Predictions for tech, 2025

It’s going to be a hard year.

You know what they say: predictions are like resurgent nationalist movements. Everyone’s got one.

I missed the deadline for Nieman Lab’s always-excellent Predictions for Journalism this year, so I thought I’d share a few more bite-sized predictions about various topics I’ve written over the last year. Every prediction says more about the person making it than about the actual future; please take these in that light. I am not a soothsayer, but boy, do I have opinions.

Here are some of them:

The AI industry will continue to orient itself around its definition of AGI, regardless of its harms.

OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of artificial general intelligence is not what you might suspect: they define it as the point where AI systems can generate at least $100 billion in profits. Given that the industry is losing billions of dollars hand over fist today, there’s a long way to go.

Closing that gap means selling in lots of different places, but the most lucrative are going to be deeper partnerships with mass-market systems, government, and military applications. For all of OpenAI’s talk about not creating AI that will make us extinct through its intelligence…