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