The Architects of AI That TIME Missed

Today on the AI Daily Brief, who's missing from Time's Architects of AI as their Person of the Year? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Super Intelligent, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy and Rovo. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can sign up on Apple Podcasts and to learn about basically anything you need about the show, whether it's sponsorship or speaking engagements, any particular job opportunities we might have, or the new old in-testing newsletter, go to aidailybrief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief and happy weekend. Now, it being the weekend, that means, you know, of course, that we are doing a big thing slash long read style episode. and this week we actually have quite a long read. This week, Time Magazine crowned their person of the year. But as they sometimes do, they took a little creative license with this. Instead of naming a single person, they awarded the title to a group of people who they called the architects of AI. Now you can see the riff on the classic photo of a group of steelworkers on a high beam with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, XAI, X.com, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Devis Hissabas, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, and Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the CEO of World Labs. Now, what I don't want to do today is get too much into the public response. There are plenty of takeoffs, like this one from the at Proud Socialist account on Twitter, which added Architects of Humanities end to the picture, or this one from Dr. Clown PhD, which I have to say at least took the time to do some good visual design, ironically, probably with AI, and put the Terminator and the Skynet logo. Now, what I want to do today is actually look at who they included in this list and where I think they missed a few folks. So let's talk about what this is not. This piece does not go one by one through those people who are featured in the cover image talking about them. Instead, it all comes together in a piece that when I turned it into a PDF was 38 full pages that looks at just a ton of dimensions of the AI boom and talks about a lot of the different players with a very diverse field of view. Still, if we are trying to organize the different groups that they featured, let's go through them. The first group we might call the Silicon Layer, the people and companies who are building the chips and the infrastructure on which this is all built. Indeed, it is with Huang that the whole thing kicks off, Lisa Su from AMD features in there, and other companies that aren't featured as much but which still show up as central to the AI supply chain include TSMC and ASML. The next group represented here is basically the data center crew. Elon Musk is, in fact, more discussed here as a fast data center builder than even a frontier model leader. The piece takes time to discuss the data center build-out. They write, ChatGPT may seem like it's running on your phone or laptop, but in fact, it and other AI tools are trained and run inside massive facilities like Stargate. Demand for these hulking AI factories spiked in 2025. The number of new data centers constructed globally each year is expected to steady at around 140, but their sizes ballooned, as did the amount of power they consumed, a function of the increasing number and sophistication of the chips inside. According to Goldman Sachs, data centers are expected to account for 8% of all U.S. power demand by 2030, up for 4% in 2023. In addition to Stargate, the article mentions Meta's Hyperion, plus additional recent efforts from Oracle. The next group featured in this Architect section is, of course, the Frontier Model Labs. OpenAI and ChatGPT, Anthropic and Claude, Google and Gemini, XAI and Grok all get a mention, as do the respective leaders of those companies like Sam Altman, Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, Anthropics Dario Amadei, and Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk as well. The piece recognizes that this is basically the fastest-growing technology category in history, with a full tenth of the world's population using ChatGPT every week, although as head of ChatGPT Nick Turley says, that leaves the other 90% still to onboard. The next category of architects are the people in government surrounding the policy and geopolitics of AI. Of course, you have presidents Trump and Biden featured prominently. In fact, much of the story anchors around how the Trump White House has engaged with the AI industry and vice versa. But the piece also talks about some of the folks who are more quietly driving policy from within and some of the key events that have shaped what has transpired over the last year. For example, Time writes, in Trump's first week back in office, Sriram Krishnan, who is still awaiting his official government badge, was summoned to the White House to brief senior officials on a breakthrough unfolding half a world away. A little-known Chinese AI startup called DeepSeek had just released a model that was said to rival the abilities of American competitors. DeepSeek claimed it had built this model in mere months using less advanced chips. Its researchers appeared to have replicated OpenAI's reasoning breakthroughs using far less computation, allowing China to erase the gap in a competition the Silicon Valley experts hadn't considered close Krishnan one of Trump top AI advisors felt both vindicated and alarmed For the past year the former partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz had been preaching the urgency of winning the AI race with China to friends colleagues and podcast listeners The U.S., he argued, needed to build as fast as possible, stripping away red tape to let American AI companies run free. To the tech leaders shaping Trump's new AI agenda, news of DeepSeek's breakthrough validated the case for acceleration. It was a wake-up call that we needed, said Dean Ball, who helped write Trump's AI action plan released in July. It set the tone for the nature of the competition that we have ahead of us and the speed with which we have to move. This struck me as particularly pertinent, given that on the same day that I was recording this, the big news that had just broke was that President Trump had signed an executive order meant to block states from enforcing state-level regulation around AI in favor of a single federal policy instead. Now, to take a detour for just a moment, this particular executive order has been extremely controversial. It has caused consternation not just with the left, but with Trump's allies on the right. