Pine is the Creative Director at TIME. To illustrate the choice of the Architects of AI as TIME's 2025 Person of the Year, we asked two separate artists to help us visualize the incredibly complex technological revolution that is currently underway. London-based illustrator and graphics animator Peter Crowther and digital painter Jason Seiler each created an image that speaks to the duality AI has produced - man vs. machine. Inspired by the inner workings of computer chips, Crowther's intricate AI structure looms large over the busy construction site.

We present a simulation strategy for the real-time dynamics of quantum fields, inspired by reinforcement learning. It builds on the complex Langevin approach, which it amends with system specific prior information, a necessary prerequisite to overcome this exceptionally severe sign problem. The optimization process underlying our machine learning approach is made possible by deploying inherently stable solvers of the complex Langevin stochastic process and a novel optimality criterion derived from insight into so-called boundary terms. This conceptual and technical progress allows us to both significantly extend the range of real-time simulations in 1+1d scalar field theory beyond the state-of-the-art and to avoid discretization artifacts that plagued previous real-time field theory simulations. Limitations of and promising future directions are discussed.

Just after Microsoft unveiled a number of new Surface gadgets on Wednesday, TIME sat down with Microsoft devices boss Robin Seiler to talk about the company's latest products and its hardware strategy moving forward. Among the highlights of Microsoft's new offerings: the dual-screen Surface Neo and Surface Duo, set for release next holiday season. The company also unveiled the two-in-one ARM-based Surface Pro X, the Intel-powered Surface Pro 7, wireless Surface Earbuds and more. The new Surface models come amid a hot streak for Microsoft's devices business -- Surface revenue is up around 14% year-over-year in the most recent quarter, reaching $1.35 billion. But they also arrive amid increase competition, particularly from Apple's iPad lineup and its newly redesigned tablet operating system, iPadOS.