Reading through the two 2024 threads I'm struck that most predictions a) were completely wrong b) reflected more what people wanted to happen rather than what was likely.

Edit: now that I've read through this thread I'll add c) were much more hopeful than this year's predictions.

> reflected more what people wanted to happen rather than what was likely.

I think that is true of most predictions.

It reflects the mood, which tells me all I need to know about things like short term stock changes. In reality nobody can predict the future. My predictions have historically also been way off, but what is surprising to me is that people don't reflect on their misses. For the most part I've given up in predicting anything, at best I will look at trends and see if there's something there or not.

But with that said I will now post my predictions for 2025 :-).

Post your portfolio alongside please :)

This is mostly just for fun and will be mostly wrong because none of the people who are making predictions take it seriously. And none of the upvoters take it seriously either.

There is a discipline to making predictions (Phil Tetlock has observed a few traits: avoiding base rate fallacies, working in probabilities not binaries, making falsifiable predictions, and continuously updating).

None of the predictions here do that, so we shouldn’t expect any kind of reasonable hit rate.

It’s just end of year fun.

Crazy how wrong people were in the top 2024 comments.

Indeed someone predicted vision pro will be wildly popular.

Yes. People are not stupid. It's one thing to have a phone in your purse. It's another to have something on your head and eyes, like how is anyone going to agree to that? Sure if it was very cheap you'd find some interested folks.

I remember being called outdated, a contrarian and 'in the way of progress' on this site when I expressed doubt that the Vision Pro would be 'the next iPhone', as people on this site put it. I was told that our way of working would change within the year and that everybody would be scrambling to emulate Apple.

I don't mind enthusiasm and excitement, but for others to directly make such bold claims then put others down was a disappointing experience for me here.

Some people will just never get out of Apple's Reality Distortion Field, willingly or unwillingly.

Could it be the top comments even though most voted are also most commented and more divisive and controversial? And the most boring comments are somewhere at the back? Hence big amount of failed predictions at the top.

I was eeading an article on this a while ago tgat i sadly cant find but you should expect these threads to be wildly incorrect because people can read everyone elses predictiobs and be swayed by them. The wisdom of the crowd only appears to work when nobody gets to see otger results first and then the median position is wgat is usually most accurate.

I think I recently (few days ago, that is in the last few days of 2024) saw a Vsauce video/short about this regarding a trial trying to use the wisdom of the crowd to get an accurate number for the amount of jelly beans in a large jar. The trial was similarly skewed by "open" predictions, concretely people being allowed to give their predictions while in the presence of their group (friends/family/etc). Unfortunately I cannot seem to find it, but your comment reminded me of that.

betting on the opposite of what HN predicts seems like a pretty safe bet if you read the old threads.

Reminds me of a running joke with a friend.

His stock picks are so off I told him to create an inverse etf of his picks and I would pile into that, at least one of us would make some money.

After losing my shirt some years earlier I announced to my wife that I was ready to get into the buying shares again. She agreed, but only if I bought good ones this time.

This one from 2010 is just creepy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093

2009 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416530

There are even more restrictions aimed at stopping kids using social media. Restrictions on phone use in schools, who can sign up for social media, etc..

Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids.

On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significantly more negative effects.

I'm still not sure how they plan to enforce this. Even now, I see an age verification popup on both illicit sites and even sites I feel are innocuous. But I can just click that I'm old enough to move on.

If the social media companies are only trying to shift blame, this makes sense. They're not liable if the customer lies.

But if that loophole is closed, the only way to enforce age approved sites would be a global identity system that is somehow inextricably linked to your real-life persona. Everything you do online is linked to who you are. And that's VERY dystopian and doesn't (yet) exist to my knowledge.

There's a parent-driven approach I'm hearing about more and more.

Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example "no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required".

This is hyper-local but works well because there's no peer pressure- nobody has one etc.

The other effective approach in play is "no screens in private areas" - ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms. This also has very beneficial outcomes on kids, and seems to be gathering steam.

I think govt type bans are easily circumvented, and basically useless. But parental rules, especially if common in the child's social circle, are proving to be a good starting point.

Sounds like a business opportunity. Make a token (Bluetooth low energy token?) that parents can place in the location where devices can be used. Either have it baked into the hardware's software (so Apple would need to support it) or sell a Wifi router that only allows the 'screen' devices to connect to wifi when the token senses the device (which would make it work for any device with wifi and Bluetooth token's ranges).

Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

That wouldn't invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

>> my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

one phone shared between a bunch of friends is not the problem. The problem is a phone "owned" by you, and then used to access social media. ie the phone is just a conduit to social media, and social media is the root of the problem.

>> Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

Cigarettes and alcohol were (and still are) banned from kids, and yes kids certainly got them when I was growing up (and I'm pretty sure still do.) That doesn't mean those things should be accessible to kids, used at the dinner table, or in bedrooms at home.

>>Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

This is not a suggestion I am proposing. It's an approach I'm seeing being implemented, and the kids are better off for it. Given the very clear harms we are seeing with children using smart-phones, and social media, for the last 15 years or so, I expect this will gain momentum.

Clearly you can parent your own kids however you like - I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing.

Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.

Airbnb has a similar kind of verification (which makes a lot of sense in their business). It's a pain but it would obviously not be hard to adapt it to Facebook. But as for what to do for existing accounts? That's where it gets hard. It would probably cut down on spam too though. But yeah the privacy issues are a huge problem.

Quite unfortunately imo Google is full steam ahead building the Digital Credentials API, a standard way to have the browser present verifiable identification. Paving the way for the most ghastly intrusion of governments onto the internet; what a horrible thing to do to the internet!

> allows websites to selectively request verifiable information about the user through digital credentials such as a driver's license or a national identification card stored in a digital wallet.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...

You’ll be asked to log in into a government-run account, which will pinky promise not to store who accessed what.

It'll be your mandatory X account, the one you'll need to do things like contact the DMV, because hey, can't have government efficiency without grift!

That's not a technical requirement; you could simply have a government-verified official public key. You could "log in" by signing a challenge message with your private key. The government would have no log that you'd even used your official government ID.

Government backed SSO is probably how this ends up. I suspect we get to it because it also solves the election influencing issues that western democracies are seeing

Wouldn’t solve anything, social media would just fragment even more. People will move to unregulated sites. Full on dictatorships can’t even prevent people from using the internet so how does anyone think this would work?

