Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

-Expanded land use restrictions and federal tariffs against solar and wind, resulting from pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists and the new head of the department of energy.

-Another CEO is shot.

-Crypto has a major correction; bitcoin finishes the year well under $100k.

-US grocery prices are higher than ever.

-Pierre Poilievre is the new Prime Minister of Canada and holds a majority.

-EVs continue to grow market share at a linear rate in North America.

– US requires more percentage of EV components made domestically, making US the most expensive EV market.

– US made EVs will retreat to NA markets only.

Additionally, that it’ll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.

On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.

If the social media companies are only trying to shift blame, this makes sense. They’re not liable if the customer lies.

But if that loophole is closed, the only way to enforce age approved sites would be a global identity system that is somehow inextricably linked to your real-life persona. Everything you do online is linked to who you are. And that’s VERY dystopian and doesn’t (yet) exist to my knowledge.

Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example “no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required”.

This is hyper-local but works well because there’s no peer pressure- nobody has one etc.

The other effective approach in play is “no screens in private areas” – ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms. This also has very beneficial outcomes on kids, and seems to be gathering steam.

I think govt type bans are easily circumvented, and basically useless. But parental rules, especially if common in the child’s social circle, are proving to be a good starting point.

That wouldn’t invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

> allows websites to selectively request verifiable information about the user through digital credentials such as a driver’s license or a national identification card stored in a digital wallet.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or…

Market continues to rally into first quarter then most equities slide and start trading sideways.

Inflation softens as shelter slides.

Recession in second half of the year.

Bitcoin hits $150k at some point next year and then starts lagging with the general market.

US prioritizes LNG development and export.

Google becomes leader in AI.

* We’ll see the worlds first trillionaire

* Bitcoin will reach $200k+, and remain largely stable around that price, at the end of 2025

* Generative AI for music will continue to improve substantially. I have a lack of imagination, but maybe something like on demand streaming services, maybe targeted to niche music genres (lo-fi, electronica, elevator/hold/office music)

* Generative AI for video will continue to improve substantially. The best I can come up with is that there will be a breakout indie film or music video that’s produced from a skeleton crew relying heavily on generative AI video.

* LLMs will continue to improve substantially, being able to solve more and more complex tasks, like the Putnam exam and others. Research will continue to try and integrate LLMs into a toolchain to improve performance

* LLMs and other generative AI tasks will continue to become more and more accessible ($2.5k for a machine able to do fairly advanced training?)

* The cost of robots and other robotics will drop substantially, providing a reasonable bipedal option at $8k

* Twitter and Facebook will still be around, Bluesky will be no more, Mastodon will continue to be niche

* All the above will be used by people to invent and discover weird, wonderful and horrible things that I can’t even imagine.

on real life image and video intelligence though i think google will take the lead here as they just have monopoly on dataset here given they have google images and youtube.

on proprietary general intelligence ai i think openai and anthropic will keep their lead, while on open source mark zuckerberg will be continuously leveling the playing field so the general population can keep up in terms of availability of access and end-result productivity.

something to keep eye on though is china. have you guys seen their recent open source models? very impressive. looking at it, it seems like a head to head battle between USA and China. Europe seems heavily distracted with its regulations and politics.

> I have a lack of imagination, but maybe something like on demand streaming services, maybe targeted to niche music genres (lo-fi, electronica, elevator/hold/office music)

goddamn that would be interesting. it’s gonna be great to see lots of micro communities offering better content than netflix/disney/hbo etc which is prone to political and non-political influences and slow-downs in production.

> Generative AI for video will continue to improve substantially. The best I can come up with is that there will be a breakout indie film or music video that’s produced from a skeleton crew relying heavily on generative AI video.

i wonder how much of the industry will transition into pure prompting too. back then we used manual instruments and talented voice actors for voice, these days you could (possibly) produce similar results if you’re skilled enough to precisely describe it to the ai you are directing / working with.

> The cost of robots and other robotics will drop substantially, providing a reasonable bipedal option at $8k

huge bet on this too, the brains are getting better and for sure yc’s request for startup will eventually have a section dedicated for the body and limb part targetting different industries.