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been particularly vocal about it, but many congressional Republicans are looking to anti-AI positions as a political winner next year. Time writes, dystopian fears are impossible to shrug off, especially since the technology stands to concentrate even more wealth and power into even fewer hands. So far, the stock market gains of AI have flowed almost exclusively to the magnificent seven tech companies, and the massive jolt of economic dislocation that AI moguls like Dario Amadei see on the horizon could spark a powerful political backlash. Anti-data center movements boosted pro-regulation candidates in local elections in November. One of those victors was John McAuliffe, who flipped Virginia's 30th district in its House of Delegates blue for the first time in decades by running a campaign focused on unchecked data center growth. Said McAuliffe, the issue that would keep the door open for me nine times out of ten was data centers and their transmission lines. McAuliffe's success may be a harbinger for next year's midterms. The American people are demanding safeguards on AI and the politics of this issue are crystal clear, says Brendan Steinhauser, the CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, and a GOP strategist and former Tea Party organizer who is trying to mobilize right-wing leaders against Trump's alliance with tech titans. Said Steinhauser, politicians who choose to do the bidding of big tech at the expense of hardworking Americans will pay a huge political price. I actually think that this is one of the things that the Time article does best. It provides a good overview map of the emerging politics of AI in a way that is frankly pretty dispassionate and unbiased. Two more groups that lurk in the piece, if not necessarily being as fully articulated, include the architects in China. For example, we got a look at embodied AI leader Peng Zhui-hi and his company Agibot, as well as some mention of Baidu CEO Robin Li, and of course DeepSeek, which you just heard, but they a little bit function more as specters in this piece rather than standing on equal footing as AI architects. Now, of course, to be charitable, that might be based on Time's audience of primarily Americans, But I think if we are trying to have a true articulation of the architects of AI, you have to include the leadership at companies like DeepSeek, Alibaba, ByteDance, and you have to view the CCP and their policies as every bit as significant as the Trump White House and their policies. Right now, for example, we are in a moment where Xi Jinping and the rest of the CCP are huddled up with China's domestic chip industry to figure out if and in what way they're going to take advantage of the U.S.'s new openness to allow NVIDIA to sell H200 chips into China. This is a significant and challenging strategic question. Do you speed up the development of the end products of the industry, but at the risk of slowing down the infrastructural resilience and independence of Chinese domestic chip manufacturers? Or are you content to stay behind in terms of the chips that you have access to, but with the hope of catching up in the future because you're investing in your own domestic industry? This will be one of the big questions that will start to play out over the next several weeks and months. The other group that I think is mentioned, but which probably deserves more consideration, is what we might call the capital allocators. SoftBank's Masayoshi Sun is featured here, but he's featured honestly less as an architect of AI and more as an evangelist with bubble roots. Time wrote, Masayoshi Sun, the famed Japanese investor, is accustomed to the hype cycles of new technology. He lost more than $70 billion when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, nearly going bankrupt as SoftBank shed 97% of its value. That same year, though, he took a $20 million flyer on an obscure e-commerce startup called Alibaba, a stake that was worth $75 billion when the firm went public in 2014. Three years later, Sun had built a roughly 5% stake in NVIDIA, a sum that would be worth more than $200 billion today, though he sold it in 2019. Today, they continue Sun as one of AI's foremost evangelists. He has pivoted his firm's $180 billion in assets into a raft of AI-related vehicles. Sun expects AI to transform everything, every industry, he says. What is GDP? What is human activity? It's all the result of your intelligence plus muscle. Almost all human activities eventually will be some kind of collaboration with superintelligence and physical AI. It's just a matter of time. Now, on the one hand, a lot of the capital that's being allocated is from people who are represented in other areas. This is, of course, the circularity that many investors are concerned about. However, there are a number of capital allocators who are, I think one could claim, if not architects themselves, are at least architect-adjacent. One notable on the venture side is Josh Kushner. Thrive Capital has been not only one of the most active investors in OpenAI but has expanded the nature of what they do Recently they made news when OpenAI took a stake in their new venture Thrive Holdings Now, Thrive Holdings is part of the larger private equity play to roll up traditional businesses and infuse them with AI. And while many people pointed to OpenAI taking a stake in them as another example of circularity, I think in this case it's actually quite different. To me, this is OpenAI having access to an enterprise laboratory, where they can see the economic value of their products play out in real time without necessarily having to support all those efforts themselves and distract them from their core business focus as well as their larger goal to achieve AGI. Also, if one is to give an honest accounting of 2025, especially as public market narratives have turned against AI for the first time in the entire lifecycle of ChatGPT, the architects of those narrative shifts are prominent and loud investors like, of course, Michael Burry and Jim Chanos. They may not be the architects of AI as such, but they are certainly architects of the narrative context in which AI is currently operating. Today's episode is brought to you by my company, Superintelligent. Superintelligent is an AI planning platform. 