Four AI predictions for 2025

There was nothing new in artificial intelligence in 2024 that matched the sheer “wow” factor of using ChatGPT for the first time, but rapid improvements in the underlying technology still kept the field humming. For 2025, this is how I see things panning out.

In 2025, that momentum will fade. Even some of the tech industry’s biggest optimists have conceded in recent weeks that simply throwing more data and computing power into training ever-larger AI models — a reliable source of improvement in the past — is starting to yield diminishing returns. In the longer term, this robs AI of a dependable source of improvement. At least in the next 12 months, though, other advances should more than take up the slack.

The most promising developments look like those coming from models that carry out a series of steps before returning an answer, allowing them to query and refine their first responses to deliver more “reasoned” results. It is debatable whether this is really comparable to human reasoning, but systems such as OpenAI’s o3 still look like the most interesting advance since the emergence of AI chatbots.

Google, which regained its AI mojo late in the year after spending two years struggling to catch up with OpenAI, also showed how the new agent-like capabilities in AI could make life easier, such as tracking what you do in your browser and then offering to complete tasks for you. All these demos and prototypes still need to be turned into useful products, but they at least show that there is more than enough in the labs to keep the AI hype going.

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