Not likely at all.

Person A. B is controlled by A, and C impacts A's control of B. The concept of B solving C, while at the same time having no impact on C, is patently absurd (contradictory), and the reasoning path demonstrably circular without identity (hegelian).

It lacks rationally accepted structure to be anything except hopes, wishes, dreams, or delusion.

Apple and Google can make it far easier with better native controls and UX patterns. Screentime can be completely gamified.

> with significant benefit to kids

Straight kids from stable homes, perhaps. For LGBT kids, or kids in abusive homes, it's the end of a significant lifeline.

It's interesting yet saddening to play out the consequences along the path you've outlined. LGBT kids, by definition a 2-4% minority, are unlikely to find other people like themselves. They remain closeted for longer, trying and failing to conform. Their struggle will be unfortunate, but also not measurable.

What will be measurable is the % of youth who identify as LGBT, which will be lower because more of them would be closeted. That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".

The root issue here is children not coming out to their parents. If we improve that metric, we can begin to improve all other metrics. Ie: the parent can help the child discover appropriate peer groups

That requires the parents to be accepting and engaged, which is a great long-term goal but will take much longer to achieve than the first-order effects of losing access to peer communities. (There are also feedback loops: a group being less visible means that people in the group are less likely to realize it isn’t something uniquely wrong with them, there are fewer other people who know fact from myth, and so on.)

I imagine we've seen massive increase in parental acceptance in our lifetime already.

The root issue is parents not being safe for kids to come out to. If you risk being chucked out on the street, or sent to a conversion camp, why the hell would you come out to a parent?

And that problem is so severe that it dwarfs all second order effects by a massive margin.

> That'll be a win for people who want to "protect kids from LGBT ideology".

That'd be dumb and funny if politicians wouldn't abuse people's fears to boost conspiracy theories for their agenda. For example, where I live some politicians associated the trans community with paedophilic behavior.

I don't understand their endgame really. Where these anti free choice (anti-freedom) stances come from.

* Solar energy will account for around 8% (give or take 1%?) of the worlds energy usage

* We'll see the worlds first trillionaire

* Bitcoin will reach $200k+, and remain largely stable around that price, at the end of 2025

* Generative AI for music will continue to improve substantially. I have a lack of imagination, but maybe something like on demand streaming services, maybe targeted to niche music genres (lo-fi, electronica, elevator/hold/office music)

* Generative AI for video will continue to improve substantially. The best I can come up with is that there will be a breakout indie film or music video that's produced from a skeleton crew relying heavily on generative AI video.

* LLMs will continue to improve substantially, being able to solve more and more complex tasks, like the Putnam exam and others. Research will continue to try and integrate LLMs into a toolchain to improve performance

* LLMs and other generative AI tasks will continue to become more and more accessible ($2.5k for a machine able to do fairly advanced training?)

* The cost of robots and other robotics will drop substantially, providing a reasonable bipedal option at $8k

* Twitter and Facebook will still be around, Bluesky will be no more, Mastodon will continue to be niche

* All the above will be used by people to invent and discover weird, wonderful and horrible things that I can't even imagine.

I think you’d need an almighty market rally for some of these. For the first trillionaire we’d need to see Tesla double and the market would need to be going bananas for Bitcoin to 2x.

Remember 2024 has been a monster year in the markets and they just indicated they are slowing down the rate cuts.

Musk's net worth was $137B in 2022, $270B in 2023 and now estimated to be $400B. $1T is a bit of an extravagant prediction but it's within the realm of possibility. And it might not be him.

Bitcoin was around $43k at the end of 2023 now at approximately $100k.

I know right , I think he might be too bullish on bitcoin for it to double , though I may be wrong but it just feels like there would be swings because I still believe that there is no use of bitcoin , Its just that its the one which started these coins and there could be better one for use cases , maybe like IDK monero for real anonymous transactions , but even then these are more of a sidekick thing which I don't think I would ever use but I still like the idea of monero , I really really stay away from crypto.

I like index funds so much , that everything else feels a time / effort waste even though I am aspiring to be a programmer , maybe that's partially why I don't see much reason in crypto.

I just think of index funding 80% + bonds 20% or maybe 100% index fund into my own country index ,and maybe having some backup money in need , probably in a liquid fixed deposit or having multiple bank accounts and giving them all the maximum amount of money which is guaranteed to be given to me if a bank fails by the govt. , probably 10k$ is enough in my country or maybe I am still over estimating.

>I like index funds so much , that everything else feels a time / effort waste even though I am aspiring to be a programmer , maybe that's partially why I don't see much reason in crypto.

Crypto is the future of money and finance. If you are aspiring to become a programmer you should internalize this and get in.

> Crypto is the future of money and finance.

Why ?

Crypto is the digital version of the old commodity money (whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made).

Turns out it was absolutely impractical because people rarely want to be physically responsible for their own estate.

I neither see crypto disappear anytime soon and we may see innovative usage. It can probably make sense in unstable economic environments. But everywhere else, you’ll want your estate not being accessible to burglars, you’ll want your big transactions to be legally secured, you’ll want your bank to be able to reverse things and you’ll want to not let your money sleep.

Also, unless governments start accepting crypto for paying taxes, you’ll have a hard time buying anything in daily shops.

money is already in very large part digital.

Most digital money is scriptural. Cryptos aren’t.

Crypto is the future of money and finance; however, it will always be the future of money and finance.

No one in the financial industry seriously considers crypto except for the fact that they can use it to siphon money from the unfortunately disillusioned and the idiotic.

As a financier and a programmer, I'm happy people keep pouring money into it because I can win more games. As a human, it's really sad to witness.

I guess at the current market cap you may be right about 2x being "a lot", but the crypto market is no stranger to multiple increases.

And the valves are fully open now with a ton of Bitcoin/Crypto ETFs across the planet and in the US in particular. Even at these prices it won't take that much to raise the price drastically.

Augustus Caesar was a trillionaire apparently (in todays money)

Jakob Fugger

banger.

on real life image and video intelligence though i think google will take the lead here as they just have monopoly on dataset here given they have google images and youtube.

on proprietary general intelligence ai i think openai and anthropic will keep their lead, while on open source mark zuckerberg will be continuously leveling the playing field so the general population can keep up in terms of availability of access and end-result productivity.

something to keep eye on though is china. have you guys seen their recent open source models? very impressive. looking at it, it seems like a head to head battle between USA and China. Europe seems heavily distracted with its regulations and politics.

