It's the Ryan Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Time magazine named its Person of the Year last week, and this year as time sometimes does, it's not a single person but a group.

It's the architects of AI. Now, a reminder for context, these picks aren't necessarily endorsements of the person.

This isn't people, the time necessarily chooses as the best people of the year. You know,

this started way back in the 1920s,

and in the 30s, Hitler one year, Stalin one year, more recently Putin one year. So it's not based on

who they think are the best people of the year. It's based on who they think are the most

influential people of the year. So looking just at this

decade, Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, and Volodymyr Zelensky, and this year it is the

exploding influence of AI in modern life. We see that influence in big picture ways, obviously, on the economy, on geopolitics,

on the environment, but it's also reshaping our day-to-day lives. Chances are you've seen

AI show up at your workplace, one way or another. Maybe you use it in your personal life,

for school, for creative projects, even for companionship. So yes, the people driving these changes are enormously

influential. So joining us now to talk about who these architects are and why Time selected them

for person of the year is Andrew Chow, technology correspondent at Time Magazine. Andrew, thanks for

coming on for this. Welcome to WNYC. Do we have you? Are you there,

Andrew? Yeah, can you hear me? Hi, now we can hear you. Sorry about that. Welcome. Great to have you.

Talk about this group, the architects of AI. You do name names, right? Yeah. So this was the year,

and thank you for that great introduction. I want to first say that person of the year, as you just

said, measures influence for better and for worse. And I think this was really the year that AI

invaded a lot of our lives and impacted the world both for better and for worse.

And that's due to the decisions of a handful of AI billionaires who really, as I say in the

piece, grabbed the wheel of history and made a lot of decisions. They put AI into our homes,

...