Twenty editions after electing all of us as person of the year for our shared protagonism in the fabric of the World Wide Web, Time again turned the spotlight on the digital world in its always eagerly awaited December issue. But in 2025 it was no longer users who had the power, but those who carry and control the system behind: the ‘architects of AI.’ Deep learning has made it possible for artificial intelligence – which until not so long ago was mere science fiction – to undergo a spectacular spurt of development, and for chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to be grafted into our everyday lives with the same force that Internet did in its day, giving the technology enterprises behind them an unimaginable degree of importance. It is a sign of the times that last year, so many of their CEOs were present at Trump’s second inauguration as US president, alongside government authorities.

One of the alternatives for the magazine’s cover depicts Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Lisa Su (AMD), Elon Musk (xAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) dangerously hanging mid-air like the workers who built the Rockefeller Center in the 1930s. Beside them, almost cropped out by the iconic red frame, is Fei-fei Li, a Stanford professor and world expert in computer science: perhaps a veiled reference to the urgent need for responsible use of the new tools, and to the impact of the not-at-all ethereal data centers where they are created, given the imprudent growth that capital, by definition, covets.