What the Freakiness of 2025 in AI Tells Us About 2026
It’s probably not possible to satisfactorily condense a 12 month’s worth of weird progress in AI, as well as predictions for the year to come, into one video. But I’m gonna try anyway because it has been a very strange time. http://matsprogram.org/s26-aie My new app! https://lmcouncil.ai Patreon Interview: https://www.patreon.com/posts/robot-in-your-27-146376094 Chapters: 00:00 - Introduction 00:34 - Reasoning Models … and limits 02:54 - A playable world 03:36 - Realism 03:50 - AI Slop gone mainstream 05:03 - DolphinGemma 05:39 - Public Mood 07:34 - AI Enlisted 08:30 - GPT-5 11:05 - Open Weight not out 13:00 - METR Breakout 17:30 - VASA-1 18:28 - Lateral Productivity 20:15 - 1 or 1000 benchmarks needed? 24:54 - Continual Learning + Altman on Superintelligence 28:08 - Automated Information Discovery ft AlphaEvolve Hassabis on Generality: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2003097405026193809 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqVbypvxDto Gemini 3: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_images/gemini_3_table_final_HLE_Tools_on.gif Reasoning Trade-offs: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13837 DolphinGemma: https://blog.google/technology/ai/dolphingemma/?s=09 Genie 3: https://deepmind.google/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier-for-world-models/ METR Time Horizon: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499 https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/ Flaws: https://x.com/ShashwatGoel7/status/2002369517499105443 https://shash42.substack.com/p/how-to-game-the-metr-plot https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/2002203627377574113 GPT-5 - Altman phd in everything: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/14/business/chatgpt-rollout-problems https://simple-bench.com/ AI Slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_3vxoJDD9k https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/16/boost-for-artists-in-ai-copyright-battle-as-only-3-per-cent-back-uk-active-opt-out-plan Survey: https://x.com/SearchlightInst/status/2001057144842387920/photo/1 Nvidia Nemotron: https://x.com/percyliang/status/2000608134205985169 OpenAI Compute Flywheel: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2001363007209914399/photo/1 Altman Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P27Ef-LLuQ AI in Govt: https://x.com/jdcmedlock/status/1939814516503847259 Benchmark Gaming: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/meta-exec-denies-the-company-artificially-boosted-llama-4s-benchmark-scores/ AlphaEvolve: https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/ https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/AlphaEvolve.pdf?utm_source=deepmind.google&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=gdm&utm_content= Continual Learning: https://abehrouz.github.io/files/NL.pdf Job Risk: https://archive.ph/20250708204527/https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic GPT4o: https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1916889492172013989 Vasa-1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ Three Views: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2D45BNxnZjdpSX2j/ai-timelines Turing Test: https://x.com/tunguz/status/1907185471211422147 Karpathy Year in Review: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/year-in-review-2025/ LLM Brainrot: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13928 Lateral Productivity: https://www.aisi.gov.uk/frontier-ai-trends-report Emotional Quotient: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08394 Non-hype Newsletter: https://signaltonoise.beehiiv.com/ Podcast: https://aiexplainedopodcast.buzzsprout.com/ AI Insiders ($9!): https://www.patreon.com/AIExplained Reasoning Models would boost results but not change paradigm Genie 3 makes the world playable (literally, in the case of yesterday’s news) DolphinDecoding Veo 3.1 / Sora 2 / Nano Banana Pro / Elevenlabs Voice/Music But AI slop everywhere Public attitude very mixed (Hassabis) AI gets enlisted in government, but too early to tell jobs/productivity impact GPT 5 underwhelms but steady gain in coding/users/HLE (strange that it has to explain its future revenue) Chinese models in dogged pursuit (not quite made it to my top 4/council). And soon Nvidia? Not Meta for now but SAM amazing METR continues but will be misinterpreted And 5 Points about 2026 Vasa wrong but … Lateral Productivity + safety report, extends to robotics (Patreon mention/freaky robot clip) Benchmark analogy (AI-2027/lesswrong charts), Amodei (codex report suggests not) and Sutskever (but recanted) and Altman (phd) were former, Altman not anymore (but must watch out for brain rot), and we can’t even decide how general we are … Hassabis/Yann debate Information Progress analogy (still 2-3 years more of exquisite compression (Deepthink) and on next phase there are … …examples already, Alphas (will it reduce the human bottleneck?) + Emotional Quotient
