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TIME names the “Architects of AI” as its Person of the Year for 2025

TIME just announced its Person of the Year… and it’s not a single person.  

The magazine selected the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 honoree, spotlighting the executives and engineers behind the year’s AI boom. One of the two covers features eight tech leaders perched on a steel beam — recreating the iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photo from 1932 — including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, AMD’s Lisa Su, xAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the center, whose chips power many of today’s AI models.

The magazine frames 2025 as the year when AI’s “full potential roared into view,” with data center constructions surging and companies crossing new valuation thresholds — while also noting bubble fears, debt-funded build-outs, and lawsuits over chatbot harms.

Prediction markets had been leaning nonhuman, with Polymarket (47%) and Kalshi (55%) both assigning the highest odds not to any one person but to “AI,” ahead of Huang, Altman, or even Pope Leo XIV, per Business Insider. Many of those bettors weren’t far off in the end — though that may be of little consolation given that the market for “Artificial Intelligence” on Polymarket resolved to “No.”

Indeed, the 102-year-old magazine has chosen groups of people or even nonhuman concepts before, as TIME has long defined the award as recognizing “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill,” according to former Managing Editor Walter Isaacson.

Across its selections since 1927, 20 awards have gone to group or conceptual forces, including “The Apollo 8 astronauts” in 1968; “The Computer” in 1982, when TIME first broke tradition to honor the rapid rise of personal computing; “The Whistleblowers,” who exposed corporate fraud at Enron and WorldCom, in 2002; and “The Spirit of Ukraine” in 2022. 

Previously titled the “Man of the Year” award until 1999, the accolade has been given to a handful of women so far, such as Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, Angela Merkel in 2015, and Taylor Swift, the most recent female recipient, in 2023.

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A new pass to access American Airlines’ loyalty program will set you back $5,000

If you’ve ever sat around at the departure gate waiting to get onto an American Airlines flight, eyeing priority boarding members with envy, we’ve got some news: you can now gain access to the carrier’s AAdvantage loyalty program at entry level… for a cool $5,000.

According to Travel Weekly, cash-flush fliers can skip the usual process required to obtain AAdvantage Gold status — notching 40,000 or more loyalty points by clocking air miles, using AA co-branded credit cards, or spending via their various partnership schemes — by paying the fee up front to enjoy perks such as “priority check-in and boarding, a free checked bag, complimentary preferred seat selections, upgrades when available within 24 hours of departure, and 40% accrual bonuses for miles and loyalty points.”

Loyalty bonus

Even before this new pay-to-play scheme, the airline’s loyalty program and its other activities that aren’t directly flying people or things around the world have become a billion-dollar part of its operations each quarter.

Last year, American Airlines’ “Other” revenue accounted for some 7% of the company’s overall annual sales, or about $3.83 billion. For the first three quarters of 2025, the division, which is predominantly made up of marketing revenue from its loyalty program — or the money that American makes from selling mileage credits to co-branded credit card merchants and other AAdvantage partners — has consistently pulled in revenues that hover around or above the $1 billion mark.

Of course, that’s just the direct, measurable impact of the program. What’s not captured is the intangible value, which makes someone choose American over another airline just because they have some status with the carrier already.

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AI Spending Is Growing, and Investors Are Assessing Where the Lasting Opportunities May Be

AI adoption continues to expand, but the path forward is unlikely to be uniform. Investors are assessing which parts of the value chain capture the most durable demand and how leadership across semiconductors may evolve as workloads scale.

Even with this variability, chips remain central to AI progress. Demand spans chip design, manufacturing, memory, and packaging, creating multiple potential drivers as the ecosystem matures.

For diversified exposure across this landscape, VanEck offers two semiconductor ETF options:

The economics of Instacart’s grocery delivery

This week was a rollercoaster ride for Instacart investors. Traders loved the announcement on Monday that the grocery delivery app will be embedded in ChatGPT, becoming the “first company to offer [a] new instant checkout app experience” on the leading AI chatbot. 

But AI can be a double-edged sword. Indeed, a separate report released Wednesday took some of the shine off, with the company’s AI-enabled experiments allegedly charging consumers different prices for the same items — by as much as 23% in one case. 

Thought for food 

Instacart has been doubling down on an AI-centered strategy this year, like offering personalized recommendations to consumers and deepening its partnership with OpenAI, in the hope of improving the economics of a grocery delivery business that runs on pretty tight margins.

The company made a whopping $9.17 billion in orders through its marketplace, most of which was passed through to merchants. CART took a ~7% slice of that revenue, worth some $670 million in Q3, as well as a cool $270 million from advertising and other fees, which are much higher margin — helping the company eke out a total of $166 million in operating profit.

But profit growth has slowed at Instacart, and the company has some increasingly scary competitors. Amazon, for instance, now looms large in the space, having expanded same-day grocery delivery to over 2,300 cities and towns in the US, leveraging millions of its members by offering a free-for-Prime service.

No wonder Instacart is looking to AI as a tool to fight back. The problem is, some observers think the company could actually be more hurt by the new technology than helped. Analysts at Wedbush noted that AI might more quickly improve delivery routing and cost efficiency in ecosystems with already established customer relationships, like Amazon, moving customers away from intermediaries like Instacart.

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Chips remain central to AI progress. Demand spans chip design, manufacturing, memory, and packaging — creating multiple potential drivers as the ecosystem matures. For diversified exposure across the landscape, discover VanEck’s semiconductor ETFs.

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