with the biggest impact, good and bad. And so, this recognition reflects a profound truth: AI isn’t just transformational, it’s polarizing.
On one hand, architects of AI have accelerated innovation in medicine, climate modeling, engineering and education. Tools like ChatGPT now see hundreds of millions of users worldwide and assist in tasks from customer service to writing to data science.
On the other hand, the rapid rollout of these technologies has sparked deep concern. Ethical questions about bias, job displacement, misinformation, mental health impacts, accountability and power concentration in the hands of a few corporations are no longer theoretical. They’re pervasive realities.
This isn’t just a Tech Story. It’s a Human story.
At DSRPT, we look beyond the headline to ask: What does this mean for people, economies, governance and culture?
- AI has gone mainstream, whether we’re ready or not
This selection signals that artificial intelligence is no longer confined to labs or novelty applications, it’s now the core infrastructure of how society functions. It’s the “new electricity” as many analysts have said. This makes 2025 a pivotal inflection point, the moment AI stopped being ‘emerging’ and became inescapable.
- Power and responsibility are concentrated. That’s risky.
This group of architects includes global-scale titans whose decisions affect billions of people. The scale of wealth, influence and technical capability concentrated in a handful of companies raises legitimate questions:
- Who sets the guardrails?
- Who ensures public accountability?
- Who gets to decide whose values get built into the systems that will mediate how we work, learn and interact?
The fact that many critics from late-night hosts to independent analysts see this choice as controversial highlights just how fraught the debate around AI has become.
- The future isn’t written, it’s being built
Naming the architects of AI as “Person of the Year” is striking but it shouldn’t feel fatalistic. It’s a recognition, not an endorsement. Those building these systems are navigating uncharted territory with incredible potential and real dangers.
This moment for us should be more of a call to action:
- We need public discourse and policy frameworks that grapple honesty with AI’s risks
- We need education systems that prepare people for a world where AI literacy isn’t optional
- We need business and tech communities that prioritize ethics, accountability and inclusivity
This isn’t just a tech industry milestone, it’s a moment for society to reflect on how we shape technology, not just how technology shapes us.
Time’s selection of the Architects of AI as Person of the Year doesn’t just highlight a group of influential leaders, it illuminates a crossroad. We are living in the era where AI transitions from promise to power which is thrilling and unpredictable. But it’s up to all of us, not just the architects, to determine whether this force builds a future that empowers humanity or one that erodes it.