"2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata

"2025 in AI predictions" by jessicata

Author: LessWrong January 3, 2026 Duration: 21:53
Past years: 2023 2024

Continuing a yearly tradition, I evaluate AI predictions from past years, and collect a convenience sample of AI predictions made this year. In terms of selection, I prefer selecting specific predictions, especially ones made about the near term, enabling faster evaluation.

Evaluated predictions made about 2025 in 2023, 2024, or 2025 mostly overestimate AI capabilities advances, although there's of course a selection effect (people making notable predictions about the near-term are more likely to believe AI will be impressive near-term).

As time goes on, "AGI" becomes a less useful term, so operationalizing predictions is especially important. In terms of predictions made in 2025, there is a significant cluster of people predicting very large AI effects by 2030. Observations in the coming years will disambiguate.

Predictions about 2025

2023

Jessica Taylor: "Wouldn't be surprised if this exact prompt got solved, but probably something nearby that's easy for humans won't be solved?"

The prompt: "Find a sequence of words that is: - 20 words long - contains exactly 2 repetitions of the same word twice in a row - contains exactly 2 repetitions of the same word thrice in a row"

Self-evaluation: False; I underestimated LLM progress [...]

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Outline:

(01:09) Predictions about 2025

(03:35) Predictions made in 2025 about 2025

(05:31) Predictions made in 2025

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First published:
January 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/69qnNx8S7wkSKXJFY/2025-in-ai-predictions

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Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Podcast Episodes
"How to game the METR plot" by shash42 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 12:05
TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometime…
"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:55
A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even r…
"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by Raemon [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:04
I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and…
“Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon” by Julian Bradshaw [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:41
Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly anno…
“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 4:54
People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of…