Hi, listeners.
Welcome to KnowPriors.
How can we even begin to wrap this year up?
The AI field has grown, breaking out into the mainstream and taking center stage with policymakers.
ChatGPT shipped massive numbers and asked for massive dollars.
Gemini and Google roared back strong.
And on the application front, AI coding has shifted to agents and is eating up all of our inference capacity.
Doctors are adopting clinical decision support en masse and in long customer support enterprise adoption is accelerating.
What's next?
On the research front, the race has multiple live players with open source closing the gap too.
A handful of neo labs, new research labs got funded this year and the narrative is changing.
Ilya is calling it the age of research.
People are trying different ideas around diffusion self-improvement, data efficiency EQ, large-scale agent collaboration, continual learning, energy transformers.
It's more open than a separate bin.
Finally, we had a lot of attempts to make AI reach into the real world with renewed optimism around robotics.
Next year, those companies are going to start making contact with reality.
From a prediction standpoint.
Personally, I think we're going to see somebody make a lot of money hundreds of millions of dollars trading markets with LLMs next year.
It's inevitable.
So we're in the second or third inning.
Markets are running a little hot and a little volatile.
It's hot in the hot tub.
So get into it with me and Elad.
Okay, Elad, it's been a year.
I know, I have a gun.
2026, baby.
Are you feeling the AGI?
Are you feeling AI winter in a good way?
I think I'm actually just failing microplastics.
I think I'm now 80% microplastics.
I'm just increasing my microplastic consumptions.
A friend of mine actually launched a new water brand that has no microplastics, by the way.
It's called Lute.
It's got glass bottles and also the cap that's in that plastic bottle.
Does it come with continual testing?
No, that's a good idea, though.
Does it come with continual testing for you?
They did actually try to take out all the microplastics.
I guess bottled water in actual bottles has more microplastics than plastic bottles because of the cap.
Okay, we'll check back in with you in 27 to see if you feel Yeah, when I'm just completely ossified out of plastic.
I'm actually really worried about microglastics.
What about all the little glass particles?
Aren't you worried about that?
People talk about microplastics, but not microglastics.
I'm much more concerned about that.
I don't think those particles end up embedded for you permanently.
Silicon?
You're not worried about silicons.
I go to the beach, I'm like, oh no, microglastics everywhere.
I'm actually very willing to insert silicon in my body eventually.
Wow.
Yeah.
I'm not going to say anything.
We can keep going.
What's happening in AI, Elad?
Where are we and what are you most excited about?
Yeah, I guess for 2016, there's a bunch of stuff that I think will be interesting that's coming.
I think we will... I think there's probably four or five things.
One is I think people will proclaim yet again that AI is not doing much and it's overhyped and like that MIT report that people are putting that I thought really didn't matter.
And the reality of the technology.
Waves take like 10 years to propagate and people are getting enormous value out of it already and they're going to get way more out of it in the future.
You know, so there's these undoubtedly next year there'll be these overstated, but bubble claims as well as, um, hey, I actually isn't working that well kind of claims, and that happens over a technology cycle, and we'll just hear it again.
Next year, there'll be pundits and discussions and just a bunch of waste of time on it.
So I think that'll happen.
I think another prediction for 26 is...
The next set of verticals will hit massive scale.
I think this year we saw consolidation of coding into a handful of players and medical scribing into a handful of players.
We go into a handful of players like RV and others.
And so I think we'll see that next set of consolidated verticals happening.
So I think that'll be interesting.
I can keep going.
I have like a bunch of these.
Do you want to go next?
We can alternate.
I just did two.
Why don't you do two?
Maybe I'll react.
I'll react.
I'll react and then I'll give you two predictions.
I have to think of my predictions while I'm reacting.
So I'm glad I have at least two threads.
Yes, I think that the overall sentiment on AI in the investing landscape is a lot of people getting stressed about the amount of capital they have at work.
And then just a level of uncertainty around the adoption cycle and technical bets that people are making that they don't have full first principles confidence on coming to roost.
So I think, like any number of exogenous factors, plus noise, about the speed of adoption which, by the way, it seems like blinding overall.
And we can talk about what the constraints are.
