It’s nearly Christmas time, and this is the time of year when Time magazine announces its illustrious “Person of the Year,” and megalomaniacs far and yon salivate at the prospect of gracing that cover (sometimes even buying a little mirror with a faux Time logo in the corner, just to imagine.)
This year, every single one of them will be disappointed, because sure enough, the title for 2025 went to – well, not a person, per se.
A couple of days ago, I read an article about Polymarket forecasting a 39% chance that “AI” would be named Time’s Person of the Year this year. This morning, I checked again, and it happened.
Here’s part of how Time’s editor in chief Sam Jacobs explains the decision:
“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. We saw it accelerate medical research and productivity, and seem to make the impossible possible. It was hard to read or watch anything without being confronted with news about the rapid advancement of a technology and the people driving it. Those stories unleashed a million debates about how disruptive AI would be for our lives. No business leader could talk about the future without invoking the impact of this technological revolution. No parent or teacher could ignore how their teenager or student was using it.”
Yes, from harried executives looking for a plan, to teachers trying to figure out if Johnny’s homework was done by AI, to students – well, tinkering with this tech as only a zoomer can – we are in the thrall of a technology more powerful than any that we have known before. A rival intelligence, dark and strong, rises to meet us, from the wells of hardware and silicon design where we ourselves forged it.
Okay, enough with the LoTr stuff.
Who’s Included?
I wanted to know exactly who is in this panel of individuals named in suggesting that “Architects of AI” are Time’s “Person of the Year.”
And by the way, how do you share an award like that, anyway?
Here’s the list:
“Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Fei-Fei Li.”
All but one of these are at the helm of major AI companies – the remaining awardee is a renowned data scientist who has graced many of the events I have hosted. Here’s a bit of a bio:
“Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist and Stanford professor best known for creating ImageNet, the dataset/challenge that helped spark modern breakthroughs in computer vision and deep learning. She’s a co-director of Stanford HAI, co-founded the nonprofit AI4ALL, and previously served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. She also founded World Labs, focused on ‘spatial intelligence.’”
Who Might Have Been Included?
Since we’re all not Biff Tanner walking around with a future stats book in our pocket, here’s a list of people that Polymarket considered contenders just before this announcement was made:
“Nvidia CEO Jen Huang is the closest competitor at 27%, reflecting his company’s central role in powering the current AI boom,” wrote Muskan Singh in the above article. “Pope Leo XIV follows at 11%, with President Trump at 7%. Other long-shot contenders include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
One Strange Thing
I wanted to mention this…
Keep in mind that ChatGPT 5.2 is only a day old in public use.
As I used the model to check Times’s decision, in the sort of quickly broadcast chain of thought reasoning that the model now displays while it’s “thinking,” GPT repeatedly said things like:
“I used insufficient data to cite inaccurate results. I’ll go back and check…”
Now, I checked GPT’s work, finding backup sources for what it was showing me. So I did not see the model making mistakes. I just saw it telegraphing them.
Is this a “bug?” Not in the traditional sense. Just something to keep an eye on.
Meanwhile, here’s the big question: will “AI architects” also be Times Person of the Year in 2026?