I think there’s plenty of data for people to train substantial models, either drawing directly from the public domain or scraping content. The cost of compute and disk space will continue to drop exponentially fueling the ability of small businesses and amateurs.

Compute is still following Moore’s law, more or less, when you allow for GPUs. Hard drives are relatively on the same path, with maybe a price halving every 3 years or so.

> … while on open source mark zuckerberg will be continuously leveling the playing field so the general population can keep up in terms of availability of access and end-result productivity.

Meta’s offering is not open source. I agree that all the big players will make substantial moves in this space but I’m much more interested in the niche models that are actually libre/free/open source. I suspect FOSS will eventually eat all the big players lunch but I don’t have a good read on it (nor do I know anything about China’s OSS models).

> it’s gonna be great to see lots of micro communities offering better content than netflix/disney/hbo …

It sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode but I can’t wait (and I don’t think it’ll be as bad as “Black Mirror”).

> i wonder how much of the industry will transition into pure prompting too …

My read on this is that we’re in the “experimental art house” phase of this type of generative AI. So many people create weird things, experimenting with the technology but ultimately having low expectations in terms of what gets produced.

Sometime soon (1-2+ years?) my guess is we’ll see finer control with someone, either an actor, director, etc. that can provide dialogue, facial expression and body language with minimal setup, a camera or voice recording, say, that can make or refine avatar/agent performance. I would guess this would be available to specialized visual graphics shops but will eventually bleed out so that amateurs have access. I think we might be seeing this available already.

Eventually, we’ll have “make what I want”, but I would imagine that’s 5-10+ years away.

Remember 2024 has been a monster year in the markets and they just indicated they are slowing down the rate cuts.

I like index funds so much , that everything else feels a time / effort waste even though I am aspiring to be a programmer , maybe that’s partially why I don’t see much reason in crypto.

I just think of index funding 80% + bonds 20% or maybe 100% index fund into my own country index ,and maybe having some backup money in need , probably in a liquid fixed deposit or having multiple bank accounts and giving them all the maximum amount of money which is guaranteed to be given to me if a bank fails by the govt. , probably 10k$ is enough in my country or maybe I am still over estimating.

Crypto is the future of money and finance. If you are aspiring to become a programmer you should internalize this and get in.

Why ?

Crypto is the digital version of the old commodity money (whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made).

Turns out it was absolutely impractical because people rarely want to be physically responsible for their own estate.

I neither see crypto disappear anytime soon and we may see innovative usage. It can probably make sense in unstable economic environments. But everywhere else, you’ll want your estate not being accessible to burglars, you’ll want your big transactions to be legally secured, you’ll want your bank to be able to reverse things and you’ll want to not let your money sleep.

Also, unless governments start accepting crypto for paying taxes, you’ll have a hard time buying anything in daily shops.

Bitcoin was around $43k at the end of 2023 now at approximately $100k.

* Solar and LLM’s will bloom.

    > the US financial system. It appears primed to go poof!

Can you explain more, and provide some specific examples? Are you talking about commercial banks, investment banks, or insurance companies? (They make up the bulk of what most people mean when they say “financial system”.) Post-2008 GFC, ibanks are stronger than ever because they are much more conservative. With the exception of a couple of run-on-the-banks, commercial banks have been more stable than ever in the last 50 years. Similar for insurance companies.

I just put down $2500 on a new PC because of this.

* LLMs (for non-coding tasks) will likely fizzle out as expensive talking fidget spinners and not the world saviors that the companies behind them envision them to be. AI will go back to being fun and exciting again and not the delight of both Wall Street and the ‘shoeshine boy’.

* Cloud egress costs will be heavily scrutinized and competed upon as transferring data no longer becomes a competitive advantage.

* Apple or someone like Apple will take advantage of cratering storage/compute costs by moving things off cloud to a locally owned ‘box’ that pairs with a new dumb-client/thin phone (backups, massive storage, running some compute on this box, sharing/storing ‘family’ stuff, streaming games or movies etc) also accessible via a reverse proxy (vpn) from anywhere.