Not so fast.
I don't even know what people are talking about.
I just saw a report that talked about it's from this group called Off Call that talked about adoption of AI by doctors.
And look, there is just amazing adoption of, of course, several different categories.
Yeah documentation, clinical decision room support with things like a bridge and open evidence and obviously the general models.
But there's like massive enthusiasm from most of the physician profession here.
And I'm like okay, of all of the domains that were professional and considered more conservative.
The fact that there is this, like you know, desire to have things that make work better seems like obviously to continue in the other professions.
I think this is, by the way, super under-discussed.
The people who tended to be the slowest adopters of technology love AI.
That's physicians, that's lawyers, that's certain accounting types.
It's actually kind of fascinating.
It's compliance.
You know, it's all the people who always never adopt technology are now adopting this stuff fast.
So I do think that's really notable and very underdiscussed.
It will keep happening.
There are actually lots of professions where, like being able to reason and interact with unstructured data is very useful.
Like I expect that there's going to be some like negative market current.
Like you know, if NVIDIA doesn't overperform by some massive amount one quarter everybody's going to freak out.
But I think that has very little to do with the fundamental secular change.
Yeah, it has to do with microplastics.
It has to do with microglastics, as you said.
Yeah, that's true.
Actually, the silicon there is in the air, I bet.
I bet they have microglastics all over the place.
It's messed up, Sarah.
It's part of the trade.
If you make 20 million as an average NVIDIA employee, you also have to have microglastics in your blood.
Don't listen to this, Jensen.
Jensen's our next guest.
It's 1%.
1% microglastics in the blood.
I think a third area is the next set of foundation models are going to come.
And by that I don't mean the Neolabs and the next-gen LLMs, which of course will happen, but I mean physics, materials science, progress by models, math progress.
And I think what will happen is there'll be one or two cases where it works really well for something.
They'll invent some new material.
There'll be some conjecture proved or something.
And then it'll fall into this overstated hype cycle of it's going to change everything about physical sciences or whatever.
And that one-off will be overstated.
And in the long run, the trend will be understated and it'll be incredibly important.
So that's another prediction for next year is there'll be a couple anecdotal one-offs in science that will make people say look, science is solved, and they'll realize science isn't solved and then later science will be solved.
I have, okay, fine, three quick predictions for you.
One is there's gonna be like some collapse of sentiment around a set of robotics companies next year, not because it like actually isn't as a field going to progress, but because people are beginning to project timelines And not everybody is going to deliver on those timelines.
What's your timeline?
I think that we will see humanoid and semi-humanoid robots get deployed at small scale in environments, be the consumer or industrial, next year, and not everything will work.
Because there's this hype cycle around humanoids overall, as soon as something doesn't perfectly work which it will not people are going to freak out.
Right.
And then there's going to be some bifurcation about people investing.
Yeah.
I mean, we're near 15, 17, whatever, self-driving, something around there.
And it's really working now, but it took a long time.
So it seems like robotics should have maybe a faster curve, but a similar curve, right?
It's going to take some time to figure all this stuff out.
And then once it's figured out, it's going to be really valuable.
And the big question for me on robotics, you know, it's interesting.
If you look at self-driving, there's like two dozen, three dozen, whatever legitimate self-driving companies, really good teams and get a purchase and all the rest.
And then arguably the two biggest winners, at least now, are Waymo and Tesla, which were two incumbents right
Waymo's Google, Tesla's Tesla.
So I wonder what will happen to robotics.
It feels to me like Optimus or some form of like Tesla robot will be one of the winners most likely right.
High probability.
And then the question is, does Waymo just adopt what it's doing for cars to robots as well?
Because there's some similar problems there.
Is it some other big industrial company?
Is it startups?
Who are the winners and why?
And structurally.
When you have a lot of capital needs but also a lot of hardware and manufacturing needs, That's going to favor incumbents, which is self-driving right.
I guess arguably the other winners in self-driving are Chinese companies, right?
Chinese car companies, which are banned from coming into the U.S. market.
And those will probably also be winners in robotics, right?
The most likely global winners in robotics will be some subset of China plus Tesla, plus something else right.
Maybe one of the startups.
