Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreWhy read AI predictions from not-Sam-Altman and not-AI-PhD? Well, early stage VCs spend their days working with people far smarter than us who use AI at the bleeding edge of what’s possible. This allows us to see a version of what the future could hold. In my 30-plus years in tech, I have never seen a technology — specifically the advancements in and around foundation models — have this much impact in this many ways, this quickly. It’s reframed my expectations of how teams build and how companies deliver value. That in mind, here are my predictions for 2025.I love Mustafa Suleyman’s digital species corollary for AI because it properly frames the question of containment. Much of present-day AI in products suggests courses of action. But increasingly, AI will take actions on our behalf. We must frame what we don’t want it to do. Expect a lot of loud cage rattling in this area. If we use California’s failed SB1047 legislation as a bellwether, Elon Musk’s pro-regulation and Trump’s anti-regulation stances will be offsetting penalties. Look for things like Anthropic’s constitution model on steroids as the industry attempts “self-regulation” for foundation model safety to avoid government regulation. Likewise, expect a flourishing of AI security startups to help with forms of cyber containment.Some of you may remember the days of “Intel Inside” as a big campaign. Foundation models will accrue brand power to products building on them. This goes beyond tone of voice, which, according to Claude, looks like this today: GPT-4: The premium, measured consultant.
Claude: The careful, ethical advisor.
Llama: The scrappy, flexible generalist.
Tone is tunable. How understanding and recall is applied in a model is not. Models will inevitably shape how products “feel.”Not quite, but the ability to iterate in scientific discovery will increase massively. Today, AI enables breakthroughs together with humans. I agree with Vinod Khosla on this: AI scientists — AI agents that are hyper-specialists — will soon regularly best their human counterparts in discovering insights. This is because AI scientists don’t need breaks. They have infinite patience for iteration. They have perfect memory for data. And they can work 24/7. Look to see the first glimpses of this relentless work ethic in medical discovery and healthcare breakthroughs, with a slew of startups helping companies take advantage of them.If Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant were all v1.0 audio interfaces, audio — with the additional context of visuals and text — will spin up whole new product experiences that recalibrate our standards. Specialized audio-only foundation models are racing with the larger foundation models to push what’s possible here. We’re already seeing huge progress in Meta’s Smart Glasses and how far they’ve come fro
Mer. Gen 1st, 2025