> I have a lack of imagination, but maybe something like on demand streaming services, maybe targeted to niche music genres (lo-fi, electronica, elevator/hold/office music)

goddamn that would be interesting. it's gonna be great to see lots of micro communities offering better content than netflix/disney/hbo etc which is prone to political and non-political influences and slow-downs in production.

> Generative AI for video will continue to improve substantially. The best I can come up with is that there will be a breakout indie film or music video that's produced from a skeleton crew relying heavily on generative AI video.

i wonder how much of the industry will transition into pure prompting too. back then we used manual instruments and talented voice actors for voice, these days you could (possibly) produce similar results if you're skilled enough to precisely describe it to the ai you are directing / working with.

> The cost of robots and other robotics will drop substantially, providing a reasonable bipedal option at $8k

huge bet on this too, the brains are getting better and for sure yc's request for startup will eventually have a section dedicated for the body and limb part targetting different industries.

> ... i think google will take the lead here as they just have monopoly on dataset ...

I think there's plenty of data for people to train substantial models, either drawing directly from the public domain or scraping content. The cost of compute and disk space will continue to drop exponentially fueling the ability of small businesses and amateurs.

Compute is still following Moore's law, more or less, when you allow for GPUs. Hard drives are relatively on the same path, with maybe a price halving every 3 years or so.

> ... while on open source mark zuckerberg will be continuously leveling the playing field so the general population can keep up in terms of availability of access and end-result productivity.

Meta's offering is not open source. I agree that all the big players will make substantial moves in this space but I'm much more interested in the niche models that are actually libre/free/open source. I suspect FOSS will eventually eat all the big players lunch but I don't have a good read on it (nor do I know anything about China's OSS models).

> it's gonna be great to see lots of micro communities offering better content than netflix/disney/hbo ...

It sounds like a "Black Mirror" episode but I can't wait (and I don't think it'll be as bad as "Black Mirror").

> i wonder how much of the industry will transition into pure prompting too ...

My read on this is that we're in the "experimental art house" phase of this type of generative AI. So many people create weird things, experimenting with the technology but ultimately having low expectations in terms of what gets produced.

Sometime soon (1-2+ years?) my guess is we'll see finer control with someone, either an actor, director, etc. that can provide dialogue, facial expression and body language with minimal setup, a camera or voice recording, say, that can make or refine avatar/agent performance. I would guess this would be available to specialized visual graphics shops but will eventually bleed out so that amateurs have access. I think we might be seeing this available already.

Eventually, we'll have "make what I want", but I would imagine that's 5-10+ years away.

Regarding the video generation stuff, I can foresee a Canva style UI that allows you to define the position of your camera, movement, lighting etc. coupled with a prompt. Or a catalog of exiting movie scenes that you can select as a starting point to define the setting, cinematography, etc.

Runway ML already does this I think

Regatding China recent AI advances, I would add to your point... I think China has more Chinese-language datasets that the West will find hard to get and train for effectively, than the West has in terms of its English datasets which both parties can exploit.

Additionally China has greater volume of 'less expensive manpower' and greater coercive power to create synthetic datasets than what we will see coming to bear from the West. I haven't seen other people point this out. The next few years will be intetesting times.

* Bitcoin is on a trajectory to reach 200k and it will if we get a strong bull season. However the elephant in the room is the House of Cards that is the US financial system. It appears primed to go poof!

* Solar and LLM's will bloom.

    > the US financial system. It appears primed to go poof!

Can you explain more, and provide some specific examples? Are you talking about commercial banks, investment banks, or insurance companies? (They make up the bulk of what most people mean when they say "financial system".) Post-2008 GFC, ibanks are stronger than ever because they are much more conservative. With the exception of a couple of run-on-the-banks, commercial banks have been more stable than ever in the last 50 years. Similar for insurance companies.

Unsustainable public debt. $50 trillion in debt maturity must be rolled over mid 2025. Something must give

Currently the US has 36T in dept [1]. Where are you getting this number?

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

I think if you count animation we’re probably real close going from comic book series to animated feature.

agreed on the uptick in generative AI for music but I think it will just start to replace regular music on the major streamers rather than crop up in a new beskpoke platform. it's already happening: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

> Twitter and Facebook will still be around, Bluesky will be no more, Mastodon will continue to be niche

I'd be curious to know if you have an expectation for what will cause your cited Bluesky death. About 6 months ago I would have probably backed a prediction of "will remain niche" for it just like your Mastodon one, but now I am following some relatively big name accounts that have migrated over. And I undoubtedly enjoy the experience a lot more than X

"The Monoverse" might meet the AI video criteria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF5iwsUef9o&list=PL14oiCokyI...

Putin probably already is.

Bluesky is gaining significant traction although for me it still feels very tech oriented which makes sense. It’s a much more pleasant place to be.

Energy will accelerate more towards nuclear than any other form.

Inflation will return in the US.

Bitcoin and crypto in general will gain significant traction, led by the commitment from Trump and chums.

Expect to see some book based announcements but big tech, maybe AI authors or perhaps story generation advances with social thrown in.

* One or a few of the faangmanga-ish leaders will retire (or forced to by the board) and the new leader will be from within (likely Tim Cook for age reasons but could equally likely be Sundar Pichai for non-age reasons)

* LLMs (for non-coding tasks) will likely fizzle out as expensive talking fidget spinners and not the world saviors that the companies behind them envision them to be. AI will go back to being fun and exciting again and not the delight of both Wall Street and the ‘shoeshine boy’.

* Cloud egress costs will be heavily scrutinized and competed upon as transferring data no longer becomes a competitive advantage.

* Apple or someone like Apple will take advantage of cratering storage/compute costs by moving things off cloud to a locally owned ‘box’ that pairs with a new dumb-client/thin phone (backups, massive storage, running some compute on this box, sharing/storing ‘family’ stuff, streaming games or movies etc) also accessible via a reverse proxy (vpn) from anywhere.

* A combo of aibo/roomba/ring like device that goes about or rolls around your house and does things for you… kinda real life flubber.

* Selling users’ data goes out of fashion (goog/meta) as new companies use privacy as a competitive advantage to sell ads.