I think that's right.
But that's like saying I think in most industries, like you know, the incumbents are more likely to win than the startups.
If you're just looking at it like as a numbers game.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't think so.
I think there's startup industries where startups should win and there's incumbent industries where incumbents should win.
And they have different characteristics in terms of market structure, in terms of capital needs, in terms of certain areas of expertise and supply chain.
So I do think there are markets where incumbents should definitionally do better.
They don't always, but they typically do.
And then I think there are markets where startups will do better.
Sure, but I don't argue that like some markets are like the moats are structurally deeper, right?
But one way that you might look at autonomous vehicles is it's one very complex single use case robot.
And it mostly does locomotion.
It does lots of other necessary types of prediction, defense in time, whatever else.
But it's a single use case robot.
Yeah.
And we forget there's a lot of good ones like that.
Dishwashers are great single use robots.
Vacuum cleaners are great.
You know like there's all these things that we actually have, that are robots in the home that we pretend aren't.
We forgot that they're robots.
Elevators are robots.
Yeah.
No, seriously, escalators are robots.
I'm going to use the language of like.
For a robot to be a robot, it has to be somewhat intelligent, right?
And so dishwasher doesn't count as an appliance.
A self-driving car does count as a robot.
Where's the border of intelligence for you?
I think like it's probably some level of generalization, right?
It can work in different environments.
It can work on different tasks.
It can work on different objects.
So a self-driving car is... Yeah, I don't know.
I didn't have that complex of a definition.
I just had it as like something that will do certain pre-programmed types of labor for you.
Maybe I have a better definition.
Let me look up what the definition of robot is.
A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially when programmable by a computer.
But you know, all these things have chips in them now.
Your dishwasher has a chip in it, right?
Or the computer in it.
Okay.
Yes.
But like I would argue that robotics has not been an interesting area of innovation without intelligence.
And so that's the relevant set for maybe you and me and many people that are looking for something that changes quickly.
Yeah, that's cool.
I mean, I do think that on the topic of robots, the biggest trend perhaps, or one of the biggest trends of 2026, 100% will be that self-driving will really begin to matter.
And that'll be both in terms of your own car, it'll be in terms of Waymo and Tesla cabs.
It's going to be...
I think one of the big things is talked about next year.
So I think on the robotics scene, that's the biggie.
I think if you look at all of the potential use cases for robots besides self-driving and say, like self-driving.
I mean, the Optimist team actually proves this.
Like if you take a model that is powering Tesla self-driving and you put it in Optimist, it can do locomotion, but it can't do many other things and you still have to do the hardware right.
Like manipulation.
And so I think that the advantages here are not as strong as you believe they are.
And like startups, some set of startups...
Yeah.
Scariest competition is the Chinese, but I do think that there is opportunity here.
Oh, I totally think there's opportunity for startups to misinterpret me.
I just think that it's not just the fact that you have a model or a base model.
You have the expertise to build the model, but then you also have all the supply chain.
And I think that's really important, because a lot of the same sensors that you need to use are there.
And, you know, how you think about actually procuring and scaling things are there.
You know there's good overlap actually in terms of some of the other skill sets that are needed, that take a long time to build usually at a startup or that are a little bit painful to build.
And people do it.
It's fine.
It's not... I mean, Anduril did it and SpaceX did it.
You know, all these companies have done it.
It's extra stuff.
So...
That makes sense.
I do think some startups will succeed here.
I was just trying to think through, you know, besides the startups, who's going to be big.
And then also I think there are one or two like incumbent slots that will just default happen, unless something very strange happens.
And you know, one could have argued that should have happened in foundation models, where Google should have had a default slot.
And in the end, it did.
It got there.
And I think that was very predictable that the Google models will get there.
I think I even may have read a post about this, like two, three years ago, that Google would be relevant right.
Because they just had all the assets that were needed for them to be a really important foundation model company.
They obviously invented transformers, but they had all the data, they had all the capital, they had TPUs and GPUs, they had like the best people for all sorts of things, or some of the best people.
So, um, it felt inevitable.
And I think this feels the same to me.
That doesn't mean it's right.
