What's next for AI in 2025

How did we score last time round? Our four hot trends to watch out for in 2024 included what we called customized chatbots--interactive helper apps powered by multimodal large language models (check: we didn't know it yet, but we were talking about what everyone now calls agents, the hottest thing in AI right now); generative video (check: few technologies have improved so fast in the last 12 months, with OpenAI and Google DeepMind releasing their flagship video generation models, Sora and Veo, within a week of each other this December); and more general-purpose robots that can do a wider range of tasks (check: the payoffs from large language models continue to trickle down to other parts of the tech industry, and robotics is top of the list). We also said that AI-generated election disinformation would be everywhere, but here--happily--we got it wrong. There were many things to wring our hands over this year, but political deepfakes were thin on the ground. We're going to ignore the obvious here: You can bet that agents and smaller, more efficient, language models will continue to shape the industry.