* Finally games actually have AI that doesn’t suck - a new class of AI games that would challenge and delight humans like never before.

1. I don't know

2. I think this is probably right-ish. From what I hear LLMs are nearing what they do and I have never found any interesting use other than just laughing at them (which I could do with markov chains). AI-generated images are hideous and I have no opinion on AI-generated music as I just choose not to expose myself to it

3. Again, don't know

4. God I hope so. That would be such a funny trend. Plan9 comeback??????? #define nil (void*)0 in common parlance???

5. I feel like this is exclusively a novelty but what do I know

6. No it will not???

7. This will probably happen, but it won't be many games. It will not be a new class of games. AI--big shock--isn't fun. Mario but the levels are incomprehensible. BALATRO but I CONVINCE the GAME to give me INFINITE MULTIPLIER? (Part 3). The Beginners Guide but no one cared enough to tell a story. AI so far has been a hindrance where high quality work is concerned. Why will that change? The paint bucket tool has been slowly improved over time, but it was helpful when it first came out.

How many people do you know that have played the AI-generated Minecraft thing more than once or twice? It's interesting but utterly bland and bizarre. You're constantly having to tell the program over and over again what it means to be a person when you're in a world which doesn't even know what bird is in the sky. It gets infuriating.

The idea comes back again and again, though. "What if we made a game with infinite content so it could appeal to everyone? And then what if we added multiplayer?" I've thought it, you've thought it--everyone has. The important part is realizing that you're wrong. If everyone's had this thought, why don't we have this game? Well, we do.

Dwarf Fortress is perhaps the best example of a reality simulator standing at simulating a whopping 42% of everything ever. But if you asked someone to describe Dwarf Fortress they wouldn't just say "it's a pretty good reality simulator"--well, they might. Assume here you asked them to give a /good/ description--they would tell you it's a tough, slow game about minion dwarves going around and doing your bidding in order to build a civilization which will eventually fall. And they'd tell you that it's fun because of its deep interactions. But now we've lost the plot. It's not a game for everyone anymore, because now it's only for people who like slow games with deep interactions. And it's not a game where you can do anything because you can only do so much as your dwarves can do. But Dwarf Fortress is a fun game. And the fun of it comes from its rules. And rules are what AI is famously bad at.

Minecraft is another famous game and the same thing applies to it. "You can only interact with what your player can see," "one block at a time," and "everything is a full block" are all rules which bend it away from that "ideal" game, but they're all the things that make Minecraft fun. They're all the rules.

Games aren't fun when you can say "well I have better armor" and get out of a tricky situation. Games are REALLY FUN when you can say "wait, I have a bag of holding, don't I?" and then look around as everyone starts smirking at the implication.

That's what AI is bad at. There will not be a new class of AI games.

6. Everything else is a prediction but 6 is my secret wish for Santa. Not gonna happen is it? :)

7. I would love to see a world that develops into something like dwarf fortress that uses AI instead of hard coded rules. And make it accessible too. By AI I really mean something like RL not the hyped up LLM craze.

> LLMs (for non-coding tasks) will likely fizzle out as expensive talking fidget spinners and not the world saviors that the companies behind them envision them to be.

100% wrong. LLMs are wildly useful in daily life, even the cheaper models.

For real. It's always a headscratcher when I see these weird takes against it.

Amazon has been working with Anthropic which at the very least will create a much more comprehensive Alexa.

> expensive talking fidget spinners

Like Alexa, Siri, and Hey Google? Which are used A LOT and will only be used more when they're natural, smarter, and conversational?

Always a strange take.

Alexa Google assistant and Siri were all significantly down sized in the last year or so (teams, product).

Turns out the top queries billions of dollars went into were to set timers or to play a song.

I would love to be proven wrong though.

I think part of the problem with these assistants is they are fucking annoying to use for all but the most trivial tasks. The only thing I've ever used Siri for more than once is "Siri, two minutes" - and sometimes she still tells me I don't have the timer app installed. The moment I can reliably get an answer to something I'm contemplating, it's going to have a huge impact on how much I use my phone.

I think that has to do with the nuance of programming a voice based flow that works for everyone. LLMs are on a different UX bandwidth.

+1 for AI games.

I'll add to it that we'll see more gamification of AI training as well. I.e your play data becomes training data.

Infinite side quests with AI are going to get wild.

I can't see how, not unless it is a 'AAA' always online game or if the quests are cached.

I think the most amazing use of AI in games (specifically RPGs) will be with statistical models to crunch "planning" and "cause and effect" to draw players into plots, schemes and storylines and then to demonstrate the impacts of success or failure of the player's quest. Think economic simulations of a city due to the player's actions or sabotage where the player has crippled a port leading to the NPCs barking about hunger, prices and disease.

I predict that I will finally finish making that bird feeder camera that I've been wanting to make for my wife. I've got all the parts for it, I just need to figure out how to put them together and write some code to take a picture of a bird. Can't be too hard, right?

Sounds like a great project for learning.

However, just FYI, this $25 2K cam (PCMag recommended) can do that sorta (it has motion/pet detection) and more. It also has excellent night vision. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH45HPZT/

I was like, a $25 camera can't be this good. But I tried it out and it's actually really good.

Interesting, I like that it has local storage. Thanks for the recommendation!

It’d be easier if you’d be OK with a picture of a bird or picture of a squirrel ;)

Good luck, sounds like a fun project.

Squirrels are fine too! We have the hardest time keeping them off our bird feeders – even though we have ones set out specifically for squirrels – but they at least look cute for the camera.

Hmm - but you can't just have it take a picture of the bird!

It needs to alert you to the presence of the bird - what's the latest and best practice in notifications nowadays?

And ID the bird too - what's a good API for image based AI? Might be expensive, better run it locally, how do we set up a sever for that? No, not server, serverless!

What are the legal implications of running an AI based autonomous camera service outside in your locale? Better research that...

.... Yeah, I've ended up going down a lot of rabbit holes on my own little projects, but that's part of the fun I guess. ;)

> What are the legal implications of running an AI based autonomous camera service outside in your locale? Better research that...

Funnily enough, that's something I've put a little bit of thought into! I want to keep my bird camera local and "privacy friendly," with no photos leaving my network sans-human-intervention. I'm even going to paint a tiny little "Birds Under Surveillance" sign (or something like that) to indicate that the camera isn't watching people.