Do you want to talk about IP as an M&A next year?
What do you think will happen there?
I think that's another big.
That's theme number four.
Five, I guess you know.
Three was different types of models, four was robots and self-driving, and then five would be IP as an MA.
What do you think?
More IPOs, less IPOs, more M&A, less M&A, different types of M&A.
It depends on whether or not the bottom falls out of the AI market at some point, right?
But I think regardless... What do you mean by the... What do you mean the bottom falls out?
What does that translate into?
I think people just get skittish about, you know, the cycle here is like, what are people scared of?
They are concerned that demand isn't real.
No, demand isn't real for AI to support the CapEx cycle, that there is systemic risk.
From people passing the ball around in terms of who is actually responsible for the CapEx build out and these credit agreements right.
Or, you know, pay on delivery contracts for data centers and for chips.
What else are they afraid of?
They're afraid of, like the microglastics AKA, like too much concentration in NVIDIA and a small number of other players.
If you're like a big public markets investor, you're just like you know you- It's too much silicon.
It's too much silicon.
You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.
I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a large tech hedge fund.
And they're already, like a foundation model investor in like multiple significant labs that may or may not go public in the next couple of years.
And they're like, okay, well, the question is, do you buy the IPO?
Their game theory on it was like actually, no matter what I think about it, I have to do it because retail will want it, because they want to be part of the AI revolution.
And then if you're a hedge fund, you get benchmarked on annual performance.
And because of the retail pop and some set of investors wanting to buy into it as a pure play, where you're like oh, I can't miss it, like I missed NVIDIA, then you have to buy it.
And so his view was like, you buy the IPO, regardless of your fundamental view of the company.
And I was like, wow, this is not the investing job I know how to do.
What do you think happens?
I think there'll definitely be a lot more IPOs next year.
I think if one of the main AI companies goes out, it'll probably do extremely well, depending on where they price.
I mean, obviously, if they're overly aggressive, it won't.
But in general I think there's so much retail appetite to actually participate in AI besides NVIDIA.
And then that'll just get a lot of other people to go public just as followers on it.
So I do expect there'll be a lot of them.
It's just one that even goes out.
And then also, it's a great way to raise huge amounts of money for some of these labs, potentially.
So it'll be interesting to watch what happens there.
Any other predictions for 26th?
Yeah, I think that I did not believe that we were going to see that many like unique consumer experiences besides like ChatGPT.
I think we are going to see like a slate of consumer hardware that mostly fails, but I'm still open-minded to it.
And then definitely actually like.
It remains to be seen if any of these scales, but I am seeing magical experiences of like really different consumer agent software that I actually want and will use.
And I think people are barely beginning to... Well, these companies are in stealth right now.
But I do think that there's going to be a lot more product people that experiment with this and model companies experiment with this next year.
And so I'm pretty optimistic about that.
Yeah, I agree with that 100%.
And I think the big question is what will end up being a breakout startup, and it'll undoubtedly be some.
And then what will be?
A startup that'll grow really fast and then it'll get copied by the main lab, slash Google, and then it just gets incorporated into the core product.
And the interesting thing is, unless a company truly hits escape velocity and build a network effect or something else really defensible, Usually incumbents can launch two, three years later and catch up.
And so if they have the distribution and they have the product.
But to your point, I think it's very exciting.
And I've been waiting for this for a while.
I think two years ago, three years ago, this guy, David Song, who was on my team at the time, ran a two-quarter thing at Stanford where we had different team supply teams from the engineering programs there.
And it was like groups of people building consumer apps using AI.
Because we said, this wave of AI is so fascinating.
Why isn't anybody building anything consumer?
So we basically just gave people free GPU to go and try stuff.
And there was no like obligation on their side to do anything with it.
You know, in terms of us getting involved, it was just go do cool stuff because this is such a good playground and those really neat experiences that were being prototyped, and then i was just shocked that nothing happened for a couple years in terms of really interesting consumer products.
So I agree with you.
There's so much room for that.
And I always wonder is it because there's a different generation of founders who don't want to work on consumer, or forgotten how?
Because the big consumer companies have kind of aged out.
Is it the incumbents are just too scary?
