I’ve been betting on the transformative power of digital technology all my professional career.
- I started doing computer simulation during my MSc in Chemical Engineering in the 1990s, in a lab where everybody else was an experimentalist. Except for my advisor, the rest of the team was sceptical — to say the least — that something useful would come from using computer modelling to study enhanced oil recovery from oil fields .
- A similar story repeated during my PhD in Chemistry, where I pioneered using molecular modelling to study polymers in a research centre focused on the experimental study of polymers and proteins.
- For the last 20+ years, I’ve been working on digital transformation playing a similar role. First, as Head of Training and Contract Research, and now as Director of Scientific Support, I relish helping my customers harness the potential of digital technology for responsible innovation.
I’m also known for telling it as I see it. In the early 2000s, I was training a customer — incidentally an experimentalist — on genetic algorithms. He was very excited and asked me if he could create a model for designing a new material. He proudly shared he had “7 to 10 data points.” My answer? “Far too few.’”
In summary, I’m very comfortable being surrounded by tech sceptics, dispelling myths about what AI can and can’t do, and betting on the power of digital technology.
And that’s exactly why I’m sharing with you my AI predictions for 2025.
My Predictions
1.- xAI (owned by Elon Musk) will purchase X so that the first can freely train its models on the data from the second. Elon owns 79% of X after he bought it for $44 billion. Now it’s valued at $9.4 billion and big advertisers keep leaving the platform.
After struggling for almost 3 years to make it work, the xAI acquisition — which got a $6 billion funding round in December — would be a win-win.
2.- OpenAI for-profit organisation will formally split from the original non-profit. I bet on this despite Elon Musk’s injunction to stop OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company (supported by Meta).
Why? A clause in OpenAI’s $150 billion funding round allows investors to request their money back if the switch isn’t completed within two years.
3.- The generation and usage of synthetic data will balloon to address data privacy concerns. People want better services and products — especially in healthcare — but are unwilling to give up their personal data. The solution? “Creating” data.
4.- Startups and organisations will move from using large language models (LLMs) to focusing on SLMs (small language models), which consume less energy, produce fewer hallucinations, and are customised to companies’ requirements.
5.- In FY 2025, Microsoft plans to invest approximately $80 billion to build AI-enabled datacenters but don’t expect that to go smoothly with everybody. In 2024, datacenters consumption gathered a lot of attention.
This year local authorities and NGOs will develop frameworks to scrutinise datacenters electricity and water consumption. They’ll also be tracked in terms of disruption to the locals: electricity stability, water availability, and electricity and water prices.
6.- Rise of the two-tier AI-human customer support model: AI chatbots for self-service and low-revenue customers and human customer support for key and high-revenue clients.
It’s not only a question of money but also of liability. There is less probability that low-profit customers sue providers over AI chatbots delivering harmful and/or inaccurate content.
7.- AI applications in healthcare — e.g. drug discovery, clinical trials, radiology — and new materials — e.g. batteries, formulation — will be receiving massive funding and attention as will be perceived as few of the “worthy” and “mostly ethical” uses of AI by three important stakeholders: companies, governments and the public.
As an example, last October, Meta released Meta Open Materials 2024, “state-of-the-art machine learning models for materials science and chemistry.”
8.- Governments of Sweden, The Netherlands, and the UK have been using AI algorithms to prevent people from underrepresented groups from claiming their rightful benefits.
This year, we’ll see a massive increase in “class action” lawsuits against European governments for their implementation of AI systems that result in discrimination and/or other harms to the public.
9.- In 2024, Elon Musk rebranded carmaker Tesla as a developer of artificial intelligence applications like driverless cars and humanoid robots. In 2025, we’ll see a surge of non-tech business following suit and adding “AI” to their company purpose.
10.- Acceleration of cybersecurity incidents through audio deepfakes (e.g. calls) and LLMs jailbreak attacks (e.g. through chatbots).
11.- Palantir — the security company disguised as a data analytics business — will have a dream year. With the mounting challenges in immigration, ongoing wars, and increasing demands on health systems, governments are under more pressure than ever to use AI for security and healthcare. And Palantir has a great track record of doing so.
