In this year's roundup, Nic, Evertjan, and Cascha unpack the rollercoaster that 2025 was for AI. From the shockwave of DeepSeek R1 to the "gradual" progress of GPT-5 and Gemini 3.0, we break down the tech, the data, (and the drama).
We discuss why 2025 became the "Year of the Idea Guy" rather than the "Year of General Agents," analyze the Great Minds of AI (from Ilya’s return to research to Dario’s scaling maximalism), and look at what the betting markets say about the bubble bursting. Finally, we make our own predictions on what 2026 holds for the industry.
We cover:
The 2025 Timeline: A month-by-month breakdown of model releases (DeepSeek, o3, Claude 3.7, Gemini 3).
The Pelican Benchmark: Visualizing progress through Simon Willison’s famous "Pelican on a bicycle" test.
Highlights & Lowlights: The rise of agentic coding, the failure of general agents, and the "Information Obscurity" problem in AI labs.
Great Minds in AI: A deep dive into the conflicting philosophies of Sutskever, Karpathy, LeCun, Sutton, Hassabis, and Amodei.
Polymarkets & Predictions: What the crowd thinks about AGI, Tesla FSD, and the AI bubble, plus our team's predictions for 2026.
Links & Resources Mentioned:
Benchmarks & Data:
METR Time-Horizon Benchmark - Tracking the jump in capabilities.
Epoch AI Capabilities Index - Aggregated model progress
The Pelican Benchmark (Simon Willison) - The evolution of SVGs.
Epoch AI Data Center Sizes - Visualizing the gigawatt scale.
Interviews & Articles:
Ilya Sutskever on Dwarkesh Podcast - "The Return to Discovery".
Andrej Karpathy on Dwarkesh Podcast - The "Decade of Agents" and "Silent Collapse".
Sam Altman: The Gentle Singularity - Referenced in discussion.
Horses vs. Cars Analogy - Understanding adoption lag.
Prediction Markets (Polymarket & Metaculus):
Will the AI Bubble Burst?
Tesla Unsupervised FSD Timeline
When will weakly general AI be announced?