The AI trends for the year 2025

The year 2025 will bring some significant changes. The reason is the massive further development of AI models and AI systems. What changes will there be and what impact will they have?

Introduction

The following forecasts on AI are based on observations over the past few months. The observations also include an extensive, daily analysis of open source AI models, AI frameworks and AI systems. Considerable technological progress has been and continues to be made on a weekly basis.

The forecasts for 2026 can be found here:

What will happen in 2026?

Companies that do not yet have an AI server should get one soon (NVIDIA consumer grade GPU). Individuals should look for AI-enabled PCs or laptops (NVIDIA GPU or Apple golden cage).

Not much time has passed since the beginning of the AI age. Nevertheless, incredible advances in the capabilities of artificial intelligence have been observed every few weeks or months, especially in the previous year. There is no end in sight (at least in terms of the development of possibilities).

All statements are to be understood as subjective forecasts. The forecasts are given in indicative form and not in subjunctive form.

Forecasts for the development of AI in 2025

Size of language models

Language models (LLMs) are getting bigger and smaller at the same time.

Big Tech companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta or Microsoft will be producing increasingly larger LLMs. ChatGPT 5 has already been announced. However, this won't go on indefinitely. On the one hand, the resource expenditure is enormous. On the other hand, smaller and more powerful LLMs are emerging.

Larger AI models will continue to exist as long as it is technologically possible. The main motivation is achieving an AGI, a superintelligence. ChatGPT has already achieved a score of 87.5% on the difficult ARC-AGI Test, which should be far more than what the average human can accomplish. Note that the ARC-AGI Test was designed to be much easier for humans to pass than for AI models.

Language models and other types of AI models are becoming smaller and smaller at the same time. Current powerful representatives of this type of model already exist. One prominent representative is Llama3.2:3B. The smaller models are becoming increasingly powerful for two reasons:

1. Algorithms and training methods are constantly improving.
2. Large models are used as teachers to siphon knowledge towards the student model: knowledge distillation.

Consequences:

• AI will find its way into every type of end device: not just mobile devices, but even mini-computers such as the Raspberry Pi
• Open source AI will outperform ChatGPT
• AI is getting faster and faster, but not with ChatGPT

Agent systems

An agent system is a network of several logical units, each of which can independently solve a specific task. Such a task could be an online search, for example, or querying a weather forecast from a weather service. The agents in the orchestra can work both with and without AI support.

Agent systems can be used to solve tasks that require several complex sub-steps to solve. One challenge here is checking the partial results. After all, the agent system has to decide whether a subtask has been completed or not. It is also challenging to break a problem down into sub-problems. Thirdly, it is crucial to interpret the results of the individual agents correctly.

Agent systems can already be orchestrated via platforms such as n8n. However, a lack of programming knowledge can only be replaced to a limited extent by the capabilities offered by a black box. In this respect, the wheat will be separated from the chaff when it comes to previously unsolved tasks for which no suitable assistance APIs are available. Many non-developers are also increasingly relying on services with very low usage fees. In the medium term, this leads to dependency, higher costs, a lack of transparency and poorer results (see Black Box).

Consequences:

• New inventions and active ingredients, but also warfare agents, will be created with the help of AI.
• Humans are becoming less important, at least as far as thinking activities up to a certain level of intelligence are concerned.
• The automation of processes will advance massively.

Rise of autonomous systems

Autonomous systems, especially robots and drones, will make great progress. More and more AI skeptics will realize that robots are a threat to humanity. AI skeptics will keep inventing new reasons why AI is unlike intelligence and cite human intelligence as the benchmark.

The rise of robots will eliminate some jobs as early as 2025. This is likely to start outside Europe because that is where the manufacturers of these robots are usually based. In very few years, households of high earners, who do not have to be wealthy, will be using domestic robots.

Cyber attacks will increasingly target such autonomous systems in the future. Anyone who doesn't yet have a smart home but likes a thrill should automate their home as soon as possible.

Consequences:

• People are increasingly relieved of everyday and repetitive industrial tasks.
• Care for the elderly is relieved somewhat.
• War is increasingly being waged via drones (and digitally).
• Humans are becoming increasingly insignificant. The rise of robots is becoming more and more apparent.

AI divides society

All those who think of AI as witchcraft and deny AI the ability to intelligent behaviors are getting increasingly unlucky. Many see AI systems as stochastic parrots. They will despair that AI, which in their eyes is "only" a simulation of intelligence, will take over more tasks from humans.

On the other side are the well-informed technicians or realists with sufficient imagination and a tendency not to see humans as the measure of all things in the long term. This group of people will become very familiar with the opportunities and risks of AI.

Both groups, the AI doubters and the AI realists, will clash. There will be social divisions that will extend into the political landscape. Parties in Germany have already started to include the topic of AI in their party manifestos.

Consequences:

• In Germany, there will no longer be a people's party with a large majority (unless a German politician performs a heroic deed that earns him the favor of the people).
• Bureaucracy is becoming an ever greater problem because it makes the differences in speed between decisions and digital progress ever more visible.
• The people who deny AI's intelligence will increasingly fall silent and either no longer remember their earlier words or present bogus arguments.

Data is becoming increasingly important

The advance of AI will ensure that the AI Act (AI Regulation) is actually used to impose financial sanctions in Europe. Quite different from the GDPR.