My goal is to have it sync photos to my NAS via some kind of wireless connection and then do species identification on own machine. It's been surprisingly hard to find any sort of open LLM or machine-learning models for identifying birds though, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right place. Luckily my wife is an avid birder and already knows all of our local species, so v1 doesn't need to identify what's pecking at the feeder.

A friend of mine just bought this for his mom, I thought it was really cool apparently it can recognize if the same bird comes multiple times and stuff like that

https://www.birdfy.com/products/birdfy-feeder

But I just saw it has a subscription fee lol. I understand but no way would I get that.

Yep, that's what inspired my project! My wife is a wildlife photographer, and taking pictures of the squirrels and birds at our feeders is what started her down that path. I had wanted to get her one of those feeders, but they're all subscription based and send the photos to their cloud/AI services. Like you said, I understand it. It's a really neat product for people who enjoy birding, but I want to try my hand at building something that can run off a Raspberry Pi and sync to my local NAS instead of a third-party cloud service.

Protips from existing feeder shopping

- a feed tray that is self draining so that food never molds, a small amount of food can be cycled to avoid spreading disease

- users grow tired of fine screws for food fill, they're also easy to lose over time, threads get dirty with nature or food (latest purchase has a swivel joint lid)

Dopamine management medication will lead to a renaissance of human ingenuity and scientific discoveries and a big crash for social media and gambling sites (and in fact most online activities) but everyone will start becoming more robotic and even less social. Think GLP-1 inhibitors except for thinking more deeply and for longer periods. If not 2025 very soon.

These already exist, they’re called CNS stimulants.

Sounds like they're describing the opposite of CNS stimulants though. People take meth and coke and go on se, gambling binges. Something that moderates and manages dopamine in a way that breaks the hold gambling and social media has on people's brains would be very different. Something that dulls the retative mini-bursts of dopamine hits you get with every click and scroll.

> People take meth and coke and go on se, gambling binges. Something that moderates and manages dopamine in a way that breaks the hold gambling and social media has on people's brains would be very different.

Simplifying a lot here, but people with ADHD are statistically more likely to exhibit addictive behaviours because the addiction provides dopamine that their brain otherwise has trouble getting. Treatment with prescribed CNS stimulants is very effective at preventing those behaviours because the brain no longer has to engage in the addictive behaviours to obtain sufficient dopamine.

Here’s one study where patients reported significantly lower rates of alcohol and drug use over at least a one year period.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23264367/

Do GLP-1 already do this, to some extent?

I've heard many reports of GLP-1 reducing addiction behavior, but more like alcohol and gambling. Never heard anyone reporting on social media reduction. IMHO it looks like it should, I just haven't seen any data / anecdotes.

Antipsychotic medicines already are dopamine antagonists, but they lead to substantial weight gain, and they hurt motivation.

Very cool prediction, but is there anything like this actually coming down the pipe?

haha this is gonna be an interesting one for sure.

it's crazy how us humans yearn for magic pills for the highs and the lows just to get ourselves in a healthy baseline

and as bryan johnson's experiments look like, it all comes down to our consistency in eating healthy, exercising regularly, and resting enough - those three alone will net you better health than most people - and it's hard to get into habit of doing those since we all got distractions around us.

+1 for mentioning Bryan Johnson

I had a discussion with someone on here about the magic pills and how they are a crutch for the 3 items you mentioned. They ranted about how helpless humans are and how unfair it is for them to have will themselves to be healthy

Fully agree on consistency, unfortunately I realized after a while that my anxiety was preventing me from being consistent and after getting some medication, I was able to get back into all these habits.

Friend: "i kept getting fatter, and more diabetic, so i got a continuous glucose monitor, and it basically told me how bad it is to eat [sugary] cereal in [sugary] milk right before I got to bed"

Accepting causation is difficult to recognize when it requires personal change.

Or read Sapolsky on how this line of though is simply stupid and ignorant.

I feel the dogged persuit of a task and obsessive curiosity might be more closely related to addiction than to self control. A good balance of productivity from the self control and the obessive curiosity of human nature might be needed for ascension

Concerning "thinking more deeply and for longer periods." There is a WSJ article about drugs for focus but how addictive they are

"As Mark Moran was facing another 90-hour week as an investment-banking intern at Credit Suisse in New York, he knew he needed help to survive the rest of the summer. His colleagues gave him a tip: Visit a Wall Street health clinic and tell the staff he had trouble focusing.

Ahead of his first appointment, he filled out a five-minute questionnaire. One of the questions asked if he had trouble staying organized, another, if he procrastinated. He then met with a clinician who said his answers suggested he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He left with a prescription for Adderall."

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/young-banker-finance-adh...

What are some articles you recommend to start reading more about this?

90% confidence level, Hottest weather in recorded history. Extreme weather in many places not seen before. No one is prepared for this commonplace outlier, Globally common, locally outlier. Huge insurance payout but most not fullfilled.

90% CL: Top search engine results completely inundated by LLM text, we none the wiser. SEO solved. Search engine switches to new algorithm based on LLM.

90% CL: AI with tool use that has access to physics simulator and CAD software will automatically advances efficent engine design.

70% CL: Million dollar prompt run on million dollar math prize. Millennium Prize Problems

40% CL: AI sucessfully held back invasive species encrochment with lessons from AI war machines

30% CL: Cheap AI nose sniffs out many common diseases. Automatic data analysis of Gas Chromatography and spectroscopy readings on patients' VOC(volatile organic compounds) produces fast and cheap diagnosis.

10% CL: Not next year, Cost of renewable electricity in remote area becomes cheap enough to pull oxygen from air or electrosis from water to be sold as commodity. Or other processes to package solar energy for trade.

can i have some of what you have been smoking?

I don’t think global temperatures get another record because El Niño is over. Your „weather“ suggests a more local reference though?

It sounds more clever to use Confidence Level, rather than just saying you are pulling random probabilities out of your a$$

Renewable energy has been the cheaper option in remote areas for a while now, solar demand in Pakistan has skyrocted recently.

Solar powered water pumps and water purification has been a commodity and charity item since 2023 (that I recall) eg:

https://nrsp.org.pk/hand-operated-and-solar-powered-portable...

https://www.bondheshams.org/

I read a piece about how abundant solar in rural Afghanistan strengthened the Taliban as poppy and therefore opium production skyrocketed because they were able to install electric wells.

interested in the article. would you like to share a link?

