New York, New York - Time magazine named the "Architects of AI" as its Person of the Year on Thursday, highlighting the US tech titans whose work on cutting-edge artificial intelligence is transforming humanity.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and xAI's Elon Musk are among the innovators who have "grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods," Time wrote.

One of two covers of the magazine is an homage to the famous 1932 photograph of ironworkers casually eating lunch on a steel beam above New York City.

In the Time illustration, sitting astride the city are Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, AMD chief Lisa Su, Musk, Huang, Altman, as well as Google's AI boss Demis Hassabis, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li.

"Racing both beside and against each other, they placed multibillion-dollar bets on one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time," the magazine said of the group.

"They reoriented government policy, altered geopolitical rivalries, and brought robots into homes. AI emerged as arguably the most consequential tool in great-power competition since the advent of nuclear weapons."

Alongside popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude, Time credited investors like SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who has plunged billions of dollars into the technology.

Time's Person of the Year selection is an acknowledgement of the year's most influential figure.

The title last year went to president-elect Donald Trump. Some others have included singer Taylor Swift and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.