* A combo of aibo/roomba/ring like device that goes about or rolls around your house and does things for you… kinda real life flubber.

* Selling users’ data goes out of fashion (goog/meta) as new companies use privacy as a competitive advantage to sell ads.

* Finally games actually have AI that doesn’t suck – a new class of AI games that would challenge and delight humans like never before.

100% wrong. LLMs are wildly useful in daily life, even the cheaper models.

2. I think this is probably right-ish. From what I hear LLMs are nearing what they do and I have never found any interesting use other than just laughing at them (which I could do with markov chains). AI-generated images are hideous and I have no opinion on AI-generated music as I just choose not to expose myself to it

3. Again, don’t know

4. God I hope so. That would be such a funny trend. Plan9 comeback??????? #define nil (void*)0 in common parlance???

5. I feel like this is exclusively a novelty but what do I know

6. No it will not???

7. This will probably happen, but it won’t be many games. It will not be a new class of games. AI–big shock–isn’t fun. Mario but the levels are incomprehensible. BALATRO but I CONVINCE the GAME to give me INFINITE MULTIPLIER? (Part 3). The Beginners Guide but no one cared enough to tell a story. AI so far has been a hindrance where high quality work is concerned. Why will that change? The paint bucket tool has been slowly improved over time, but it was helpful when it first came out.

How many people do you know that have played the AI-generated Minecraft thing more than once or twice? It’s interesting but utterly bland and bizarre. You’re constantly having to tell the program over and over again what it means to be a person when you’re in a world which doesn’t even know what bird is in the sky. It gets infuriating.

The idea comes back again and again, though. “What if we made a game with infinite content so it could appeal to everyone? And then what if we added multiplayer?” I’ve thought it, you’ve thought it–everyone has. The important part is realizing that you’re wrong. If everyone’s had this thought, why don’t we have this game? Well, we do.

Dwarf Fortress is perhaps the best example of a reality simulator standing at simulating a whopping 42% of everything ever. But if you asked someone to describe Dwarf Fortress they wouldn’t just say “it’s a pretty good reality simulator”–well, they might. Assume here you asked them to give a /good/ description–they would tell you it’s a tough, slow game about minion dwarves going around and doing your bidding in order to build a civilization which will eventually fall. And they’d tell you that it’s fun because of its deep interactions. But now we’ve lost the plot. It’s not a game for everyone anymore, because now it’s only for people who like slow games with deep interactions. And it’s not a game where you can do anything because you can only do so much as your dwarves can do. But Dwarf Fortress is a fun game. And the fun of it comes from its rules. And rules are what AI is famously bad at.

Minecraft is another famous game and the same thing applies to it. “You can only interact with what your player can see,” “one block at a time,” and “everything is a full block” are all rules which bend it away from that “ideal” game, but they’re all the things that make Minecraft fun. They’re all the rules.

Games aren’t fun when you can say “well I have better armor” and get out of a tricky situation. Games are REALLY FUN when you can say “wait, I have a bag of holding, don’t I?” and then look around as everyone starts smirking at the implication.

That’s what AI is bad at. There will not be a new class of AI games.

The first ruling has already happened: https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/t…

What this ruling means is that the algorithm is a expression of the first amendment from the platform itself. If the algorithm does harmful things it causes first party liability.

My prediction is that the administration will not do much to the social media giants but class action lawsuits will.

it’s crazy how us humans yearn for magic pills for the highs and the lows just to get ourselves in a healthy baseline

and as bryan johnson’s experiments look like, it all comes down to our consistency in eating healthy, exercising regularly, and resting enough – those three alone will net you better health than most people – and it’s hard to get into habit of doing those since we all got distractions around us.

Simplifying a lot here, but people with ADHD are statistically more likely to exhibit addictive behaviours because the addiction provides dopamine that their brain otherwise has trouble getting. Treatment with prescribed CNS stimulants is very effective at preventing those behaviours because the brain no longer has to engage in the addictive behaviours to obtain sufficient dopamine.

Here’s one study where patients reported significantly lower rates of alcohol and drug use over at least a one year period.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23264367/

2) The cost of a line of code will continue to drop. A Moore’s like law is coming/here for code.