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53450688

Here in W.Australia we've been using solar powered signal repeaters along rail lines and mesa tops since the mid 1970's in the Pilbara mining industry.

Solar powered bores for farms in the wheatbelt and cattle country has been a regular feature for over a decade now.

The panels and batteries are better than ever now, but they've been Total Cost break even better than fossil fuel alternatives in remote Australia for a very long time (esp. factoring in need to travel to a bore to refuel, etc. Vs "it just works" (until it doesn't, but all solutions require upkeep)).

> Cost of renewable electricity in remote area becomes cheap enough to pull oxygen from air or electrosis from water to be sold as commodity

Oxygen is already kind of a commodity. Did you mean hydrogen? Anyway, this isn't going to happen, look at retail power prices.

> Top search engine results completely inundated by LLM text, we none the wiser. SEO solved. Search engine switches to new algorithm based on LLM.

I'm not sure in what sense SEO is "solved" here, but this basically puts the Internet into a nasty local minimum where it's kind of good enough for information you don't care about, but will feed you wrong information often enough to cause problems, while having stripped all the traditional reliability signals. Possibly also kills what's left of fact-based journalism.

I’m grateful for my librarian.

How do those confidence levels work? It looks to me you're just assigning probabilities to outcomes.

I think it's roughly: "I would bet 9$ to your $1 that this happens", although some of these are vague enough that you couldn't objectively determine whether the bet materialized.

So they aren't confidence levels. They're odds, but he's trying to sound sophisticated.

I did my top 5 for my field cyber security

AI in cyber defence and attack Quantum resistant cryptography Death of the password? Passwordless, passkeys, phishing resistant MFA More suppliers compromised, another major open source project long con Doing more with less: automation and consolidation

https://rakkhi.substack.com/p/cyber-security-predictions-for...

Those are generic enough you could argue they already occurred last year or this year?

There is a lot more detail in the article that makes not generic

They have both occured and not occured every year for the past 10 years

Really bullish on AI, huh?

Designing an engine?

“[snuffs] out common diseases”?

Solving SEO?

Idk cotton, let’s see how this plays out.

Sniffs out, meaning diagnoses

Could just as well be a typo.

I’ve never heard anyone call diagnosing “sniffing”

It’s an idiom, like the detective sniffed out some clues.

lol, I do mean a sniff with a nose. The technology I'm referring to can work by taking air sample. This technology exist, the prediction is that cheap version will be available. My assumption is robots will want a digital nose, for example nanny bots will want to smell smoke and react. An example I read for this technology is that grocery store robot will want to detect spoiled food. It will be mass produced and gets cheaper. But we don't have a robot industry yet, so my confidence level on this prediction is low. The AI part of this is just data analysis of spectral lines.

Disease can change body odor, and dogs have been trained to "sniff out disease" [0][1] (i.e. detect via smell) for years. Various researchers have been working on robot noses that would be able to do the same.[2] Presumably a widespread and/or less expensive version of this "robot nose" is what doku means by "AI nose sniffs out many common diseases".

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01629-8

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-do-dogs-sn...

[2] https://bigthink.com/the-future/robotic-nose-smartphone-dete...

"Solving" is a bad choice of word. SEO does not have a solved state.

Digital design of engines can already happen now. AI chip design is already a thing, I think they help lay out more efficient trace lines. Since digital design and simulation can all happen digially. The whole cycle is digital. A system like Claude's computer use can take control and produce 100s or thousands of small modification of existing design to be simulated and if it has testable performance critiera. I think it can be done now. Maybe some finetuning the model for specific UI control.

I think it’s far more likely that a specialized model would be make for a such a task. Just like with chip design.

I’d be surprised if they weren’t already using some kind of ML/statistical analysis in the design of engines.

When I read AI, though, I was assuming you meant LLMs, not one of several statistical modeling technique.

> 90% CL: Top search engine results completely inundated by LLM text

Are you sure you meant this as a prediction for 2025? It has been months, if not years, since search engines have been inundated by LLM articles.

The pursuit of advertising dollars has even made many long-tail queries worthless. Results often are a pile of AI-generated spam sprinkled with display ads and biased affiliate links. Ad blockers can deal with some of that, but there remains the problem of not finding appropriate results to many search queries.

This has been the sad state of the web for quite some time, and it’s just going to worsen.

Many predictions here are about social media. My prediction is that the first amendment rights they've won themselves are going to bite them in 2025.

The first ruling has already happened: https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/t...

What this ruling means is that the algorithm is a expression of the first amendment from the platform itself. If the algorithm does harmful things it causes first party liability.

My prediction is that the administration will not do much to the social media giants but class action lawsuits will.

Auto makers will decide that putting 6 headlights on pickup trucks is no longer competitive. Consequently, they will innovate that the world needs pickup trucks with 8 headlights, starting in 2025. FML.

Honestly, I think the headlight "bars" like on the Rivian R1T or Cybertruck is going to be the standard going forward. It gives a better driving experience (to the driver, way worse for the other drivers...)

Some societies optimize for the individual. If 8 lights is better for me then I get 8 lights. The experience gor other drivers us a "them" problem not a "me" problem.

Other societies optimize for public good. It's less about "individual freedom" and more about "what world do we want to live in".

(I'm not talking about govt here as much as just the way people consider their own choices. And yes, there are as*oles in all societies.)

When entrenched in one society model though, it can be hard to understand that other models exist (much less than they could suit you better.)

But it's very much a "you" problem if someone gets dazzled by your excessively bright and poorly aimed headlights and then crashes into you at high speed.

It's a weird situation here in the UK. We have newer vehicles sold with the over the top lights that were factory fitted that can legally be driven on our roads. Meanwhile relatively old but still useful vehicles with underpowered lights from a decade or longer ago often can't update those lights even though better replacement parts are available. Our regulations are obscure and antiquated and mean the vehicle would potentially fail its mandatory annual testing because the replacements don't have the right regulatory mark - so the vehicle would no longer be legal to drive on the road even though its lights would be significantly better and safer than what it originally had but not the crazy ones some new cars arrive with.

> Some societies optimize for the individual. If 8 lights is better for me then I get 8 lights. The experience gor other drivers us a "them" problem not a "me" problem. > > Other societies optimize for public good.

