😺 10 AI predictions for 2025

PLUS: The absolute WEIRDNESS of Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership

Welcome, humans.

Microsoft and OpenAI have a really weird relationship. They both need each other, but they both need to protect themselves from each other.

For example, both companies hired investment bankers to figure out how much of OpenAI Microsoft will own once OpenAI becomes a for-profit company.

It’s kind of hilarious—apparently, OpenAI can get out of its deal with Microsoft at any time if it suddenly “creates AGI.” And OpenAI’s board gets to decide when that happens.

Uh, what’s that? Deal closes tomorrow? Smash that AGI button! We’re going live!!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Here’s a recap of the predictions from the State of AI 2024 report.
VCs invested $3.9B in genAI startups in Q3 2024.
X will allow AI training on user data after November 15.
The U.S. Congress wants to pass an AI bill post-election.

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The Top 10 Predictions for 2025 from the State of AI Report 2024 (and our HONEST reactions).

All last week we were reading through the dense (and amazing) 2024 State of AI report.

This report has more charts, takes, and insights than we could ever hope to cover in ~300 words. For today, let’s start with the most fun part: the report’s predictions.

In the 2024 report, Air Street was transparent about what they got right and wrong in their predictions from last year:

That’s 5 hits, 3 misses, and 2 “sortas.”

2024 hits:

GenAI in Hollywood productions (results mixed).
AI songs top charts in Germany.

2024 misses:

No major tech IPOs (Cerebras filed, but didn't complete).
No global AI governance deal (high-level agreements, no detailed accords).

Here's our HONEST reaction to 8 of Air Street Capital’s predictions for 2025:

Big sovereign wealth investment into a US AI lab triggers national security review: kind of happening?
An app made by an AI noob goes viral: NotebookLM doesn’t count.
Frontier labs get serious about data collection practices: Does not launching in the EU count?
Open-source alternative beats GPT-4o: Many are trying (here’s a roundup).
Challengers fail to dent NVIDIA's armor: Seems likely, but NVIDIA might be its own worst enemy.
Interest in humanoid robotics cools off: We think interest in bots will overpower models, actually. Lots of near-term bot progress to be made.
Apple's on-device AI efforts pay off: The first test will be this week, when Apple Intelligence Phase 1 (notification summaries) comes out on October 23.
A GenAI-powered video game breaks out. Feels far out, but def possible.

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Around the Horn.

This video is WIDLY realistic…most unreal part is the voice tonality IMO. Here’s HeyGen if you want to check them out.

PitchBook data revealed VCs invested $3.9B across 206 deals for genAI startups in Q3 of 2024—and that’s not including OpenAI’s $6.6B round.
X updated its privacy policy to let third parties train their AI off your data starting November 15 (joining Reddit, Stack Overflow, Tumblr, WordPress, + LinkedIn).
Perplexity wants to raise $500M at an $8B valuation—its 4th funding round in a year—it gets ~15M queries a day and makes $50M from subscriptions.
The U.S. Congress will try to pass an AI bill (based partly on this roadmap) sometime in the two month period between the November Presidential election and when the new Congress is sworn in.

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MyLensAI is a Chrome extension that transforms any webpage or YouTube video into visual summaries like mindmaps and timelines with one click.
AI Desk answers your website visitors' questions about your products and services 24/7 via a free widget (backed by Google + NVIDIA).
TimeSkip is a Chrome extension that creates YouTube video chapters in seconds with timestamps that are easy to copy and paste (free to download).
Altnado writes alt text for your website's images, which helps boost search rankings and helps with accessibility.

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What gives it away that this is AI?

Your job is to tell us what about the video below gives it away as being AI. Click the link, watch the vid, and then answer the poll with your best take!

What gives it away that this video is AI?

Write in

Write in, pt. 2

Here’s what #Neuron readers had to say about last week’s video:

H.G: “The water doesn't look correct. The splashing should be more dramatic.”
L.C: “Theres a way that the people move and their expressions that is a bit off, kind of like uncanny valley. I've heard/seen/read this strange lilt in movement with the AI I used across the board. It's almost zombie-like.”
B.S: “I'm way too distracted by how cool the monsters are to notice it's AI and I'm not sure how I feel about that. 😮”