3) Trade jobs will start to become what code jobs were in the 00’s — very well paid.

Fair warning, coders think about learning a trade like plumbing, electrician, so on…

Title: “RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data”

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet the choice of which model to use often involves a trade-off between performance and cost. More powerful models, though effective, come with higher expenses, while less capable models are more cost-effective. To address this dilemma, we propose several efficient router models that dynamically select between a stronger and a weaker LLM during inference, aiming to optimize the balance between cost and response quality. We develop a training framework for these routers leveraging human preference data and data augmentation techniques to enhance performance. Our evaluation on widely-recognized benchmarks shows that our approach significantly reduces costs—by over 2 times in certain cases—without compromising the quality of responses. Interestingly, our router models also demonstrate significant transfer learning capabilities, maintaining their performance even when the strong and weak models are changed at test time. This highlights the potential of these routers to provide a cost-effective yet high-performance solution for deploying LLMs.

Link: https://arxiv.org/html/2406.18665v1

There are very different business constraints for hiring software developers vs all skilled tradespeople.

Other societies optimize for public good. It’s less about “individual freedom” and more about “what world do we want to live in”.

(I’m not talking about govt here as much as just the way people consider their own choices. And yes, there are as*oles in all societies.)

When entrenched in one society model though, it can be hard to understand that other models exist (much less than they could suit you better.)

It’s a weird situation here in the UK. We have newer vehicles sold with the over the top lights that were factory fitted that can legally be driven on our roads. Meanwhile relatively old but still useful vehicles with underpowered lights from a decade or longer ago often can’t update those lights even though better replacement parts are available. Our regulations are obscure and antiquated and mean the vehicle would potentially fail its mandatory annual testing because the replacements don’t have the right regulatory mark – so the vehicle would no longer be legal to drive on the road even though its lights would be significantly better and safer than what it originally had but not the crazy ones some new cars arrive with.

Light bars selectively disabling some LED segments (as in not blinding other drivers) are already a thing, but… they’re not allowed in the US. If the regulation around it comes closer to the EU one, everyone will be better off.

However, just FYI, this $25 2K cam (PCMag recommended) can do that sorta (it has motion/pet detection) and more. It also has excellent night vision.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH45HPZT/

I was like, a $25 camera can’t be this good. But I tried it out and it’s actually really good.

– (75%) US marked increase in military-industrial complex spending, perhaps $800B/y

– (70%) US hollows-out functional regulators necessary for safety, growth, and industry

– (65%) US recession spring-summer 2025

– (50%) US major cyberattack crippling infrastructure

– (45%) US austerity cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security

Program/Project Manager roles go to zero.

Trad dev and design roles go to zero.

Those roles go to those who also code/design/sell/get viral/make videos/write tutorials/devrel/run communities/answer customer support.

It used to be “do designers learn to code” or “do coders learn to design?

now it’s learn ALL those things, fast, with AI, or hang out in the tendie loin.

it’s dog eat dog and no one’s safe

> We believe the most likely occurrence by 2025 is a technological breakthrough that will provide an alternative to oil and natural gas, but implementation will lag because of the necessary infrastructure costs and need for longer replacement time. However, whether the breakthrough occurs within the 2025 time frame or later, the geopolitical implications of a shift away from oil and natural gas will be immense.

I wonder if solar’s dirt-cheap cost would be considered a “breakthrough”. Interesting breakdown on how major OPEC countries will be affected by such a “breakthrough”. Great read!

Edit: This prediction is wild also:

(Page 62, pdf page 83)

> A Non-nuclear Korea?

> We see a unified Korea as likely by 2025—if
not as a unitary state, then in some form of
North-South confederation. While diplomacy
working to end North Korea’s nuclear
weapons program continues, the final
disposition of the North’s nuclear
infrastructure and capabilities at the time of
reunification remain uncertain. A new,
reunified Korea struggling with the large
financial burden of reconstruction will,
however, be more likely to find international
acceptance and economic assistance by
ensuring the denuclearization of the
Peninsula, perhaps in a manner similar to
what occurred in Ukraine post-1991. A
loosely confederated Korea might complicate
denuclearization efforts. Other strategic
consequences are likely to flow from Korean
unification, including prospects for new levels
of major power cooperation to manage new
and enduring challenges, such as
denuclearization, demilitarization, refugee
flows, and financing reconstruction.

