🔮 Unlimited AI, the race to robotaxis and other powerful predictions for 2025

2025 is going to be a wild year. That’s easy to foresee.

A year is a short, foolhardy horizon to capture the force of exponential change. Yet, each January, I distil conversations with technologists, investors, policy wonks, and defence insiders to produce a set of predictions—helpful guideposts, I hope, rather than crystal balls. Many themes repeat (exponential drivers don’t take coffee breaks!), so my book, published three years ago, is still relevant.

This coming year feels like it’ll be a wild one, a crazy one; I feel it deep in my craw. My subconscious tickles me, and I hear the “du-du-du-du-da-du-duuh” of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in my head. We’re going to need some new verses.

More relevant than ever

In 2024, I logged hundreds of discussions across Europe, the Middle East, and the US, co-led research on complex risks, and witnessed tech breakthroughs up close. The result: seven bold calls for 2025. Last year, I slightly beat my own expectations, so I’m raising the bar further. Let’s see how we fare a year from now.

1 There will be no AI wall

Contrary to fears of plateauing, AI research is speeding up. DeepSeek's ultra-efficient model shows labs competing to cut costs and boost performance.

Expect new frontiers crossed: 10-million-token context windows will let models digest entire books, medical archives, or enterprise knowledge bases in one go—almost “human-like”, perhaps more so, in continuity.

An AI model will topple challenging benchmarks like FrontierMath and Arc-AGI thanks to leaps in reasoning capabilities. Other models will have massive context windows, effectively being able to hold all the information that matters to us in their “heads”.

Test: A 10-million-token model is released publicly; new record highs on logic-heavy benchmarks.

2 Deployment will move at warp speed

Because the cost of intelligence has collapsed, GPT4-ish quality has come down several hundred times in price for end users, we’ll use more of it. This will mean usage in simple agentic systems. Six months ago I didnt’t use any agentic workflows. Starting in 2025, I am using a few. I expect I’ll be using dozens by this year's end, each consuming oodles of cheaper and cheaper tokens. Our AI systems will more robustly use our computers for us if we want. I use my computer pretty well, and I’m more interested in getting AI to do important things for me that I find hard to do.

Three years into the genAI awakening of ChatGPT, we’ll see a series of startups move into scaling out to customers, going from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues.

Large companies will be a year into their first pilots and will start to scale out and expand these initiatives.

Test: Three GenAI companies, outside of foundation model makers, surpass the $100m annualised revenue milestone for the first time.

3 Machines will chat more than humans

Corporate security pros already see that over half of web traffic is bot-based. But as agentic AI explodes, bots exchanging data among themselves will dwarf human traffic.

In practice, large swathes of text, computations, negotiations, and even coding will be automated behind the scenes by bots calling each other’s APIs, web APIs and websites directly.

Test: New metrics show Automated Software-to-Software Token (AST) usage eclipsing human-generated tokens.

4 Waymo overtakes Uber in San Francisco

Waymo's tenfold growth last year let it catch up to Lyft's ride volume. If vehicle supply isn't a bottleneck, half of all city rides might become robotaxi trips in 2025.

Expect near-zero wait times and rapid growth in Waymo’s other cities. Apollo will also grow at an incredible clip.

Test: Waymo has a month with more rides in SF than Uber.

5 Extreme climate events will increase

Brace for an uptick in storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires. Insurance markets will wobble as supply chains scramble.

Expect more challenging questions about paying for decarbonization—and more focus on accelerating the transition in a world where global consensus is fraying.

Test: Climate-related insurance costs will be higher in 2025 than in the annual average of the previous twenty years.

6 Renewables surprise again

Solar’s record-breaking run continues. Battery prices keep dropping on better capacity and efficiency.

Home solar plus storage—so-called “prosumer”—will spread. We’re on the cusp of a more decentralized energy model.

Test: Global solar deployments grow at least 30% year-on-year.

7 The EV market will hit a higher gear

Demand for battery-electric and plug-in hybrids is near-boiling. In 2025, EV sales will gain market share faster than the year before, even if Europe wobbled a bit this year.

With new models, faster charging, and robust incentives, EVs are on track to be the default choice for new buyers.

Test: EV global share from 2024 to 2025 outstrips the 2023-to-2024 jump.

Taking a step back

There are several other important themes, but I’ve struggled to find an adequate test for these. They are significant enough that I’ve included them here.