2025 in the rear-view

And it is a wrap. The end of 2025 is a few days away and it is time to pause and check the patterns of this year.

It was the year of AI hype. An avalanche of announcements, new products, new hopes, dreams and delusions. All that supported by billions of money either spent or promised to be spent.

Let's start with various products.

We got introduced to AI Browsers. Browser is the next battle ground between the old guards and the young and restless. Perplexity, Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to wrestle in to upend Google, Microsoft and Apple in their dominance on desktop and mobile. Yet, they still rely on the old dogs for the underlying infrastructure to make it work. That's not even a long shot.

• Browsing for your life (13/07/25) - It was the rumour mill that OpenAI will release its AI Browser. 

• Perplexing Perplexity (17/08/25) - This was a cute attempt by Perplexity to buy Chrome from Google.

• To browse or not to browse with AI (26/10/25) - Both OpenAI and Microsoft announced integration of AI into the browser. Every demo shows that you are either searching for flights or cooking recipes. 

And speaking of Google, it was declared again that it has a monopoly and this time over the online advertising business - Another day, another monopoly(27/04/25). While we are still waiting for the remedy in the second monopoly case, the remedy for the first monopolistic ruling is in - Is this what you call punishment? (07/09/25) which resulted in ... nothing. Life goes on. Search for it.

And speaking of search. Search became the casualty of the AI race. What used to be a simple, albeit tedious activity, became a useless exercise where the user is pushed further and further from the original source of information. We are now presented with answering systems which pretend to know everything that make their users dumber.

• The pitfalls of AI search (26/01/25) - An attempt to mix humans and technology when it comes to searching. AI answers, humans verify. Except it doesn't work and it is not scalable.

• Search engines becoming summary engines (18/05/25) - The search result is now an approximation. It is moving from presenting links to presenting opinions.

And speaking of OpenAI. That's an intersection of ideas, dreams, lunacy and deceit.

• AI vibes (20/04/25) - We learned that Mr. Altman, CEO of OpenAI made a bet - 'In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company.' So far none of them have accomplished that. They still need hundreds of people to build a profitable company.

• Mr. Altman’s singularity delusion (15/06/25) - A manifesto full of fantasies and hallucinations that border on complete delusion.

• The 3rd device (29/06/25) - Without a device, you can't achieve scale and dominance. OpenAI signed up Jony Ive - formerly of Apple - to create a device which will be shipped 'faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before.'

• When everything else fails. Sell Sex (19/10/25) - Make old ideas new again. Sex sells, it will sell AI and help OpenAI to generate revenue.

• AI, the other direction (02/11/25) - On their quest to remove humans from the picture, OpenAI is hiring experts in the attempt to suck every ounce of knowledge from their heads. OpenAI people realized that just sucking content from the Internet is not enough. Only if they read my post 'Oil and data. There will be blood' they would learn that their efforts will lead them nowhere. An AI Fata Morgana.

• AI doesn’t know what time it is (30/11/25) - The circus monkey is still learning new tricks. To know what time it is is one of them.

And speaking of devices and the future of AI, we can't not mention Mr. Musk with his 'Just AI. The future according to Elon Musk' (09/11/25) where we will have a device - formerly known as a phone - which will run on AI and will connect with the cloud AI and that will be the only thing which we will need or have. There will be no operating system, there will be no apps. There will be just a screen and video and audio. And it will happen in the next 5 or 6 years and all the content will be AI generated.

Mr. Musk's predictions are famously accurate. Especially in the realm of self-driving cars with breathtaking accuracy about Tesla's self-driving cars.

• Where are the flying cars? (22/08/21) - 2022 since we didn't hit the target in 2018 nor 2020.

• The self-driving car is just around the corner (18/09/22) - 2023 for sure.

• Shocking, positively shocking (14/12/25) - Almost there.

Still on the device front, Facebook/Meta/Zuckerberg introduced the latest version of AI Glasses - 'When dreams become nightmares' (28/09/25). They worked so well that a few minutes into the inauguration demo, Mr. Zuckerberg takes them off and reads the rest of the speech from a teleprompter.

Want more lunacy? The new frontier for AI is space filled with data centers - 'Is this SciFi enough?'

And speaking of space, we learned that Christmas 2032 might be our last Christmas - 'Big Bada Boom, Christmas 2032?' or that our solar system might have visitors from out there - Stars and Aliens.

While some are getting high on AI, some are using AI to pick up mushrooms with 100% precision - AI Hallucination Mushrooms.

There was more that happened in 2025 and you can read more here about quantum computers, Uber, Apple, and Hiswai.

The recurrent pattern? The main objective from all the AI companies is to insert AI to every human activity and become the layer which will facilitate everything for us. They want AI to think for us. My TEDx talk is relevant more than ever - In AI We Trust, But Should We?