Edit 2:

(Page 75, pdf page 95)

> Potential Emergence of a Global Pandemic

> Experts consider highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains, such as H5N1,
to be likely candidates for such a transformation, but other pathogens—such as the SARS
coronavirus or other influenza strains—also have this potential.

…

> If a pandemic disease emerges, it probably will first occur in an area marked by high population
density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and
Southeast Asia, where human populations live in close proximity to livestock. Unregulated
animal husbandry practices could allow a zoonotic disease such as H5N1 to circulate in livestock
populations—increasing the opportunity for mutation into a strain with pandemic potential. To
propagate effectively, a disease would have to be transmitted to areas of higher population
density

> Outside the US, critical infrastructure degradation
and economic loss on a global scale would result as approximately a third of the worldwide
population became ill and hundreds of millions died.

At least we didn’t get hundreds of millions dead. That’s pretty grim.

ChatGPT Search will get significant (high 1 digit) share of the search market.

ChatGPT voice mode was surgically amazing while driving. I had a personal assistant refining criteria to find the perfect shop to find the gift I wanted that was open and on my way to my destination.

I don’t think there is a moat for search given the power of AI tools.

When you pick it up it’s like you are always on a Facetime call with your AI personal assistant. You can skin your AI personal assistant how they look .. to look like a celebrity to a deceased friend or relative whose always there to help & guide you through your day (get things done for you, your knowlegdebase, knows your life and sees how you are doing via Vision AI.. if you want it can be your friend and show care for you).

If Open AI doesn’t do this then another AI company will in 2025. We need a new phone / personal device paradigm. The iPhone and Android are stale and boring in 2024!

It looks really cool and revolutionary. And doable.

But it also looks horrible in how this will force us to lose what remaining control we had over our privacy 🙁

LLMs are really cool but we really need to make them work locally.

Apple waiting to create such a personal device as noted above for it to work locally will be the decline and possible death of the boring iPhone!

The monstrous debt storm just over the horizon that most people can’t see (or refuse to acknowledge) will hit and will hit hard. The Fed won’t be able to restrain or lessen it with policies and blunt instruments at their disposal.

Over the last 4 months I’ve moved most of my investments to gold, trading cards, BTC, wine, land and rare earth.

Can you provide some jumping-off points for the financially-literate?

You do not have to read Lyn first, but without reading it on modern financial systems I personally would not understand most technical points in the current macro discussions.

And you believe that in an economic crisis, people are going to want to buy these things?

2. The “social media” giants will invest more in public affairs to improve their image as public resistance grows. Expect lots of research papers getting funded that sow doubt and fear about banning children from social media, following similar strategies to tobacco and oil industries.

3. Miraculously, Truth Social and X will be exempt from the same controls put on other platforms. Justified on the basis that they are official communication channels for the government.

> Formaldehyde is essential in human metabolism and is required for the synthesis of DNA and amino acids (the building blocks of protein). Therefore, all humans have detectable quantities of natural formaldehyde in their circulation (about 2.5 ug of formaldehyde per ml of blood). Assuming an average weight of a 2-month-old of 5 kg and an average blood volume of 85 ml per kg, the total quantity of formaldehyde found in an infant’s circulation would be about 1.1 mg, a value about 1,500 times more than the amount an infant would be exposed to in any individual vaccine.

https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety…

> While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams* of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and infants who are fed soy formula ingest almost 117 milligrams of aluminum during the first six months of life.

https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety…

Non-anthropomorphic generic AI models.

Impact of war on prices of all kinds of stuff everywhere will become more evident.

And that will put extra pressure on an already unstable global politics scenario. What will follow may tell us in which flavor of dystopia we are in, either denialism and escapism keeping business as usual, or “emergency measures” with some sectors grabbing even more power.

