Artificial intelligence and its architects are "for better or worse" Time's Person of the Year for 2025. This was announced by the American magazine that every December, since 1927, "crowns" the personality or, in rare cases, the concepts that have most influenced society in the year that is about to end.
The magazine's most coveted cover story, which has previously featured presidents, dictators, pontiffs, sovereigns, and, in one case in 2023, singer Taylor Swift, now illustrates how AI "is impacting our lives, for better or worse." "For ushering in the era of thinking machines," the magazine states, "for astonishing and disturbing humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are Person of the Year."
This time, there are two covers : on the first, Time placed Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, Elon Musk of Xai, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Sam Altman of Open Ai, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind Technologies, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li of World Labs, perched on a steel beam like the workers building the first skyscrapers in the famous 1932 photo "Lunch atop a Skyscraper." On the second cover, the same pioneers populate a structure shaped like the letters A and I, veiled by shelves.
Donald Trump was disappointed: he was expecting his third cover after those of 2016 and 2024. Among the favorites were also Pope Leo, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, killed at a rally in Utah, and New York Mayor-elect Zorhan Mamdani.
For the third time in nearly 100 years, the magazine has singled out a group of individuals, following the "guardian" journalists facing death and persecution in 2018 and the #MeToo women in 2017 who "broke the silence" on sexual harassment by powerful people.
In addition to CEOs, Time has also focused on the technology that has emerged from their laboratories: the magazine has previously chosen objects or concepts for its year-end cover in 1982 with the personal computer, in 1988 with the Earth in danger and in 2006 with the revolution of social media users and a 'You' in capital letters on the cover.
(Unioneonline)