Why is there so little innovation actually on the consumer side of AI?
I still don't quite understand what the issue is.
Okay, let's list the reasons.
I do think that the incumbents are pretty scary.
And anybody who was around for the last generation of interesting consumer ideas saw actually the ingestion of those ideas into the existing platform, as you put out.
Yeah.
So there's that.
I also think, like the first instinct that I've seen from companies, from founders, working on like new consumer experiences, is essentially building like better versions of like last generation experiences with this generation technology.
And that ends up like not being that interesting.
And so I actually think you have to be like either quite close to research or pretty creatively ambitious to build like something very different that has any chance.
And so I think there's just not that many people who have had that experience set or that creativity.
And now we're going to see it.
Yeah, I think it's pretty exciting.
The other thing is I was talking to a really well-known consumer founder who's running a giant public company.
And his view is that perhaps in the entire world there's a few hundred great product people for consumer.
At least in terms of who are actually working on it.
Obviously, there's enormous human potential and people who aren't working in consumer products could.
But of the people working in consumer products, I think there's a few hundred people who are exceptional, who could actually come up with and launch their own product.
That would be interesting or good.
And so you could also just say that maybe there's just a limitation on how many of these things can exist, just given human potential, within the set of people who are already doing it, which I think is kind of an interesting argument.
I don't know if I agree with it, but I thought it was an interesting argument that he made.
I would limit myself to that number if it's also the set of people who have the context of what is possible now.
Mm-hmm.
If you've got great consumer product instinct but you're like work, you're like grinding away on the like 50th iteration of an existing product.
Yeah, you're working on the little sub button in Gmail or whatever, instead of actually going off and doing this 100.
Yeah.
Well, anything else we should talk about or any other big predictions for 26th?
I feel like a very big emergent thing that happened this year was the surprising funding of like Neo Labs, like three through eight.
What do you think of that?
What do you think about alternative architectures?
Do you have any point of view on all of the effort around getting reinforcement learning to be more general, continual learning, some of the research directions.
I think there's enormous amounts of really interesting research being done.
So there's a lot of juice to be squeezed out of these models still in different ways.
And I think that's really exciting.
Ultimately these things become capital games for certain types of approaches or models, because we know scale really matters, which means that eventually you have to collapse into a handful of players, because capital will aggregate to things that are working the most.
No generating revenue.
And so then the question is, what are those things?
At what point do things just get kind of locked in from a usage perspective for whatever reason?
And there's all sorts of ways you can imagine this being built over time against some of the models.
So I think it's interesting.
I think it's exciting.
I think we'll see how it plays out.
I think to articulate what the arguments could be for new research directions is like Ilya did this interview recently where he describes it as the age of research.
And, to paraphrase, he basically says that yes, I believe in scaling, of course, but there's some floor of compute that is not infinite where we can test ideas at scale.
And then if we have, let's say, secret ideas around, like how to get to more rapid or more compute, efficient improvement, then it actually isn't just a straight resource battle, which the rat race does feel a little bit like today.
I think the other argument you could take is actually multiple architectures, and people have done some research on this.
But multiple architectures are really relevant at big domains of usefulness.
They just haven't been scaled, right?
And like there's enough capital out there to test them, be they like diffusion or SSMs or whatever.
And that's going to happen this next year.
And then I think there's like a resource focus argument, right?
If Ilya is describing that some set of labs, they have an enormous amount of compute but they have to spend a lot of that compute on inference today then how much do you spend on your particular research direction, be it self-improvement or post-training or emotional intelligence or very large scale-out agent stuff?
Yeah, it depends on what you're doing, because the inference is what ends up then raising you money to pay for everything else, because you're generating revenue.
So I think...
Sure, but it's effectively your way to bootstrap into more and more scales.
So I always thought perhaps incorrectly I actually probably think it's incorrect but I always thought that eventually you end up with evolutionary systems is really how you build AI.
Because maybe I'm over extrapolating up a biology where effectively, your brain has a series of modules that have different functions or tasks.
Right,
You have a visual system that's highly sort of pre-wired to deal with vision really effectively.
You have different areas of higher thought and learning.
You have memory.
