Time Magazine, for what it's worth these days in terms of cultural relevance, has named the 'Architects of AI' as its Person of the Year for 2025, and these multiple persons include Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg.

ChatGPT was released to the public a full three years ago as of last month. But Time Magazine is declaring 2025 the year of AI, saying that the "architects" of the AI boom are the most influential figures of the year. And, Time says, 2025 was "the year when artificial intelligence's full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out."

That was, arguably, more like last year for most of us. But hey, Time is kind of a fading brand, a former weekly news magazine that became biweekly in 2020, mostly focused on web content that someone is reading somewhere, with rapidly dwindling print circulation.

"Person of the Year is a powerful way to focus the world's attention on the people that shape our lives," says Time's Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs in an editorial. "And this year, no one had a greater impact than the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI."

The cover of the annual issue is actually two covers this year, as seen below. On the right, ironically, is a non-AI-generated image that is nontheless fictional. It's a painting by Jason Seiler, modeled after the iconic 1932 photograph "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," depicting Zuckerberg, Musk, Huang, Altman, along with Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind Technologies, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute.

Courtesy of Time Magazine

As CBS News notes, "Most of the industry figures pictured on Time's cover did not speak to the magazine for the story, so this year's spread mainly focuses on the implications — positive, negative and in between — of the companies they have built and the technology they continue forging."

But a couple of them did, including Huang, who said of AI, "Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it. This is the single most impactful technology of our time."

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son and Baidu CEO Robin Li, who were not pictured in the cover image, also apparently talked to the magazine.

Donald Trump was Time's Person of the Year both last year and when he was first elected in 2016, and in 2023, Taylor Swift was given the honor.

This year, Jacobs lauded the collective "architects" saying that they were being recognized "for delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, [and] for transforming the present and transcending the possible."