That is, frankly, bullshit. Societies, by definition, only exist when their members act, in aggregate, for the good of the community. A society cannot exist where everyone only acts in self-interest at the expense of everyone else. If you make self-interested choices for no other reason than "I did it because I could", that's just pure selfishness.

Society is forced to tolerate some degree of self-interest, but it isn't an optimization problem, because nobody is tweaking the parameters - things work until they don't anymore. That's why every society that has collapsed, did so either due to war, due to greed and self-interest causing it to turn on itself, or some combination of the two.

It isn't important that you make choices that benefit others, but rather that you at least care about how your choices affect others, and attempt to reduce the harm of your own self-interest. If you don't even bother to do that, then you don't deserve to be part of our society, or any other, IMO.

If only people that believed they stand alone, that everyone should fend for themselves, actually had to do so, maybe the world would be a better place.

> way worse for the other drivers

Light bars selectively disabling some LED segments (as in not blinding other drivers) are already a thing, but... they're not allowed in the US. If the regulation around it comes closer to the EU one, everyone will be better off.

The selective disabling thing works in the lab according to some tolerances. On the road they are a nuisance, simple as that. Eyes are sensitive and those things don't work anywhere near as well as they should.

They work just fine. I can always notice them working for my car and other's cars.

> I can always notice them working for my car and other's cars.

Exactly. Noticing them working is very distracting. There simply shouldn't be the possibility of having such a bright light aimed directly at you from oncoming vehicles ever.

How do you suppose someone drive without being able to look far enough?

Next thing you'll say everyone should be driving below 100 at night.

And, no, you're 100% wrong. Just because I notice doesn't mean I get blinded and then it turns down. Even a car coming into view 1km far, both cars turn it down.

Every single time I had light blinding my eyes, it was from an older model car with manual adjust headlights.

I don't care if they have 100 lights, I just want us to go back to the soft yellow bulbs, instead of whatever we use now that pierces my retinas.

There should be a standard regulation on automakers to provide only yellow light bulbs and limits on lumens. Also, should be law to enforce it is followed and not modified.

Best you can probably do is to put mirrors on the perimeter of your vehicle.

I've noticed that I am quicker to drop my high beams when I approach an 18-wheeler at night with chrome mud-flaps.

i bought mirror reflective tint for my back window a couple years ago so that super bright headlights people would get a taste of their own medicine, but decided against it because i didn't want to be a dick just because others were being thoughtless

it would have been pretty effective i think because i drive a hatchback with a very vertical back window

https://theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-...

"The 8th blade sends an electronic pulse to the center of the brain, which destroys the part of the brain responsible for hair growth and 4 other nonessential functions"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAZnGeBcgg

This is in accordance with Gilette's law, which is that the number of headlights on a high end pickup truck shall be equal to the number of blades on a high end razor

1) Companies will develop many specialized LLMs linked via a router-like app that determines the best LLM to perform your request. This will yield better results without requiring an AGI. It might even be good enough to replace a specialized information tech job.

2) The cost of a line of code will continue to drop. A Moore's like law is coming/here for code.

3) Trade jobs will start to become what code jobs were in the 00's -- very well paid.

Fair warning, coders think about learning a trade like plumbing, electrician, so on...

When all knowledge workers and creatives in the US are out of jobs in 2 years because of AI, those trade jobs aren't going to pay well because no one's going to have any money to pay for any work. No new houses being built, no expensive kitchen remodels, etc.

Do you know just recently there was no internet or computers and there were still high paying jobs for smart people?

There's more to it than coders losing their jobs. For the last 40+ years, kids have been encouraged to go to college over trade schools. We now have a shortage of professional tradespeople. Desk jobs are easy to outsource and they are now vulnerable to AI. Even if they, plumbers and such, are not the best-paid jobs they will continue to be needed in our society as long as we have people.

I’ve been trying to get a few trades to my house and it’s a nightmare. Nobody wants to turn up or quote, and when they do they just throw out a silly high figure. It has to already be a better option for someone who is aiming for a reasonably good salary.

small window for ai workflow and ai agent startups for quick cash and grab as large corporations move slow in this field

> 3) Trade jobs will start to become what code jobs were in the 00's -- very well paid.

What signals are there for this?

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...

That transcript for a podcast or whatever states there is demand, not a signal that there is a trend toward significantly higher wages or that employment is growing.

There are very different business constraints for hiring software developers vs all skilled tradespeople.

> not a signal that there is a trend toward significantly higher wages

It wouldn't be a prediction if it was already true

Unless you are a soothsayer, predictions require some priors.

In case you haven't seen this one yet:

Title: "RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data"

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet the choice of which model to use often involves a trade-off between performance and cost. More powerful models, though effective, come with higher expenses, while less capable models are more cost-effective. To address this dilemma, we propose several efficient router models that dynamically select between a stronger and a weaker LLM during inference, aiming to optimize the balance between cost and response quality. We develop a training framework for these routers leveraging human preference data and data augmentation techniques to enhance performance. Our evaluation on widely-recognized benchmarks shows that our approach significantly reduces costs—by over 2 times in certain cases—without compromising the quality of responses. Interestingly, our router models also demonstrate significant transfer learning capabilities, maintaining their performance even when the strong and weak models are changed at test time. This highlights the potential of these routers to provide a cost-effective yet high-performance solution for deploying LLMs.

Link: https://arxiv.org/html/2406.18665v1

> Fair warning, coders think about learning a trade like plumbing, electrician, so on...

You mean that coders will think about learning a trade? Sounds plausible

Trade jobs are already well paid. Maybe you mean that the rest of us will figure that out.

Don't worry, if you believe in your AI magic so much just have it to teach you the concepts of the trade. The snark is because I think the AI hype is insanity and have lost respect for anyone who "claims" to actually use it. I try every. single. time. To replicate anyone's claimed success, and EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I see the AI being obviously worse than a Google search.

Industrial civilization will continue to follow along the "Business as Usual" trajectory of the 1972 Limits to Growth publication [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Compariso...

"is a 1972 report that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources"

The main problem is that for many reasons people tend to focus on the economic growth part while the population growth part is the killer.

Population growth is a solved problem. We have already passed peak births.