You have... uh, mirror neurons that are involved with empathy, right?
Your brain is actually very um, specialized in some ways, although obviously, as people were born with literally like half a brain hemisphere and the brain rewires and sort of covers all the functionality.
But, um, like a few famous cases like that.
Uh, but you know fundamentally um, you have a lot of stuff that evolves into very specialized tasks.
It's almost like a MOE or something, you know?
And the question is the degree to which you recapitulate that, as you're doing, further development of AI.
And when do you start just spawning off a bunch of instances of something and just have some utility function?
They're evolving against that.
You then have some selection and recombining and all the other stuff that you'd kind of do to try and make some of that work.
Versus how much of it is a more analytical approach or a more experimental approach or you know so.
In a directed way.
And so I think it's really interesting to ask because, if you look again at biology as a potential precedent although maybe a very bad one you look at protein design.
And for a long time there were these super analytically designed proteins.
And then they came up with all these systems that involved this shit, you know, like phage display and like mutagenic scans and all sorts of things that gave you dramatically better results than if you just sat and thought about it.
And now, of course, we kind of solved it with AI, where you have all these 3D structural predictions that are actually very good.
And that's That was AlphaFold and a few other things that really were breakthroughs there.
So it feels like in the context of AI, maybe eventually we end up there as well, right?
We just involve these systems.
And then that may be a very different type of approach and training.
That may be where I think things really have an interesting break.
And that's one of the reasons that arguably, people are so focused on code, because code is arguably a bootstrap into moving faster on development of AGI.
But I think it's kind of code plus self-evolution is really the potential, really interesting approach to it to get some really fast lift off.
But maybe not, right?
We'll see.
What is the one prediction you have for 26 that has nothing to do with AI?
Do you think about anything else, Sarah?
I do.
I'm joking.
Really?
I mean the other thing, by the way.
One other prediction that does have to do with AI is I do think defense will accelerate in terms of startups and defense tech and the shift to autonomous or not autonomous, but to drone based systems in general.
It's a massive reworking of how you think about war events.
And I think that's going to be a huge shift that we'll see go even faster this coming year.
I think this is accelerating, in part to how the Trump administration has been approaching it and the Secretary of War and everybody there have been thinking about it.
I think in part, you have enough density now of startups doing interesting things.
So I think that's the other thing.
That's like a huge shift, that You know it's a hype cycle right now.
And I actually think, again, it's a little bit under thought about because it's going to be so big.
Outside of AI.
I mean, I think there's obvious, really interesting things happening in space with SpaceX and Starlink, and I think about communications and telephony.
So that's a big shift.
There's really interesting things, in my opinion, happening in energy and mining.
And, you know, I think there's a lot going on in the world.
I agree on defense, with some concern that we have to wait for budget to actually shift from contracts to primes to some of these new companies at scale.
But the demand, the need to be competitive in a world that's increasingly autonomy-driven is, like so obvious, right.
And I think you know hype cycles and booms are good in that they bring a lot of people to the table.
You know capital founders, people who want to work in the industry.
And so you can make a lot of progress in a quick amount of time, even if a lot of companies die.
And there's more enthusiasm over a short period of time.
So I agree with that.
And I also don't think that's necessarily bad.
What's your non-AI prediction?
I think that, like I'm not the only one, but I think the like GLP-1 thing is just, despite all of the enthusiasm like, still underrated for how much impact it has had right.
And so I think that the continual adoption of these is like inexorable.
I actually think it creates a path that is interesting for like other peptide and hormone therapies.
I think the fact that it has been so effective has like lots of second order effects, both from people way, like just being a lot less overweight, like directly, and the willingness to look at other engineered peptides or like.
I think, like everybody understands now that like
Delivery matters.
There are these really incredible medicines.
And I think that the impact of that is going to like fuel much more investment in anything that looks like that type of opportunity.
And so I think that's exciting.
100%.
Yeah, I actually think one thing that you mentioned is really interesting where, if you look at the sort of biohacking community, there's a lot of peptide use, now different peptides that will do different things in terms of You know, somebody will have some chronic carpal tunnel thing and they'll fly to Dubai to get peptides injected or whatever.
