Time & No Baselines Person of the Year: AI Architects

Like Time magazine’s Person of the Year, No Baselines recognizes that some years are defined not by a single individual, but by a force that reshapes the world. For 2025, the No Baseline Person of the Year is the architects of artificial intelligence. Figures such as Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Jensen Huang, Yann LeCun, and Fei-Fei Li did not simply release products or publish papers. They designed the systems, infrastructure, and intellectual frameworks that moved AI from theory into daily reality, redefining how work is done, how knowledge is created, and how progress itself is measured.

For no baselines, naming a collective as Person of the Year is intentional. The rise of AI has not been driven by a single breakthrough moment, but by sustained system-building across research, hardware, software, and deployment. These architects focused on durability rather than spectacle, investing in foundations that compound over time. Their work reflects a core No Baselines belief: real progress comes from questioning assumptions and rebuilding the baseline, not optimizing within existing limits.

What sets these AI architects apart is long-term thinking under uncertainty. Many of their most consequential decisions were made years before outcomes were obvious, when there were no clear benchmarks to validate success. Choices around scale, compute, data, and governance required patience and conviction. In resetting what is possible, they established new reference points for intelligence, productivity, and collaboration between humans and machines.

Awarding No Baseline Person of the Year to the architects of AI recognizes the power of systems thinking. AI’s impact is not defined by any single model or application, but by the invisible scaffolding now shaping science, markets, and decision-making worldwide. By redesigning the foundation itself, these architects embody the no baselines idea that the future is built not by competing within constraints, but by rethinking why those constraints exist at all.