6 AI Trends that will Define 2025

The ideas you should be tracking to stay ahead of AI (spoiler- this list does not contain AGI)

After ~18 months of mainstream Generative AI, the dust is starting to settle. Beyond the hype cycles and viral demos, patterns are emerging about what makes AI solutions work.

Each year, I've tracked and highlighted key trends in the space. In 2022, this included MultiModality, Mixture of Experts, Sparsity, RAG, and Synthetic Data. Each of these has become a very important building block for LLMs and Generative AI Systems.

The 2023 predictions also aged well. I highlighted trends like Small Language Models, Agents, GraphRAG, and the importance of data enrichment/prep for LLM-based systems. However, the biggest prediction was my call for Meta to be the most influential AI company for the year, ahead of OpenAI, Google, etc., b/c of their decision to open-source Llama (many people doubted this at that time). Given Llama’s insane adoption- the most downloaded model ever + building on it is the source of many LLM innovations- and how this influenced other major Open Source LLMs, I think this held up.

As I’ve done the research, I see new technical and business developments that could reshape how we build with AI in 2025 and beyond. I’ve flagged many of them in my previous articles, but instead of asking you to dig through them all, I’m putting them in one place. In this article, I'll break down the 6 research directions, engineering approaches, business practices, and use cases that I believe will be the most important to watch closely, so that you can get ahead of the competition by working on these early.

Since this is a paywalled article, I want to be upfront on who this article will be most useful to. I wrote this with a focus on-

1. Tech Professionals (or students) who want to understand where to develop their skills or push their teams to be most competitive in the AI market.

2. Investors who want to identify trends/techniques that will be best for investments.

3. Policy Makers/Educators who want to design education programs that are actually relevant to people.

Assuming you’re one of the 3 groups, I’m very confident that you’ll get a lot of value here. For anyone else- I make no promises (I still think it’ll be good, but I might be biased here).

For access to this article and all future articles, get a premium subscription below.

Each of these articles takes a long time to research and write, and your premium subscription allows me to deliver the highest quality information to you. If you agree that high-quality work deserves compensation, please consider a premium subscription. We have a flexible subscription plan that lets you pay what you can here.

PS- Many companies have a learning budget that you can expense this newsletter to. You can use the following for an email template to request reimbursement for your subscription.

I provide various consulting and advisory services. If you‘d like to explore how we can work together, reach out to me through any of my socials over here or reply to this email.