And usually those are sort of early indicators of potential larger scale adoption societally.
And so I think that's a really interesting trend right now in general, like this whole, like world of peptides and their uses.
And is there a hymns of peptides?
Like what's the, what's coming there?
So I think that's super interesting.
Yeah.
I also think, like the biohacking community, as you said, like the set of people who were really really early off-label GLP-1 adopters, interested in longevity neuromodulation with ultrasound stem cell injection, for example, like that has been like a fringe small community.
And I think that like, I think it's going to get less fringe.
And a lot of these things traditionally 10 years ago came out of the bodybuilding community, right?
The bodybuilding community was like creatine and all these things that are more broadly used now, but also other things for sleep aids or other, you know, magnesium and all this stuff.
And to round out this year end episode, we've asked some of our friends for their predictions for 2026.
I'm so curious.
My prediction for next year is that the reasoning systems are going to translate directly to AIs that are much, much more versatile much, much more robust.
And reasoning is going to impact, is going to revolutionize not just language models, but reasoning is going to impact every single industry, from biology to self-driving cars to robotics.
And so reasoning, I think, is the big, huge breakthrough that is going to transform a lot of different applications and industries.
In 2026, AI will stop being a reactive tool that waits for us to prompt it.
Instead, it will become very proactive and get deeply integrated in our work life.
It will go where we go, hear what we hear, know what tasks we need to work on and, in fact, most of the times, complete those for us before we even ask it to do so.
It'll be our coach that helps us improve our skills.
It'll be our manager who helps us prioritize our work and manage our time.
In short, it's going to be the best work companion you could wish for.
I think the main AI prediction that I have for next year is I think context is just going to be the most important part of every single product.
And honestly, one of the best experiences I've had with it so far is just memory and chat GPT.
I think that there are going to be a lot more features that basically their goal is to extract the user intent and make the onus less on the user, to basically give all of the models or the system or the product more and more context.
So, in other words, how do you put the onus on the product to actually extract that from the user, instead of the user having to do all of the work?
To do this upfront?
My prediction for 2026 is there will be a whole new suite of product experiences that run on much faster inference.
My prediction for 2026 is that we'll finally stop copy pasting stuff into chat boxes.
Instead, I think we're going to have applications that have better use of screen sharing and context management across the sources that matter the most.
One prediction for 2026.
There's so much talk of agents right now, and there has been for a while, but no one has truly created a mass scale consumer agentic AI.
I think the models are there today for this to be possible.
And in 2026 we will see the group that figures out the right interface and system and product that creates as big a step, function and overall experience as chat did when it first came out.
And I think this area is not nearly as seated to labs as people assume.
It really is anyone's ballgame.
Hello, Aaron here.
First of all, I get quite awkward around doing selfie videos.
This is my ninth take of this video.
So I hope it goes okay.
But 2026 prediction would be that this is going to be certainly the continued year number two of AI agents, but in particular AI agents in the enterprise in either deep, vertical or domain-specific areas.
I think this is going to be the main way that we actually take all of the progress that we're seeing in AI models and actually deliver them into the enterprise.
You have to be able to tie to the workflow of the organization.
You have to be able to get access to the data that they have.
You have to have the right context engineering to make the agents actually work.
And then you have to do the change management that makes the agents effective.
So this is going to be a year where we start to see this pattern emerge more and more, which equally means that we need to ensure that we have a lot more happening on agent harnesses.
So shout out to Okorva, Suhail and Dex for that answer.
But it's definitely gonna be the year of age and harness and seeing how do you start to get an order of magnitude improvement on the model's capabilities by having all the right scaffolding around the model, And then finally, it will be the year of economically useful evals.
So really starting to figure out how these models end up doing a lot more knowledge worker tasks in the economy.
And we're going to see a lot more of that in 2026.
We saw some previews of that this year with Apex and GDPVal and a handful of others.
We're going to see way more of that.
So those are the predictions, and we'll see you in 2026.
I think 2026 is going to be a very interesting year for American open models.
Over the last year, the frontier of open intelligence shifted from America to China, starting with the release of Deep Seek at the end of 2024.
And American institutions were slow to notice this erosion of American leadership and open intelligence, but I think they've noticed in a big way.
