Desperate Times, Desperate Measures(wheresyoured.at) Next year is going to be big. Well, I personally don't think it'll be big, but if you ask the AI industry, here's the things that will happen by the end of 2026:
AI agents in 2025 – what everyone's getting wrong(reddit.com) So I'm seeing all these posts about AI agents being the next big thing and how everyone needs to jump on the bandwagon NOW or get left behind. While there's some truth to that, I'm kinda sick of all the misinfo floating around.
Timeline of the Far Future(wikipedia.org) While the future cannot be predicted with certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline.
A Realistic AI Timeline(vintagedata.org) AI timelines can grow old. Reading through the last highly publicized exercise, it's as if we were stuck in the early 2020s: ever larger models, unlocking ever more impressive emerging capacities. GPT-3 steampunk.
The Post-Developer Era(joshwcomeau.com) Two years ago, in March 2023, I published a blog post called “The End of Front-End Development”. This was right after OpenAI released its GPT-4 showcase, and the general reaction was that human software developers were about to be made redundant, that software would soon be written exclusively by machines.
The End of Children(newyorker.com) Societies do collapse, sometimes suddenly. Nevertheless, prophets of doom might keep in mind that their darkest predictions have been, on the whole, a little premature.
AI 2027: Responses(thezvi.substack.com) Yesterday I covered Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent podcast coverage of AI 2027 with Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander. Today covers the reactions of others.
12 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2025(ieee.org) If you read the news about AI, you may feel bombarded with conflicting messages: AI is booming. AI is a bubble. AI’s current techniques and architectures will keep producing breakthroughs. AI is on an unsustainable path and needs radical new ideas. AI is going to take your job. AI is mostly good for turning your family photos into Studio Ghibli-style animated images.
Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse(theintrinsicperspective.com) An awful personal prophecy is coming true. Way back in 2019, when AI was still a relatively niche topic, and only the primitive GPT-2 had been released, I predicted the technology would usher in a “semantic apocalypse” wherein art and language were drained of meaning. In fact, it was the first essay ever posted here on The Intrinsic Perspective.
Five Things AI Will Not Change(metastable.org) In 1983, when I was ten, 100 million people watched the TV movie “The Day After,” an audience five times larger than the Game of Thrones finale garnered in 2019. The cold-war era film graphically depicted the aftermath of an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union: mass casualties, radiation poisoning, the collapse of infrastructure, and the breakdown of society.
Angelina Jolie Was Right About Computers(wired.com) “RISC architecture is gonna change everything.” Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago. Today, they’re somehow truer than ever.
No one knows what the hell an AI agent is(techcrunch.com) Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labor in the world” via the company’s various “agentic” services.
Bitcoin Without a Fight(loeber.substack.com) Dial the clock back by thirteen years. It’s the spring of 2012. Bitcoin is trading at five dollars a coin. You ask me “what would the world look like at $100,000 a coin?” When Bitcoin is 20,000 times more valuable? It’s unimaginable. Maybe the financial systems of some small countries have failed, and been taken over completely by Bitcoin. Surely it has become a popular currency.
Atlanta Fed predicts -2.8% GDP(atlantafed.org) The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 3, down from -1.5 percent on February 28.
Stephen Diehl: The Case Against Crypto in 2025(stephendiehl.com) In 2020, I wrote what became a widely-circulated critique of cryptocurrency and its implications for our financial system. At the time, I desperately hoped to be proven wrong. As a technologist who deeply believes in the potential of technology to strengthen democratic institutions, I took no pleasure in forecasting the corrosive potential of crypto assets. Unfortunately, the intervening years have borne out many of my predictions with shocking prescience.