Companies such as Google, OpenAI and Microsoft will collect more and more data and try to minimize their exposure. These companies will continue to throw paper at the problem of unlawful data misuse. This will buy them a few years until a judgment is passed against them. During this time, they can generate so much revenue that the high fines will only account for a fraction of the revenue generated.

The EU will continue to tinker with and improve the AI Act, because there is no more prominent topic than artificial intelligence.

Consequences:

• Consideration will be given to taxing data.
• Big tech companies will (over the years) pay increasingly higher fines until they are broken up or go under.
• Data protection is gaining in importance, including the long-neglected protection of personal data (only the Hessian data protection authority will continue to work like an authority, and the Hamburg data protection authority will continue to claim that language models do not process personal data). Even Ursula von the Leyen and Olaf Scholz will realize that it is not a good idea to build a European cloud that uses Microsoft's technology base. OK, maybe not Olaf and Ursula, but everyone else.

If you do not believe in super intelligence in the near future, please write! Your contact details will be noted down and you will receive a reply – when the time comes – with a request for a comprehensive admission of your failure (or a creative excuse). Alternatively, the author admits their failure, even if the subjective probability of a wrong prediction regarding AGI is very low.

IT skills shortage is disappearing

German companies saw a shortage of skilled IT personnel. This was mainly due to the fact that companies are mainly looking for employees. If they were looking for external staff, they would find what they were looking for. This applies to all jobs that do not have to be carried out permanently on site.

This means that there are also a sufficient number of competent AI consultants and AI developers available. They do not even have to take paid training courses, notice periods, vacation days or similar into account. Employees, on the other hand, are often overwhelmed by constantly having to learn new things about AI.

Furthermore, AI will lead to an increase in productivity in software development and therefore in the efficiency of business processes. Some of the additional money available will be invested in security technology to better defend against the ever-increasing number of cyber attacks. These attacks are not aimed at AI systems, but are generally on the increase because our world is becoming increasingly digital. The rise of autonomous systems mentioned above also makes it more attractive for hackers to carry out more digital attacks. With the help of AI, such attacks can in turn be better defended against.

Consequences:

• Suddenly there are enough AI consultants and AI developers and therefore software developers.
• Companies will realize that employees are not the only form of employment.
• Software development initially costs more money, but over the lifetime of a product it costs far less than before.

Content-Explosion

AI-generated texts, images, videos and music will flood the internet. Training data for new, better AI models will therefore become increasingly difficult to find. This is why training data is increasingly being generated synthetically and also assimilated via the environmental experience of autonomous systems (robots, drones).

VG Wort will change its remuneration model because many authors will mainly create their texts using AI. Authors of handwritten texts will receive less royalties from VG Wort for the same work than before.

Generated texts and images of very good quality are becoming increasingly easier to generate. With the help of automation, programmers can create blog articles, news feeds, and PowerPoint presentations themed to company knowledge that will emerge automatically and with minimal human intervention. The "human in the loop" is becoming less important.

AI content is increasingly being used to form opinions. Everyone is becoming an AI expert. Everyone is becoming an expert on topic X. Agent systems enable many people to become experts on topic X themselves without understanding anything about the topic. Companies will take longer to find real AI experts.

Consequences:

• Videos and images are becoming more and more realistic. Many people no longer trust a video or picture.
• AI texts will flood the internet. Search engines in their current form will cease to exist.
• Jobs for translators, copywriters, illustrators and SEO specialists are becoming increasingly insignificant.
• A bad programmer remains a bad programmer, despite AI-driven code generators. Only now anyone can program something that was previously unthinkable.

Further theses in brief:

• States will begin to realize that not only money but also information must be taxed. Information is already an equivalent value that often replaces money. Large technology companies are taking advantage of this to avoid taxes and become ever more powerful.
• More and more non-technical people will bring out software solutions. They will use tools such as n8n and interfaces to larger AI models. This will lead to the market being flooded with mediocre solutions that look great at first glance, but will mostly only be suitable for individual users.
• Information warfare will cause massive problems worldwide. Slow democracies will lose out to dictatorships and autocratic regimes.
• Politics and the legal system in Germany will be even more overwhelmed than before. The new Internet country will continue to lag behind on the Internet and allow itself to be paralyzed by lobbyists and bad advisors. Many Germans still do not understand that data gifts to Google, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI are not a blessing, but the beginning of the end of Europe.
• German companies will wake up from their slumber and use AI to optimize business processes.
• More and more companies will ask themselves whether their data will be safe with OpenAI and/or Microsoft and/or other American companies and their state-affiliated secret services. This is predominantly not about the protection of personal data, but about trade secrets.

Consequences:

• Parts of my answer might scare you…

Outlook

The year 2025 will be very exciting. The capabilities offered by AI will be unimaginable. It is now impossible to predict where we will be in 2026. A few years ago, it was still possible to make predictions with a high degree of reliability over a period of one year. Those days are over.

In future, all AI realists will think in terms of minutes, days or weeks if possible, but no longer in months or even years. AI doubters will be reluctant to work with AI systems due to the superiority of AI, or they will do so secretly and not tell anyone.

AI will have fully arrived in mobile devices. This will lead to a revolution that is bigger than the introduction of mobile devices themselves. Anyone who is not completely blinded will see that sooner or later this rate of development will not continue and that a singularity is on the horizon.

Until this singularity, which will be in the near future, everyone should make the best possible use of the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence.

PS: This text was created completely manually and without AI, except for the post image and the SEO summary for search engines, which is invisible here. Translations of this text into languages other than German are translated with AI.