Nine months ago, Elon Musk said 2025 would be the year chatbots became smarter than humans. Sam Altman thought it would be the year fully autonomous AIs entered the work force. And Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicted that by the end of the year, AI would be writing 90 per cent of all software code.

We’re two weeks into the new year, and none of those things have happened. So, full disclosure: I have no idea if we’re going to reach artificial general intelligence or see the rise of humanoid robots this year. If the people at the centre of the industry can’t figure it out, I doubt I can.

But I do have some ideas about how AI could reshape our world over the next 12 months. I think we’re going to see a new political movement pushing back against AI adoption and leaning into our collective humanity. Democratic governments will defy an increasingly protectionist America and start taking digital regulation seriously again. And we’ll start establishing cultural norms about AI use – like whether you really need to respond to that AI-generated e-mail your colleague just sent.

On this episode, I turn the mics around and invite my longtime producer, Mitchell Stuart, to ask me about what’s actually in store for the year ahead.

Mentioned:

Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence (2025), KPMG

Human-centric AI: Perspectives on trust and the future of AI (2025), Telus

Could an Alternative AI Save Us from a Bubble? (Gary Marcus), by Machines Like Us

GPT-5 System Card, OpenAI

Multi-model assurance analysis showing large language models are highly vulnerable to adversarial hallucination attacks during clinical decision support, by Mahmud Ohmar et al (Nature)

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