TIME magazine has named the "Architects of AI" – led by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang – as its 2025 Person of the Year, cementing the technology's status as the defining force of the modern era, the outlet announced Thursday. The selection highlights how a small group of tech titans and political leaders, including President Donald Trump, have fundamentally reshaped the global economy and geopolitical landscape, driving what Huang described to the magazine as "the single most impactful technology of our time."
Alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the "Architects of AI" recognized by TIME include a cadre of rival and allied tech titans who are collectively reshaping the global landscape. Key figures featured in the report include Sam Altman of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT ignited the current boom; Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, who is integrating AI into social platforms; and Elon Musk, who is rapidly building massive data center infrastructure for xAI. The group also encompasses hardware and model leaders such as AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, as well as global investors and innovators like SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and Baidu's Robin Li, all of whom are described as "grabbing the wheel of history" to drive the technological revolution.
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.
For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the… pic.twitter.com/mEIKRiZfLo
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2025
In the days leading up to the unveiling, reports proliferating on social media suggested the 2025 accolade belongs not to one person, but to a collective dubbed "The Architects of AI."
The a circulated cover art depicted a striking digital reimagining of the legendary "Lunch atop a Skyscraper" from 1932. Rather than steelworkers dining on a beam, the graphic showcases the tycoons and intellects engineering our digital destiny, according to Polymarket.
BREAKING: TIME Person of the Year reportedly leaked. pic.twitter.com/oe3okxsXoZ
— Polymarket (@Polymarket) December 10, 2025
The cover was confirmed to be authentic. Sitting center stage is Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are powering this entire revolution, in no small part thanks to the Israeli company Mellanox he bought for a meager 6.9 billion dollars, which made the AI speed and bandwidth on his revolutionary chips possible to begin with. He's joined by household names like Elon Musk (Tesla, xAI), who made autonomous driving part of every day life, and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), who transformed social media with AI. But the bench goes deeper, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, who made Chat-GPT a household name and revolutionized the way people retrieve data and interact with the world, and AMD's Lisa Su, whose chips have declared war on NVIDIA. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis is also on the leaked cover, a nod to the California giant that made AI latest breakthrough with Gemini 3.0, and made everyone question whether it is the next big thing – potentially outranking Chat-GPT because of its more sophisticated inner workings and easier supply chain. Also on the cover were another Chat-GPT rival, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and the "Godmother of AI" herself, Fei-Fei Li, a Chinese-American computer scientist whose work on AI long before the revolution should be perhaps noted as the big bang of this new era.
It's a powerful visual: the people literally building the infrastructure of the 21st century, just like the steelworkers built the 20th.
The leak triggered chaos for gamblers. Viral posts on X noted that markets had "Artificial Intelligence" as the heavy favorite. However, when the cover showed people, the "AI" bet crashed. Since the winners are "The Architects of AI" (humans) and not "Artificial Intelligence" (the tech), the wager lost its value immediately.
When the cover leaked showing actual people instead of a generic robot, the betting rules kicked in. Since the title is reportedly "The Architects of AI" (humans) and not "Artificial Intelligence" (the tech), the value of the "AI" bet crashed from a sure thing to nearly zero in seconds.
Based on the betting odds chart from the various betting agencies, these were the following predictions:
Top political & world figures
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Pope Leo XIV (7–34%)
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Donald Trump (3–25%)
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy (11–12%)
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Jerome Powell (~9%)
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Benjamin Netanyahu (3–9%)
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Xi Jinping (~6%)
Cultural & media stars
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MrBeast (11–14%)
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Joe Rogan (8–12%)
The "tech" candidates (now likely part of the "architects")
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Jensen Huang (17–33%)
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Sam Altman (6–14%)
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Elon Musk (2–14%)