For example, it has worked with the US military, intelligence, and police for many years and has contracts related to patient data with the British National Health Service (NHS).
The icing on the cake? Palantir’s founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, has mentored and supported US VP-elect JD Vance since 2011.
12.- Regulation is not all that drives AI behaviour — reputation is paramount in business. As a result, 2025 will finally see organisations getting on with AI governance, focusing on policies and risk mitigation.
13.- ByteDance and the US Government will reach an agreement where part of TikTok will be owned by a US company.
I know this is a bold prediction but many US companies will regret if the US and China continue to escalate their belligerent relationship. US companies generate massive revenue from China annually — Apple ($67 B), Tesla ($21 B), Qualcomm ($17.7 B), Intel (14.9 B), and Meta ($13.7 B).
If Musk co-owned TikTok, he’d have a new means to control public speech and access to additional advertising revenue.
14.- Despite the EU AI Act prohibitions entering into full force in February 2025, this year will bring us more — not less — AI deregulation.
First, Trump has been vocal about supporting deregulation overall and the VP-elect has signaled to the tech industry his plan to defend its interests.
The UK has not formally regulated AI use and instead has published the policy paper “A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation”, which is a hotchpotch of best practices, excuses to avoid regulation, and a lukewarm framework.
As for the EU, the AI Act has been extremely watered down — especially regarding generative AI harms and the use of copyrighted content — thanks to tech lobbying. EU governments will be too afraid of “missing out” on innovation to diligently apply the Act. Instead, they’ll rely on specific departments to clean up after AI systems mess up.
15.- The loneliness industry will continue to flourish. Humans are wired for connection and tech is committed to showing us that AI can fulfil that basic need.
Typing “mental health” in a Google browser offered me “mental health ai” as a second option and “mental health AI chatbot” as the sixth. And AI companions and avatars such as those created by Character.ai are reaping the benefits.
And we now have Big Tech entering the field too. For example, Meta envisages social media filled with AI-generated users, and even if they’ve just deleted Facebook and Instagram profiles of AI characters they created over a year ago, it’s still possible for users to create their own chatbots.
In 2025, we’ll see a surge of chatbot vendors promising companionship, coaching, mentoring, and a “cure” for a multitude of mental health issues from depression to addiction to addictive behaviours.
16.- In 2024, we had tons of fun using generative AI to create dreamlike — and unrealistic — landscape scenery. But immediate gratification is transforming into disenchantment. Reports of people feeling sick when seeing AI images have steadily increased and there is more evidence that we’re moving from experiencing awe to feelings of uncanniness.
As we have services that remove ads from our searches and social media, I anticipate that this year we’ll be offered to opt-out from AI-generated content to preserve our sanity and free our feeds from the “enshittification” of the internet.
17.- Generative AI search will rock our world. I agree with the MIT Technology Review that it’ll transform the work for many but not only because its promise of summarising information from many online sources into a unique answer touts “productivity” and “personal AI assistants.”
My rationale is that it’ll upend advertising, SEO, branding, and marketing in general. Organisations have spent millions learning how to position themselves in searches and how to tell their story so it resonates with their market.
Generative AI search will scratch all that. Whilst brands and organisations can sue defamatory websites and amend unflattering Wikipedia entries, how do you neutralise an AI-generated derogatory blurb about your business?
18. AI systems developers will massively up their ante in anthropomorphic language to ensure the AI hype is alive and well. In 2024, they appealed to our cognitive functions — thinking, reasoning, understanding.
This year, they’ll appeal to our senses — words such as hearing, listening, seeing, looking, smelling, and feeling — and will use terms denoting hardcore thought processes, especially in the interaction with other humans: investigate, discover, devise, advise, coach, and mentor.
19.- Individuals will be coerced into becoming AI lie detectors. Cybersecurity experts have been repeating that humans are a key vulnerability point of enterprise security strategies. We’ve been bombarded with tips and tricks to spot AI-generated synthetic images of people. We’ve been shamed when we’re been deceived by slop. And hyperrealistic deepfakes erode our trust in our senses.
