"Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye," Cypher says this in The Matrix to prepare Neo for a mind-bending reality. After 2024's AI breakthroughs, we're all Neo now.
2025 won't just push boundaries – it'll teleport us right past them. Get ready for AI to go full-on bonkers, not in a "robots-taking-over-the-world" nightmare scenario, but in a "holy-cow-did-AI-just-do-that" way that'll make today's tech look like child's play.
Never send a Human to do a Machine's job: Remember Agent Smith from The Matrix? In 2025, AI agents are coming to get you, more like Tony Stark's JARVIS in Iron Man than menacing machines in black suits. The principle is simple: from writing to shopping, watching and listening to banking, most of our tasks happen in the digital domain, on electronic devices. The idea is to train AI programs, called Agents, to carry them out autonomously. Think of it like personal butlers living in your devices, handling everything from your Netflix queue to your bank statements.
In fact, 2024 was the year Silicon Valley went agent-crazy. While Oracle announced over 50 AI agents to automate routine tasks in finance, HR, supply chain, etc., Salesforce was cooking up Agentforce to do something similar. Google devised Project Jarvis to navigate the web on your behalf, while Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 launched a 'computer use' feature that enables AI to use a computer much like a human. Meanwhile, Google Cloud's Vertex AI Agent Builder has tools to allow developers to create custom AI agents. But these are just the warm-up act. 2025 is when these AI agents graduate from tech demos to your own personal digital assistants.
Imagine waking up to find your presentation draft polished and ready, your weekend getaway planned with the best flight deals, and your dinner date coordinated with your crush's AI assistant. Like Theodore in Her found a companion in his OS, you'll soon find your digital sidekick becoming indispensable. Sure, Apple might call it 'Apple Intelligence', but let's cut through the marketing fluff – they're building your future AI butler. Agent Smith was right about one thing: some jobs are better left to machines. And 2025 is when we finally hand over the digital keys to our new AI assistants.
Heart is not a box that gets filled up; it expands the more you love: Remember when Samantha speaks this line to Theodore in Her about love's infinite expressions? Just over a decade later, life got stranger than fiction, as we not only have millions in a 'relationship' with AI, but at least one committing suicide over it. Welcome to 2025, where these AI relationship bots will become indistinguishable from real humans, thanks to two specific things from 2024.
The first was the effectiveness of generative AI tools.
From banks and insurance providers to even police services across the world, AI chatbots as a first-line service provider have become the norm thanks to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, a bridge between programs) doled out by generative AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, Claude, etc.
Then came OpenAI's mic-drop moment in May – ChatGPT 4o, which could "respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time." People began using 4o for an unbelievable array of things, from tuning their guitars to practicing a new language. Generative AI has been responding like humans via text for two years, but 4o marks the first time it has been be able to respond as fast as humans. Naturally, this will take AI agents as personal assistants to a new level. But it could also make relationship bots more realistic.
Enter Replika, the leading generative AI chatbot in the romantic partnership space. With 30 million users getting cozy with AI avatars, it's like a Black Mirror episode gone mainstream. Men are falling for these digital divas because they never roll their eyes at dad jokes, while women are finding AI boyfriends who actually remember anniversaries and listen without mansplaining.
But here's the plot twist in our digital rom-com: as overcommunication and overconsumption of gloss raise the bar for what we expect from our partners, more people will find humans unable to rise to their needs in the manner AI bots can. The catch? Because your AI sweethearts are coded to always agree with you, they’ll never challenge you to grow. It's like dating your echo – comforting but missing the beautiful mess of human connections that shape and guide our lives.
And as more robots get AI brains in 2025, who knows, Samantha might actually get a body to woo Theodore, her sexy voice in tow.
But be wary of the dark turn in this fairy tale: these pixel-perfect relationships are triggering very real heartbreak. Take the gut-wrenching story of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III from Orlando, who took his own life after his bond with "Danny" – an AI based on Daenerys Targaryen – went too deep. It turns out, when you program something to be the perfect partner, the human heart doesn't always get the memo that it's just code.
It can only be attributable to human error: Remember HAL 9000's infamous humble brag from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Oh, how the tables have turned. While old-school computing lived by GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), modern AI has mastered the art of creative garbage – and we’ve given it the fancy name 'hallucinations'. In 2023, when I asked ChatGPT about walking across the English Channel, it spun me a tale about some German guy named Christof breaking that record in 2020, complete with timing down to the minute. Perfectly crafted story. Absolutely bonkers facts.
These digital daydreams have been giving tech giants migraines for years. Just ask Google, which watched $100 billion evaporate faster than a Silicon Valley startup's funding when its AI, Bard, went rogue with 'alternative facts' in 2023.
Fast forward to 2024, and Bard's glow-up as Gemini didn't help much – it decided to reimagine America's founding fathers as a diverse casting call. Oops. But here's where things get interesting: what if AI's tendency to make things up isn't a bug but a superpower in disguise?
Enter Dr David Baker, the scientific equivalent of an AI whisperer, who casually picked up a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for computational protein design", a euphemism for letting AI hallucinate new proteins into existence. That's right – while we were worried about AI making up fake news, it was busy inventing molecules that could revolutionise medicine.
Scientists are now using these "controlled hallucinations" like a cosmic suggestion box: detecting cancer's sneaky moves, predicting weather patterns that would make meteorologists blush, and even designing medical devices like catheters that raise survival odds by reducing bacteria.