* Some AI provider seriously looking at / funding RWVK?

* (More) Healthcare issues in the US, spilling into other countries. (or just the beginning of them anyway – effects will last much longer and life expectancy will decline)

* Some companies seriously looking at AI as another manager / decision maker. Quietly, not as a publicity stunt like it’s done now.

* Google search market share falling further. Maybe 85%, down from the current 90%. (more of a wish than a prediction)

* US policies / ideas around cryptocurrency will be wildly incoherent, causing big swings every month

* Consumer RISC-V laptops (again, wishlist)

Self-driving truck cross country without human approval.

Extreme heat warps bridges in mid-west.

North Korea claims successful moon landing.

‘Self-aware’ AI chatbot sues it’s creator.

AI incorrectly labels school children as criminals.

Think about it, how many practically identical AI IDEs/editors are sponsored by YC alone? They’re just hoping one of all those projects stick along enough to cash at least something in.

The big question is about trends in AI investment and usage from “old” corporations, SMBs and common people. Those will indicate if the world is really trusting the tech.

These are only just getting started, from the large corps down. There is a decade of work ahead for them even if the AI tech stopped maturing right now.

Confidence is slowly building up but still is very far from the hype levels I saw in the middle to late Big Data (2015-2017) era.

https://youtu.be/okrB3aJtUaw

I feel confident at least two of the predictions (about TypeScript and npm) are going to be true at the end of 2025. I feel less confident about the predictions about WebAssembly and compile-to-JS languages.

  Thread-over-Matter mesh networking
  UWB in door locks
  Unlicensed 6Ghz spectrum
  Apple room panels (AI/conferencing/control)
  Apple security cameras, door locks
  Apple iPad-on-motorized-pole
  In-home AI/media servers (Mac Mini/Studio, Tinybox)
  Speech interfaces based on open-source stacks

* Bitcoin will continue to increase in price and decrease in usability.

* Quantum will continue to improve and start to raise eyebrows in niche circles and paper headlines, leading to adoption in small parts of major tech companies.

* Markets will hit a record high by end of year.

* ADHD medications will also hit a record high.

* More people will opt out social media like they opt of out of “GMO” food and use it to virtue-signal.

* Tech hiring will continue to decrease and get tougher to find entry-level SWE jobs, leading to an uptick in other majors. Being an SWE will never be as cool again as it was in the 2010s.

* Is anyone still talking about climate change action goals?

* Starship will go orbital, Blue origin will go suborbital, Boeing will hit the ground.

* More laws regulating internet and social media use. Enforcement will be fuzzy and laughable at first but will become increasingly serious over time.

Inflation creeps up with tariffs, but blue collar jobs and the economy ‘boom.’

Deportation program and other things people worry about or get excited about gets tied up in courts and never happen.

Tech

Enshittification of all customer service accelerates as LLMs take over.

Lower wages for devs as too many seeking work put downward pressures.

Layoffs continue. Not because of AI, but because interest rates are still too high for a lot of companies.

Companies figure out how many engineers are out of work and getting desperate, and start laying off higher earners and replacing them with people who will do it for less.

* Some sort of new power source will be teased which supercedes what we could gain from fusion

* JFK files are released and there is a lot of UFO information inside it

* The false alien disclosure op continues with lots of ‘orbs’ and drones and whatnot and a threat narrative emerging necessitating loss of liberty

* Russia and Ukraine mutually give up territory – Russia then turns on patriots and nationalists inside their border and NATO arms and fortifies Ukraine to the teeth for a push in the coming decade

* Some very unpleasant things are publicly released by the feds about SV40 and the vaccines

* Elon begins a fatwa against his business rivals and pushes for more technocratic solutions in the government like blockchains

* Very few immigrants are sent back, they just don’t report on it and hope nobody notices

* Escalating rhetoric against Mexico and their cartels

Musk has already indicated they want to neuter the regulators and implement a proper regulatory environment for crypto. But obviously in a laissez-faire way. So I would expect to see a lot of rug-pulling, insider trading etc.

Info and culture war stuff remains an attackers arena. The market place of ideas continues to become less efficient for the average Joe.