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Robo runs on the Teamwork Graph, Atlassian's intelligence layer that unifies data across all of your apps and delivers personalized AI insights from day one. rovo is already built into jira confluence and jira service management standard premium and enterprise subscriptions know the feeling when ai turns from tool to teammate if you rovo you know discover rovo your new ai teammate powered by atlassian get started at rov as in victory o.com another group that i think is missing from the analysis is somewhat adjacent to the larger china geopolitical conversation, but I think also needs to be taken on its own terms, which is of course the Middle East and specifically the Gulf states. There are a number of different reasons that the Gulf has a distinct role in architecting AI as we know it. There is first, of course, its literal and metaphorical central position between the US and China which puts it in a unique position to face both directions and has created a ton of geopolitical challenge in its own way But there is also of course the Gulf as a capital and infrastructure partner The Gulf is one of the only regions in the world that has the combination of sovereign capital energy abundance and nation urgency to build compute, attract frontier partners, and, if the chatter be correct, actually figure out what sovereign AI looks like as we head into 2026. There are so many increasingly important companies in that region, including G42, and also the more recently launched Humane out of Saudi Arabia. Even if it was just from the standpoint of capital alone, the reality is that as the capital needs of these companies continue to increase, sovereign Middle East wealth is one of the only pools that's actually big enough to play at the scale these companies are trying to play at. A third group, which I think is fairly conspicuously absent, is what I might call the enterprise operators that translate AI into actual ROI. While the conversation about consultants and GSIs tends to be about how AI might disrupt their work, the reality is that one of, if not the major source of demand, that will or won't make all of this AI infrastructure investment make sense, will be enterprise and business adoption. That enterprise and business adoption is not happening without translators who contextualize the technology for existing business processes and help existing businesses transition to new ways of working. Anyone who's worked inside enterprises knows that that is an enormous amount of work. In fact, if there is any big lesson of 2025 is that you can't just carpet bomb companies with chatbots and hope it all works out. Not that they're not effective, but there are going to be limits in the changes that those chatbots make that organizations are going to quickly run up against. And to put a really fine point on this, if these translators of AI don't do a good job of managing the change inside companies, of helping them figure out how to use these tools, it will make the enormous amount of money that's being spent on capex in things like data centers cease to make any sort of sense. And so while yes, they may not be architecting AI from a supply side, the architects of the demand side of AI are every bit as important to how the shape of the industry plays out. You know, there is this larger, interesting nugget here where there's a lot of emphasis in the timepiece on what we might call the supply side of AI, the builders, the chip makers, and a lot less on the demand side, the people who are deploying it, the people who are educating around it, the people who are creating with it. And while the most likely explanation of that is just that you can't fit everything in a single article, it is worth noting that part of what people are frustrated with with AI is the feeling that it's being done to them rather than with them. If the architects are a handful of tech billionaires, then AI is something being imposed from above. If the architects include the people deploying, teaching, and creating with AI, then it's something that's being co-constructed and the appropriate response is participation. It's both a more empowering narrative and one that's more accurate. Now, to give time credit, they absolutely don't ignore normal people who are experiencing the benefits and challenges of AI. Their stories are somewhat weaved throughout the piece. But still, I think when we are thinking about the architecture of a world-changing system like AI is, understanding the people who use it, whose lives and careers will be changed by it, as part of the story of that architecture, is incredibly important. Now, along those lines, the last category of architects that I do think are worth a mention, and who I believe are going to have an increasingly important role are another type of translator, and that is translators in the creative and entertainment fields. Right now, there is this significant challenge where the antipathy towards AI in Hollywood and among artists is incredibly high. And yet at the same time, the tools are incredibly valuable and open up new creative pathways, and some people are excitedly trying to use them. What's more, there is a recognition among some artists and creatives that AI is simply not something that can or will go away. And so what do you do with that? We are starting to see some examples of people who are trying to cut through that middle, who recognize the power and potential of AI, but who also believe that there can be a version that doesn't have to ignore the concerns of creatives and entertainers on the other side. One example of this is Asteria, which is trying to build IP-safe video models basically from with inside the entertainment industry. I think we are desperately going to need translators like that, especially as the political discourse gets more fraught next year. So that's my read on Time's Person of the Year, the architects of AI. Overall, I don't think this is just Time being overly clever. I think it's a useful framework, and a lot of people who read this article are going to have a better sense and understanding of the breadth of the industry than they did before. But I do think that some of those omissions are telling in where the state of the conversation is, and I especially hope that we can recognize that the ground-level people who will be interacting with AI and using AI, whose lives will be changed by AI, have to have some seat at the architect's table. For now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.