Featured Image Credit: SHAWN THEW / Contributor via Getty
Forget your Spotify Wrapped or Pornhub Year in Review because Time's Person of the Year is here. Previously known as Man of the Year or Woman of the Year until 1999, the American news magazine has been crowning some of the world's most influential people since 1927.
Starting with aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and appointing President Donald Trump as Person of the Year in 2024, we've had everyone from Mahatma Gandhi, Pope John Paul II, and even Taylor Swift claiming the title.
Multiple people have won before, with the likes of U.S. Scientists (1960), American women (1975), and the Live 8 Good Samaritans (2005) all taking the honor, but in 2025, it's the 'Architects of AI' who have been named as Time's People of the Year.
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In 1982, 'the computer' was declared Machine of the Year to welcome the dawn of the Information Age, but showing how far we've come, the so-called 'Architects of AI' are the winners in 2025. Highlighting the computer's win and 'You' (representing individual content creators on the World Wide Web) in 2006, Time itself wrote: "This year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI. Humanity will determine AI’s path forward, and each of us can play a role in determining AI’s structure and future."
Although the 'architects' moniker strays far beyond the big names, one cover image replicates the 1932' iconic "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper”, swapping out the ironworkers for Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla's Elon Musk, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, AMD's Lisa Su, Google DeepMind division CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, who launched her World Labs startup in 2024.
Reminding us how the work of the above and others has trained and sustained AI, Time adds: "Now we find ourselves moving through a world increasingly defined by it. Even as the growth of these models relies on neural pathways that appear to copy our own—they learn, speak, argue, cajole, and, yes, their ability to do these things can be as frightening as it is astonishing—we know that there is a difference between us and our creation."
Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs continued: "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.
“The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apple’s Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie."
While there's no denying the impressive work that the Architects of AI have done, there are some divisive members in the pack.
Up there with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin as some of the more controversial picks, the Architects of AI haven't exactly gone down well.
Over on Reddit, one person referred to it as 'disappointing' while another said: "Yeah it's a very disgusting world we live in."
Saying it's an ironic case of dinosaurs cheering the asteroid, another added: "The editors were so proud of this choice.....until they all lost their jobs to the 'Person of the Year'.
A third responded to "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" parody and concluded: "That almost f**king offends me. Taking a picture of the common man doing extremely hard, dangerous and skilled work and replacing them with a bunch of ultra-wealthy f**ks who step all over that common man whenever they get the chance."