Over the last half year, both from the government level, from the enterprise level, and there are some really interesting neo labs starting to come out with open intelligence as their directive.
And there are a few of these, not just reflection.
And these companies are starting to produce some very interesting, small open models.
And next year I think we'll see the US regaining leadership at the open-weight frontier at the largest scale.
And I'm really excited to see that.
Hey, folks.
My prediction for 2026 is that I think we will see AI become much more politicized.
I think we'll see it become a major point of discussion for the 2026 midterm elections.
And some people will come out strongly against it.
Some people will come out strongly supportive of it.
And I'm not sure which side is going to win out. has marked an incredible year in AI drug discovery.
In the past year alone, we've gone from being able to design simple molecules on the computer to designing simple antibodies and now, most recently, full-length antibodies with drug-like properties zero-shot on the computer.
If 2025 has been the year of research in AI drug discovery, 2026 will be the year of deployment.
The models have finally entered an era where they're becoming really useful for drug discovery.
Not only do they make things faster, but they're also allowing us to go after really challenging targets which have been traditionally really difficult to do with traditional techniques.
I'm really excited to see what comes next because the models show no signs of slowing down.
Okay, my prediction for 2026 is it will be the year that YOLO dies.
We will begin transforming ourselves from a you only live once to don't die.
I think right now we're kind of a suicidal species.
We do very primitive things.
We poison ourselves with what we eat.
We design our lives so that we slowly kill ourselves.
Companies make profits by making us addicted and miserable.
We destroy the only home we have.
And somehow we celebrate these things as virtue.
I think it's all backwards.
And I think one day we'll look back and we'll be pretty astonished that we behaved like this.
I think the shift coming is going to be simple and radical, that we say yes to life and no to death.
It's simple, but I think it could be in response to AI's progress.
And we do this defiantly as a form of unification.
I think it does require a lot of courage for us though, to say we recognize how sacred our existence is.
We don't want to throw it away.
And we want to defend it with every bit of courage and strength we have because it is so precious.
I think it's going to be the year we end YOLO and the beginning of Don't Die.
The most striking thing about next year is that the other forms of knowledge work are going to experience what software engineers are feeling right now, where they went from typing most of their lines of code at the beginning of the year to typing barely any of them at the end of the year.
I think of this as the Claude Code experience, but for all forms of knowledge work.
I also think that probably continual learning gets solved in a satisfying way that we see the first test deployments of home robots and the software engineering itself goes utterly wild next year.
My prediction for 2026 is that it's the year where everyone's perceptions are flipped.
Currently, everyone believes that you can only use NVIDIA outside of Google, and that will be obvious that that's not the case.
Currently, about a third of Americans hate AI and think it's really bad.
That number will increase.
Currently, most Americans think AI is not useful.
That will flip as well.
And so everyone's priors will be flipped.
That's because the transformative use of AI will be so prevalent.
The obvious utility of it will be so high that there is no way for anyone's priors.
You know cognitive dissonance will be wiped away.
Hey, I'm Benjamin Spector.
I'm Asher Spector.
And our prediction is that 2026 is the year of energy efficient AI.
Data center buildups are primarily constrained by energy.
Power availability, great interconnects, high-voltage equipment, things like that, which is why XAI's Colossus was initially powered by on-site gas turbines.
The thing is, the demand for compute is continuing to grow.
Labs, neo-labs like us and startups like Chris are having pretty remarkably sensational demand for both training and compute, and this demand is currently outstripping our ability to push lots onto the grid.
This means that in 2026 it will be really important to squeeze every available bit, and tons, out of every wallet.
That said, in the long term, chips probably matter more than power, because chips depreciate much more quickly than the underlying power infrastructure.
So, for example, with data center power supplies at tens of kilowatt hour, the chips cost actually, in order to manage, more than the power in a five-year depreciation cycle.
So in 2026 we think intelligence for a while is really important to squeeze as much intelligence you can out of every human energy.
But in the long term, we think it's the chips that matter more.
Happy holidays.
Happy new year.
Thanks for the year.
Happy 2026.
Happy 2026, listeners.
Thank you.
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