The result? We’ll become the most distrustful human cohort in history and we’ll be expected to — and held responsible for — taking precautionary measures, training, and developing critical thinking to sort the truth out of the avalanche of AI-generated fake and deception.
20. In 2024, many elections shifted power to the right and far-right. As a result, we’ll see a substantial increase in investments in facial recognition and drone surveillance to prevent terrorism and illegal immigration, and also as first responders, assessing a situation before police arrive at a scene.
21.- Meta will continue to eat the market — and profits — from OpenAI and other LLM developers with their open-source models. As Amazon killed the competition with their free delivery, Meta is doing the same for LLMs. LLaMA may not perform better than the last ChatGPT or Claude models, but researchers love that it’s open source and can install it locally.
As in the case of Amazon Prime, Meta has the luxury of being able to throw buckets of money into it. The pay-off? Feedback from users enables them to iterate faster, minimises public criticism, and fosters pervasiveness.
22.- Big Tech will double down on non-exclusive partnerships. We thought OpenAI and Microsoft’s love affair was forever — 2024 proved it wrong.
OpenAI announced a partnership with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into Apple experiences and with Reddit to enhance their models in exchange for deploying AI features in the platform. Interestingly, Reddit also partnered with Google to enhance their products and — guess what? — give Reddit access to Google’s “AI-powered capabilities”.
As for Microsoft, GitHub announced that it would let developers choose large language models from Anthropic and Google to power the GitHub Copilot Chat coding assistant. It has also invested in Mistral AI and has partnered with other language model companies such as Cohere, which also “partners” with Google and Amazon.
My prediction is that 2025 will be even more “promiscuous.”
23.- China will finally claim its place in AI. The World Intellectual Property Organization data showed they’re filling the highest number of generative AI patents (China 8,210 vs US 6,276). They also have 13,000 granted AI patents, compared to 8,609 U.S. patents.
However, many argue that the US dominates in terms of impact, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who in May told Bloomberg that in AI, the US is “well ahead 2 or 3 years probably of China, which in my world is an eternity.” He blamed it to China’s chip shortages.
But time flies in tech and by November, Schmidt said that the US was falling behind China in the race to develop more powerful AI. How come? “in addition to access to talented engineers, powerful chips, and large data sources like the US, China also benefits from having more electric power to fuel the training of the AI models.” He also mentioned government subsidies for AI-related Chinese companies had spurred development in the sector.
Moreover, China’s researchers produce more papers on computer vision than any other country and the latest version of the DeepSeek LLM beats in some cases models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta with much more humble hardware.
My money is on China knocking it out of the park this year.
* * *
And my last two predictions are that 2025 will again be a year when two AI promises won’t come true.
24.- AI agents — I agree with MIT Technology Review that AI agents are an appealing idea rather than an actual product. And 2025 won’t change that.
25.- Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) —Whilst this an enticing idea — or a devastating nightmare, depending on the side of the AI hype — in 2025, it’ll continue to be a pipe dream.
And it’s not only me that believes it. The US Federal Trade Commission released on January 3 a blog post with the following opening paragraph
People often talk about “safety” when discussing the risks of AI causing harm. […] These discussions can sometimes focus on the possibility of existential risk stemming from some sort of AI agent or cyborg of the future. But speculation about human extinction is well beyond the FTC’s immediate concerns.
However, that doesn’t mean that AGI sceptics will have an easy life this year. Big Tech and other AI acolytes will increase their attacks against “dissenters” and all those who focus on present harms rather than utopian and dystopian AI futures.
Back To You
You’ve now read my predictions, I want to hear from you
1.- Which ones do you agree on?
2.- Which ones do you dispute?
3.- Which ones did I miss?
WORK WITH ME
I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.
- I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout.
- I empower leaders to harness the potential of AI for sustainable growth and responsible innovation.
- I’m a sought-after international keynote speaker on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
Contact me to book a call and discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.