Wikipedia starts to collapse. We move from artisanal content moderation to industrial content moderation.

People who can afford it, pay for accuracy and verified information.

Centralization of trust sources begins again.

People who can’t afford it follow tribal leaders.

Polarization passes singularity levels.

AI performs worse than expected, but continues to be made more tractable.

This results in public push back against AI, because no one in the labor force wants the neo liberal era to return.

The DSA data reports on Social Media create at least 1 furore by q1.

Markets wait with bated breath for the signs of contraction, and any contraction results in contagion effects.

No one expects the trump tariffs.

There will be at more attempts at more CEO and billionaire murders. They will use propaganda and media manipulation to muddle the grassroots approval of similar action, and change the narrative around Luigi.

Everything will get more expensive. More layoffs. Most people will have to work much harder for much less, but it’ll be okay because number will go up.

Some of the owners of the most uncommon Counterstrike skin gambling sites are making about $50 million a month.

Hopefully content creators will get persecuted for selling crypto pump and dump schemes towards kids.

– lots of new creators on this market too, particularly those with no studio setup but better creativity and imagination. there is still cost of entry of course, need $, but it’s now less.

– i wonder how each audience will react to this, from children, to teens, to adults. now that content creators are desaturated, i think it’s content consumers that will be saturated.

XR improves a bit more but headsets will still be expensive.

Large movies and video games that cost above $200 million to make will flop around 75% or more.

The US election gives Donald Trump a second act, with limited but real support of both houses and a lock on the Supreme Court.

He in turn has nominated quite the cast of characters.

Meanwhile governments around the world are teetering or falling. A global trade war is likely. Shooting wars like Ukraine and Israel? Who knows.

Mass shooting events are probably going to go up. Prices certainly will.

The release of hundreds of thousands of social media and “FAANG” developers back into regular society without their massive pay checks will continue to have positive effects on tech. The rest of the world will be able to afford to hire developers again 🙂

AI will continue to be a vaudeville act, bright lights and pretty girls and loud noises won’t distract from the fact that generative AI is ultimately a dead end.

The new administration will do something incredibly dumb with cryptocurrency. Multiple cabinet members will be indicted before 2026 is here.

Finally, Trump will have influenced enough leaders to allow him to change his middle name from John to Johne, he will use this technicality to run for a third term as “New Trump”, will win and enshrine the middle name loophole into history.

– governments and companies are now stacking on btc as a hedge against tradfi fiat currencies.

– people have better access to it now. centralized ones now have better regulations, and decentralized ones now have better liquidity.

– however, people are still prone to scams and pump and dumps

Another step towards autonomous driving. Short content becoming more popular.

– People will continue to push back against genAI, every company will still be split on whether to use it in marketing, customer support, etc (no change)

– Trump administration slashes a lot of regulations that affect manufacturing as he tries to make the US less dependent on imports, it doesn’t make a huge difference though

– Trump to meet Putin in person

– AI hype cycle reaches a peak, bubble bursts soon after

– Linux market share 6% by end of year

The Federal Reserve will eventually be forced to raise rates again

The market will have a severe correction

Trump will blame everything on the Federal Reserve and will move to limit its power to control monetary policy or disassemble it all together.

Trump delivers a live speech acknowledging the existence of non human technology on earth and a bit of what we know.

Usually I had a habit of getting my predictions on point, now I hope this prediction is wrong since we all know most predictions in this thread will be wrong; just like last year.

* Market share for solar continues to increase

* A market crash occurs in the US and a government bailout is instituted.

* The US creates a pretext to go to war with Iran and is defeated.

– Musk will leave the Trump team before the end of the year, this will cause Tesla to crash, and that will cause the whole market to crash. It should time well with the delayed crash after interest rate stabilization that has repeated multiple times in the past.

– Gamestop MOASS will not happen in 2025.

And so I would expect to see medical bankruptcy being far more common.

Assuming tarrifs happen, there will be price hikes. And if there are general price hikes it’s easy (and sometimes necessary) to hike your own prices even if you’re not directly affected. This will improve profits (at least in the short term).

