What to expect in 2025

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Happy New Year, and welcome to 2025! On Tuesday, we explored all the ways AI has transformed our world over the past 12 months. Today we’ll show you what’s next — from autonomous AI agents to humanoid robots to LLM-powered scientific breakthroughs.

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Today’s Insights

• Part I: AI agents and the arbitrage economy

• Part II: Unexpected applications and AI companions

• Part III: AI-literate businesses, humanoids, and AGI

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

2025 AI PREDICTIONS, PART I

AI agents will be everywhere

• Microsoft, OpenAI, and Alphabet are each working on new models that can see and understand things on your screen and beyond. These models will power agents — AI-powered software that can perform actions on your behalf.

• Expect to see AI agents take on more real-world duties, from ordering food for us to handling customer service issues to automating repetitive tasks at work.

• Different agents will also start teaming up and tackling complicated projects together, each bringing a unique skill set to the table.

Agents will create a new arbitrage economy

• On some tasks, agents will be able to outperform humans, like analyzing data and generating reports.

• For these tasks, the most tech-savvy companies will prefer hiring AI agents over humans. For example, an AI agent that can answer customer service calls for a fraction of the cost of a real human (this is already happening).

• In companies that are not on the leading edge of tech literacy, which is most of the economy, smart employees will take advantage of agents to delegate work and boost their productivity.

We’ll find new ways to build more capable AI

• Toward the end of 2024, startups realized their latest models weren’t improving at the same rate as previous releases.

• That led researchers to search for new training techniques — especially those that rely on less data while being more energy-efficient.

• One example is a technique called chain-of-thought — an approach that breaks big problems down into smaller steps.

• OpenAI’s reasoning-focused o3 is paving the way, with everyone from Alphabet to Alibaba following in its footsteps.

• We’ll also see experiments with SLMs (small models fine-tuned for specific tasks), neuro-symbolic AI (traditional machine learning mixed with experimental approaches), and various other approaches.

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2025 AI PREDICTIONS, PART II

AI will show up in unlikely places

• AI will become even harder to ignore next year as generative features are added to our phones and laptops. AI headsets and gadgets — like Meta’s Orion AR glasses and an AI-powered Alexa — could become more widespread, too.

• Doctors will come to rely on AI as a helpful companion: It’ll serve as a secretary and notetaker as well as a second pair of eyes for X-rays and scans, often delivering higher accuracy than humans.

• Scientists will use AI to predict weather forecasts weeks in advance; discover compounds that could serve as new disease treatments; and spot genetic abnormalities that would otherwise take years of trial and error to find.

We’ll form closer bonds with our LLMs

• Chatbot platforms like Character AI will become even more alluring as AI learns to mirror human behavior with higher accuracy.

• You’ll be able to design your own AI companion, complete with a customizable set of emotional and physical characteristics.

• More users will turn to AI for therapy and mental health guidance (more than a third of Americans already admit they’re willing to give it a try).

A new generation of voice apps will emerge

• Now that AI is finally good enough to understand human language and talk to us, faster and more intuitive voice interfaces will replace some tasks where text is cumbersome.

• For example, instead of having to open your phone, visit a website, search and click through multiple pages to find a product you already know you want to purchase, you may be able to verbally instruct your phone to order it directly for you.

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2025 AI PREDICTIONS, PART III

Businesses will become AI-literate, and demand for AI-skilled talent will continue to grow

• In 2024, generative AI use among business leaders jumped from 55% to 75%, but companies are still struggling to adopt AI on a wider scale.

• Next, businesses will use their own data to build custom AI systems that match their needs; they’ll rely on experts within their ranks as well as outside consultants to help lead the transition.

• AI startups will likely benefit, bringing in more investments (the industry is expected to reach a value of $1.81T by 2030).

• AI literacy will become even more essential: Educators are already warning that students who don’t engage with AI risk falling behind, while a recent IBM report suggests AI know-how could soon be a prerequisite for many jobs — regardless of which industry you’re in.

The rise of humanoid robots

• Some of the first AI-equipped consumer robots will hit the market to help with things like folding laundry and doing the dishes, but they’ll come with a hefty price tag.

• Manufacturers will come to rely on robots to automate physically-intensive tasks, with humanoids from Agility Robotics and Figure already hitting factory floors for Amazon and BMW.

• Realistic 3D simulations will help robots learn new skills on the fly; they’ll get to try out difficult tasks millions of times in the digital world before moving on to the real thing.

We’ll edge ever closer to AGI

• We’ll get a better grasp on whether AI really “thinks” for itself and peer into models’ black boxes to pin down how they make decisions.

• OpenAI’s o3 can already solve research-level math problems while tackling coding tasks with the accuracy of a competition-level programmer.

• Models will get better at integrating their “senses,” bringing together linguistic, visual, and auditory skills to understand more about our world.

• The emerging consensus: AGI might not arise in a single, dramatic leap forward but a series of steady, gradual breakthroughs; when we reach it, it might not be obvious, which explains why companies like Microsoft and OpenAI are racing to formulate their own definitions before it happens.

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Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team