U.S. Time 'Person of the Year'… 8 AI executives including Jensen Huang and Altman

U.S. newsweekly Time selected the technology company executives who led advances in artificial intelligence (AI) this year as the world's most influential "Person of the Year."

Time announced on the 11th (local time) that "The Architects of AI" are the Persons of the Year. The Time cover featured eight AI-related company chief executives: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, AMD's Lisa Su, Tesla's Elon Musk, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Worldcoin's Fei-Fei Li. The cover was themed on the famous photograph "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," which was taken in 1932 during construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

A second cover shows a structure shaped like the letters AI; AI assistance was used in the image's production process.

Time said, "This year was when AI's full potential began to be revealed in earnest, and it became clear that we can neither return to a pre-AI time nor ignore AI," adding, "No one had a greater impact than the people who conceived, designed, and built AI." It also said, "Whatever the question, AI had the answer," and added that "AI made the impossible possible."

Time assessed that AI and its executives significantly influenced U.S. policy under the Trump administration and that AI has become a major factor in international relations, including competition between the U.S. and China. However, it also pointed out many side effects in the AI development process, such as massive energy consumption, job losses, the spread of misinformation, cyberattacks, and power concentrated among a small number of companies.

Time has selected a Person of the Year annually since 1927, when it featured Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, on its cover. Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump, who returned to the White House after four years, was chosen.

Han Gyeong-je