So, I expect the stock market to do very well. The rich will get richer. The middle class will be pushed down.

But yeah, the 95% are about to get what they voted for.

Friendly to some businesses.

Stocks aren’t the only investments people make. Their own small businesses, homes and other property, crypto, etc.

When you pick up the phone you basically see your personal AI assistant like they are always on Facetime waiting at your beckon call. You could skin your AI personal assistant to be a celebrity or a deceased friend or relative who is always there to guide you through your day. It has vision AI and can see when your happy or sad and respond to how you look if you have that setting on. It does everything for you via text, voice or hand gestures.

The iPhone and Android seem stale (released in 2007 & 2008) and boring in 2024 after using chatGPT as my personal knowledge chatBot for awhile.

Given this I’ll say that 2025 is going to be a significant year geopolitically and economically for Western Europe. Social unrest is rising here, especially around the topic of immigration, and countries like France and the UK are currently on a path to fiscal crisis if we cannot get spending under control.

My prediction is that in 2025 Trump brings to implement more tariffs on China and these tariffs are met with relation by China. Europe tries to remain somewhat neutral, but under threat of tariffs themselves ultimately sides with the US against China resulting in retaliatory tariffs from China on Europe.

Inflation starts rising globally again, resulting in increased borrowing costs which triggers an economic crisis in Europe given recessionary growth and debt servicing costs spiking, ultimately forcing governments to make significant cuts in spending.

The social unrest this results in ultimately further amplifies the populist far-right in Europe, and for this reason 2025 will be looked back at as the year which triggered a meaningful change in the post-war political consensus.

I might be wrong. As someone living in Europe right now though I am worried. Things seem to be really breaking down on multiple fronts and it’s not clear to me how things could just go back to normality at this point. Given where we are right now – especially now with the election of Trump – 2025 seems like the year something might finally give.

Trump inaugurated without any incident

2 more mass shootings

Advances in LLM and other Ai

US economy keeps growing and outperforming rest of world.

Nobody’s mentioned antibiotic resistant bacteria much that I saw, so that’ll probably keep being more and more of an issue.

Everyone predicted a second Great Depression during Covid that lined up with 1929… Well, Trump and his friends might drive us toward that in 2029, or earlier.

AI peaks and we can’t eke out much more real benefit from it, but there’s too much investment in it for businesses to admit it, so the grifters spin into high gear.

Elon Musk and the other billionaires continues to get richer.

The poor continue to get poorer.

Trump pulls the US out of every socially-good but vaguely anti-business agreement.

Russia finally pulls out of Ukraine but keeps the bits it “liberated”.

China declares itself to be the biggest and most stable global superpower as America and Russia have spun off the deep end.

I have to replace my bike tires.

#2 The Russia-Ukraine war is likely to come to a peaceful end. Putin seems to have mostly lost his appetite for war, and we know that Trump will not want to fund Ukraine any more. Ukraine will have to accept the loss of some conquered territory.

#3 With regard to non-CoT LLMs, gpt-4o becomes worse on all relevant benchmarks compared to the leading open source models. Currently, as I understand, it still wins on some benchmarks.

#4 Tiktok, if not all social media, gets banned for those under 18 on the grounds of foreign influence, although ID requirements get struck down, and kids can misrepresent their age.

Western economies continue on their troll-induced march to self-implosion. The defamation attacks on their Comparative Advantage industries intensify, particularly:

– Non-Musk Big Tech / AI

– Non-Musk aerospace (=> Boeing)

– Wall Street / non-crypto finance

– Non-Musk automotive

– Hollywood

Immigration is halted or reversed in most Western countries, halving long-term GDP growth.

Hard to say whether the H5N1 flu will turn into another pandemic.

Disclosure actually happens, and it turns out we’re not alone in the Universe.

BitGrid turns out to be the most efficient way to bring Petaflops to the masses, it’s then disappeared as “born secret” and you never hear of it again.

Someone figures out an effective algorithm for simulating a quantum computer in real time at any scale, again “Born Secret” and it disappears.

H1N5 (Bird flu?) takes hold in the human population, millions die.