Time magazine announced this week that "Architects of AI" are its 2025 Person of the Year, according to USA Today. The recognition features tech leaders including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla's Elon Musk, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, AMD's Lisa Su, and Stanford's Fei-Fei Li depicted in a painting modeled after the famous 1932 "Lunch atop a Skyscraper" photograph.
Time's editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs explained the selection: "This 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. Whatever the question was, AI was the answer." The magazine called AI "the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons."
That framing—positioning AI as inevitable, transformative, and historically significant—is exactly the narrative these tech leaders want amplified. Time delivered it without apparent irony.
The phrase "Architects of AI" credits a specific group of executives and researchers for building AI systems that are, according to Time, reshaping society. This framing makes several assumptions worth examining.
First, it treats AI development as primarily driven by these specific individuals rather than thousands of researchers, engineers, and contributors whose work enabled current capabilities. Jensen Huang didn't personally design GPU architectures—Nvidia's engineering teams did. Sam Altman didn't write the code for GPT models—OpenAI's researchers did. The "great man" framing erases institutional and collective contributions in favor of CEO narratives.
Second, it positions these leaders as neutral builders rather than commercial actors with specific interests. Zuckerberg isn't architecting AI for humanity's benefit—he's building it to strengthen Meta's business model and competitive position. Musk's AI investments serve his companies' commercial objectives. Crediting them as "architects" without acknowledging their financial incentives sanitizes business strategy as technological progress.
Third, it accepts the premise that AI's impact in 2025 was definitively transformative rather than contested, overhyped, or unevenly distributed. USA Today reports Time said AI "changed our world in 2025 in both new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways." That's vague enough to be unfalsifiable—any technology that gets attention could be described this way.
Time calls AI "the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons." This is dramatic framing that equates technological capability with geopolitical significance without establishing the comparison's validity.
Nuclear weapons fundamentally altered great-power competition by creating mutually assured destruction, making direct conflict between nuclear powers strategically irrational. AI models, thus far, have not created analogous strategic dynamics. They've accelerated certain capabilities—surveillance, information processing, content generation—but haven't introduced new equilibriums that restructure international relations.
The comparison also implies that AI development is primarily a matter of national competition rather than commercial competition between private companies. While governments certainly care about AI capabilities for military and economic reasons, the "architects" Time features are corporate executives whose primary accountability is to shareholders, not national interests.
If AI truly were as consequential as nuclear weapons for great-power competition, we'd expect governments to treat it with similar urgency around regulation, oversight, and international coordination. Instead, we see tech companies racing to deploy systems while regulatory frameworks lag years behind—not because AI is less important, but because its geopolitical implications remain uncertain and contested.
Time's Person of the Year selection has always been part journalism, part brand management. The magazine positions it as recognizing whoever most influenced events over the past year, "for better or for worse." In practice, it's often a cultural temperature check reflecting which narratives dominate media attention.
The 2006 selection of "You" (recognizing online communities) was forward-looking marketing about user-generated content rather than analysis of that year's most influential developments. The 2025 "Architects of AI" selection functions similarly—it's amplifying an existing narrative about AI's transformative importance rather than critically evaluating whether 2025 was actually the inflection point Time claims.
USA Today notes that last year, Donald Trump received the title following the presidential election, and also in 2016. Those selections reflected electoral outcomes with clear, measurable impact. The "Architects of AI" selection reflects... tech industry prominence and media attention around AI, which is circular reasoning.
The magazine's announcement emphasizes AI's "full potential roaring into view" and becoming something "there will be no turning back or opting out" from. This treats AI adoption as inevitable rather than contested, and obscures ongoing debates about whether current AI capabilities justify the hype.
Time doesn't address: the massive capital expenditure companies are making on AI infrastructure that hasn't proven profitable yet (see Oracle's recent earnings miss), the substantial energy consumption AI training and inference requires, the displacement of workers whose jobs are being automated without clear transitions, or the concentration of AI capabilities in a handful of companies whose leadership Time is now celebrating.
The magazine also doesn't interrogate the claim that "whatever the question was, AI was the answer." That's vendor marketing, not analysis. AI is useful for specific applications with clear success criteria. It's not a universal solution to arbitrary problems, and treating it as such enables overpromising and misapplication.
Time's cover painting references "Lunch atop a Skyscraper," the iconic 1932 photograph of construction workers sitting on a steel beam high above New York City. The original image symbolized American industrial ambition and working-class labor building modern infrastructure during the Depression.
The AI cover replaces construction workers with tech billionaires, which is either tone-deaf or deliberately provocative. The construction workers in the original photo were risking their lives to build physical infrastructure for wages. The tech executives in Time's painting are managing companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars while their employees build AI systems.
The homage suggests equivalence between industrial-era labor and contemporary tech leadership that doesn't exist. It romanticizes corporate executives as builders while erasing the actual engineers, researchers, and workers whose labor produces AI systems.
If we're assigning credit for AI capabilities in 2025, the list extends far beyond eight executives and researchers Time featured. It includes: the thousands of engineers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and other companies who built and refined models; the researchers who developed foundational techniques like transformers and reinforcement learning; the data laborers who annotated training data; the infrastructure teams who built compute clusters; and the open-source community whose contributions enabled rapid iteration.
It also includes researchers and critics who identified limitations, risks, and misapplications—work that's essential to understanding AI's actual rather than imagined capabilities. Time's framing treats AI development as primarily about breakthrough innovations by visionary leaders rather than incremental improvements by distributed teams and critical evaluation by skeptical researchers.
The "Architects" label credits vision over execution, strategy over implementation, and leadership over labor. That's consistent with how business media typically frames technology development. It's not consistent with how technology actually gets built.
Time's choice reveals more about media narratives in 2025 than about AI's actual impact. The magazine is reflecting and amplifying the story that AI is historically significant, that specific tech leaders are responsible for this significance, and that adoption is inevitable rather than a choice society is making.
That narrative serves the interests of the executives Time features. It positions their companies as essential infrastructure rather than commercial services, their products as inevitable rather than optional, and their leadership as visionary rather than opportunistic. It's effective brand management delivered through editorial selection.
The honest assessment: Time chose to honor tech executives during a year when AI dominated headlines, investment, and policy discussions. Whether AI in 2025 actually was as transformative as the magazine claims, or whether we're in a hype cycle that will look different in retrospect, is a question that can't be answered yet. But Time's selection ensures the narrative of AI inevitability gets amplified regardless.
If you're evaluating media coverage of emerging technologies and need help distinguishing between substantive analysis and narrative amplification, Winsome's team can help you identify what actually matters beyond the headlines.
Source: USA Today, "Time magazine names 'Architects of AI' Person of the Year 2025" by Melina Khan
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