On the Horizon - 2025 - My predictions

Published on Monday, 13 January 2025

On the Horizon - 2025 - My predictions

In a way, predicting 2025 is somewhat harder and easier than 2024, a lot of what I see are the seeds of 2024 coming to bloom. But for what we will have by the end of the year is really unclear to me - but we will see some impact in research for sure - AI assisted research in fields will explode this year.

Predictions:

AI Video / AI Audio

  • Cinema level visuals made on generative environments - not only creating a video, but creating the entire space so that the camera can be then moved in post production - will become available to the high end customers. This approach is a complement to the diffusion models, which only generate a few frames of temporal consistency - using this method will allow much better time coherence and consistency / object permanence. Nvidia Cosmos is closest to this and I think the next version of it will satisfy this point. I expect many video models to actually start using this method with temporal control nets to avoid the inconsistency of object permanence.
  • AI Chatbots will be allowed to sing, make music and emote more. While some LLMs are already capable of such things, they are generally removed in post-training but I think these restrictions will be removed this year. Suno's lead on AI Music gets folded into a leading model, meaning you'll be able to ask a ChatGPT competitor "make me a song, with lyrics and background track".
  • Visual understanding models will be commonly deployed - Meaning point your camera and get full descriptions of what you see, It's nearly there anyway.

AI Agents

By agent, I define as a application in which an AI model takes actions against external systems on behalf of a user in furtherance of a user's give task and goal.

  • A desktop based agent will become available to use on the computer. Interacting with your browser and mail client automatically. (Probably Claude's Anthropic will be there soonest) - doesn't mean the LLM has to run on the desktop.
  • AI Agents included in softwares (Teams, Github, ...) will start to become available in preview at least before the end of the year.
  • Programming Agents will start to be useful (see AI Devin in 2024 being still completely unusable) - but in 2025 AI coders will be the focus and ship mid year.

AI in Mathematics

  • While the first theorem proof by an LLM has already been published, I expect 2025 to have a slew of progress on fundamental proofs rewritten by LLMs or LRMs, particularly towards automated proofing systems (Coq, ...) and several proofs generated by LLMs that humans did not independently derive.

AI in Medicine

  • One company will announce an AI diagnostics companion for health - that is certified as a support tool for doctors.

AI in War

  • A semi-autonomous multi-agent AI will be used to control a tactical engagement in Ukraine. This has nearly happened due to the engagement of the first robot brigade (dec 2024 : Ukraine’s All-Robot Assault Force Just Won Its First Battle ) - but without AI - using tele-operation. I think AI will be used at more levels than just terminal guidance of the FPV drones.

AGI

  • One company claims their model has attained AGI - defined as a model that is as good as a reasoning human - in office work related tasks. There is a lot of disagreement if this constitutes AGI or not.

Robotics:

  • Humanoid robots become available in limited quantities to the general public, with at least 1 company shipping a home robot with AI onboard to do simple tasks (Unitree from 2024 does not count since the robots are only remote controlled). These first robots will be sometimes teleoperated for specific tasks. Pricing will be lower than 50k$ per robot.
  • One company announces wide scale drone deliveries in US cities: While drone delivery companies already exist (13 Drone Delivery Companies to Know | Built In), one of them is going to break out as an early leader this year.

Space:

  • SpaceX demonstrates first ship to ship refueling.
  • Blue Origin gets to orbit with New Glenn and proves the landing system, but is not able to send a reused first stage to orbit yet.
  • The first part of a new space station gets deployed, probably commercial.

Environment:

  • 2025 beats 2024 as hottest year.

Energy:

  • Record installation of Solar, Wind and renewables (beating 2024 worldwide - despite the US's drop).
  • Price spikes on Gas and Petrol due to US actions and disruption of Russian production. Unsure if that will continue throughout the year but we will have shocks from policy changes.