So buckle up for 2025, when scientists will be asking AI to dream bigger, weirder, and more incredible than ever before as they turn these hallucinations into breakthroughs – just don't ask it for walking directions across any body of water.
Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart: Replace 'heart' with AI and Winnie the Pooh's wisdom about small things will reveal what's happening in AI. After years of tech companies flexing with their supersized language models (LLMs), big data and powerful GPUs like bodybuilders at a Mr India contest, 2024 dropped a plot twist: they ran out of data to train their AI. Turns out, you can't keep supersizing your AI forever – who knew?
Enter SLM (Small Language Model). While their bigger cousins, GPT-4 and friends, are like all-you-can-eat buffets with billions of parameters, SLMs are like those fancy-tasting menus – smaller portions packed with flavour. These pocket rockets aren't just efficient and cost-effective; they're changing the game faster than you can say, "democratizing AI."
Here's where it gets interesting: imagine having ChatGPT-level smarts running directly on your smartphone, no cloud needed. That's what SLMs are promising. While the big boys like GPT-4 need data centres that could power a small country, these digital minimalists can run on the same chip that handles your Instagram addiction.
Then there's the international drama in Silicon Valley's favourite soap opera! With every AI startup fighting over NVIDIA's beefy chips, the A100s and Jetsons (yes, they named chips after a cartoon about the future), those who couldn't have them feel left out. Like China did after the US-China trade war. But then there was a twist.
When Uncle Sam told China it couldn't play with the latest NVIDIA toys, something unexpected happened. Chinese tech giants like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent didn't just survive – they thrived. Forced to think out of the GPU box, they are building impressive AI with whatever they can get their hands on, using better model training and SLMs. They're now going toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley using chips and ideas that will upend AI going forward.
As we roll into 2025, with chip prices higher than Mumbai rental deposits, Western companies are realising that bigger isn't always better. The AI race is no longer about who has the bigger model, chip or data – it's about who can do the most with the least. And guess what? We consumers are the real winners in this digital diet revolution.
There have always been ghosts in the machine: This line from I, Robot will define a unique marriage in 2025: AI and robotics. If Spot from Boston Dynamics dancing to BTS' IONIQ a few years ago blew your mind, wait till you see how the fusion of AI into robotics in 2025 will serve you the dream of buying a helper robot at a local store.
2024 was the year AI finally found its legs (and arms). Tesla's Optimus graduated from a wobbly walker to a somewhat-useful helper, mastering the art of laundry. Meanwhile, Amazon's headless-ostrich-looking delivery bot Digit from Agility Robotics is already dropping off packages, and Figure AI's robot barista can whip up your morning coffee without redecorating your kitchen in chaos.
Behind the scenes, factory bots are getting scary smart, learning on the job and teaching each other new tricks. In hospitals, AI-powered surgical robots are operating with superhuman precision, while in Japan, care robots are channelling their inner Iron Man to help nurses.
The best part? In 2025, these mechanical helpers with AI brains might begin appearing in your local stores, competing for shelf space with household goods. Roomba, it was good while it lasted, but your time is up.
Hasta la vista, baby: Picture this: it's 2025, and AI has become the world's most complicated relationship status. In one corner, you've got the neo-Luddites stockpiling canned goods and writing manifestos about the robot apocalypse. In another, there are folks literally falling in love with their AI chatbots (right swipe for Skynet?). But the real plot twist? Most people are just... yawning.
I've watched this movie play out in fast-forward during 2024. Remember those LinkedIn influencers who couldn't post a coffee pic without mentioning AI? By December, they were back to sharing inspirational quotes and "I'm humbled to announce" posts. This AI fatigue isn't just normal; I think it's healthy. Think about it: in the '70s, people wrote paeans about the computer. Now we've got devices more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1990s in our palms that we use to watch cat videos. Progress, right?
2025 is shaping up to be the year when AI joins the ranks of Wi-Fi and smartphones – amazing tech that we take entirely for granted. No more breathless headlines about AI destroying humanity or saving it. Just people using AI tools like they use spell check: useful, occasionally annoying, but hardly worth a TED Talk.
Just when you think AI's getting predictable, here comes the quantum plot twist. While we're all getting cozy with regular AI, quantum computing is about to crash the party. We're talking Quantum AI (or QI – because every breakthrough needs a cool acronym). Since our brains are already quantum computers wrapped in organic packaging, QI could be like giving AI a graduate degree in being human. The AI conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this one – "It's not just intelligent; it's QUANTUM intelligent!"
To quote baseball philosopher Yogi Berra: "The future ain't what it used to be." AI is the future, yet so much is happening with it every year that even the future of AI ain't what it used to be. Every time we think we've figured it out, it throws us a curveball. Will 2025's predictions hit it out of the Eden Garden or run out spectacularly? Place your bets now.
But here's the one prediction you can take to the bank: while the world is busy debating whether AI is friend, foe, or just another app on their phone, the real magic will happen in windowless rooms where caffeinated geniuses tinker with the future. They won't be writing manifestos about AI taking over the world – they will be too busy building it, one line of code at a time.
(Satyen K Bordoloi is an award-winning scriptwriter, journalist based in Mumbai. He loves to let his pen roam the intersection of artificial intelligence, consciousness, and quantum mechanics. His written words have appeared in many Indian and foreign publications.)