Every December, Time magazine chooses its Person of the Year: the person who most influenced the news and the world, for better or for worse. Last year, Time magazine chose President Donald Trump for the second time. The year before, it was Taylor Swift who many claimed had saved the economy from recession with her Elas Tour. In 1938, the magazine chose Adolf Hitler.
This year, Time magazine chose to award an award not just to one person, but to the so-called “Architects of AI,” a group of CEOs shaping the global AI race in the United States. Recent Edelman data shows that AI is in everyone’s heads, embodying the hopes of the few and the economic fears of the many.
“For decades, humans have been striving toward the emergence of thinking machines,” the article says. “Leaders working to develop the technology, such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have warned that the pursuit of its capabilities could lead to unforeseen catastrophes (…) This year, discussions about how to leverage AI responsibly have been replaced by a rush to deploy AI as quickly as possible.”
According to one of TIME’s two cover photos, some of those people appear to be Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and World Labs’ Fei Fei Li. All of them are people who have lived “neighbouring each other or against each other.” others. ”
Time writes that these individuals have reshaped government policy, intensified geopolitical competition, and pushed the adoption of AI through a multibillion-dollar bet on “one of the largest physical infrastructure projects in history.”
This is the story of how AI will change the world in 2025 in new, exciting, and sometimes terrifying ways. This is the story of how Mr. Huang and other tech titans seized the wheel of history, developing technologies and making decisions that reshaped the information environment, the climate, and our lives… AI has emerged as the most important tool in great power competition since perhaps the advent of nuclear weapons.
Time only announced the news on Thursday morning, but images of the cover photo were leaked to prediction market Polymarket on Wednesday night.