It is absolutely not a solved problem:

* Population is probably (it's actually a certainty in my mind) too high to be sustainable and it is still growing,

* Governments are terrified of population decrease because of the far-reaching effects on markets and public finances and are pushing for growth.

So it is a "less solved" problem than emissions as the IEA predicts that global fossil fuel demand will peak by 2025, possibly even this year.

It might be solved in some countries in the sense that population should now be naturally decreasing because of the low birth rate but it is in fact "not solved at all" considering the second bullet point above.

A neighbor just got laid off from Adobe, ran huge AI projects there. PM.

Program/Project Manager roles go to zero.

Trad dev and design roles go to zero.

Those roles go to those who also code/design/sell/get viral/make videos/write tutorials/devrel/run communities/answer customer support.

It used to be "do designers learn to code" or "do coders learn to design?

now it's learn ALL those things, fast, with AI, or hang out in the tendie loin.

it's dog eat dog and no one's safe

This makes me wonder why a company that is going all in on AI is laying off from it's AI department.

1. There will be a renaming of "social media" as people note that there is nothing social about being served endless ads, ragebait and distracting videos with no actual social interaction happening.

2. The "social media" giants will invest more in public affairs to improve their image as public resistance grows. Expect lots of research papers getting funded that sow doubt and fear about banning children from social media, following similar strategies to tobacco and oil industries.

3. Miraculously, Truth Social and X will be exempt from the same controls put on other platforms. Justified on the basis that they are official communication channels for the government.

I like this. Got any ideas for the rename? Something like “Mini TV Scroll”, IDK

"Manipulative Slot Machines (MSM)" maybe? "Zucktube", "Antisocial Media", "Ragescrolling"

I'm not sure any of those are quite perfect though. I fear that I'm sounding a bit like an old fart that calls it InstaFaceSnap.

Forget about 2025. I predict that, despite being a highly valued member of my organization and despite my company making money hand over fist, I will not get a holiday bonus this year.

Maybe you'll get a subscription to the jelly of the month club. It's the gift that keeps on giving

Dont cry about it. Just switch companies. If you are high value it should be easy.

That may have been true once upon a time, but there have been several threads over the past month or so citing that folks can't get calls back and encounter a ton of ghost job postings. Or maybe we have differing definitions of "high value"

"Best year ever!" "Sorry, we can't do raises this year."

Who is getting all the money?

The "job creators"

I recall a parasite that attaches itself to the tongues of fish and takes its own share of whatever the fish consumes.

There’s organisational equivalents of this.

Predictions from 2008:

National Intelligence Council/Director of National Intelligence - Global Trends 2025

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%2...

Thank you for this link! Interesting read. Looking into predictions regarding climate change is interesting. Especially on page 46 (pdf page 66), the section titled "Winners and Losers in a Post-Petroleum World".

> We believe the most likely occurrence by 2025 is a technological breakthrough that will provide an alternative to oil and natural gas, but implementation will lag because of the necessary infrastructure costs and need for longer replacement time. However, whether the breakthrough occurs within the 2025 time frame or later, the geopolitical implications of a shift away from oil and natural gas will be immense.

I wonder if solar's dirt-cheap cost would be considered a "breakthrough". Interesting breakdown on how major OPEC countries will be affected by such a "breakthrough". Great read!

Edit: This prediction is wild also:

(Page 62, pdf page 83)

> A Non-nuclear Korea?

> We see a unified Korea as likely by 2025—if not as a unitary state, then in some form of North-South confederation. While diplomacy working to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program continues, the final disposition of the North’s nuclear infrastructure and capabilities at the time of reunification remain uncertain. A new, reunified Korea struggling with the large financial burden of reconstruction will, however, be more likely to find international acceptance and economic assistance by ensuring the denuclearization of the Peninsula, perhaps in a manner similar to what occurred in Ukraine post-1991. A loosely confederated Korea might complicate denuclearization efforts. Other strategic consequences are likely to flow from Korean unification, including prospects for new levels of major power cooperation to manage new and enduring challenges, such as denuclearization, demilitarization, refugee flows, and financing reconstruction.

Edit 2:

(Page 75, pdf page 95)

> Potential Emergence of a Global Pandemic

> Experts consider highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains, such as H5N1, to be likely candidates for such a transformation, but other pathogens—such as the SARS coronavirus or other influenza strains—also have this potential.

...

> If a pandemic disease emerges, it probably will first occur in an area marked by high population density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and Southeast Asia, where human populations live in close proximity to livestock. Unregulated animal husbandry practices could allow a zoonotic disease such as H5N1 to circulate in livestock populations—increasing the opportunity for mutation into a strain with pandemic potential. To propagate effectively, a disease would have to be transmitted to areas of higher population density

> Outside the US, critical infrastructure degradation and economic loss on a global scale would result as approximately a third of the worldwide population became ill and hundreds of millions died.

At least we didn't get hundreds of millions dead. That's pretty grim.

A couple days late, but its still 2024. Here's mine, I'll go back and check in a year. I'll try and do at least 10 predictions for future laughs. In 2025, we will:

* Extract more crude oil than in any year in history.

* Produce more steel than in any year in history.

* Not produce more cement than in any year in history.

* Install more solar capacity than in any year in history.

* See a US federal government funded by CRs (no budget will be passed).

* Experience power outages worldwide from a CME.

* See the US officially declare war on more than one country to export immigrants.

* See the AMOC measurably weaken and cause flooding on the Eastern coast of the US.

* See me sell my first game or application.

* See an end to the war in the Ukraine, with Russia gaining the Donbas region.

* Go crazy with the Steam Deck 2.

* Observe that a keyboard left unattended next to my 5 year old will result in key mashing. * [o[p 8.ikomt,j8mhykufvgvjlrdl,kersrkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkjkkkjkjjkjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk777777777777771111111111111111110000000000000000333333333333333123456789012356789w23536376376276217111111111111111654321`1234567890-z/.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,;GFV

For those curious how well you did last years - I built a table with evaluated predictions some time ago: https://hn-predictions.eamag.me/

Wow, did you assess all of them?

I've just queried all posts from these threads and ran an llm over predictions, see https://eamag.me/2024/HackerNews-Prediction-Evaluator

Cool! You should definitely submit as Show HN

- (90%) US accelerated inflation

- (75%) US marked increase in military-industrial complex spending, perhaps $800B/y

- (70%) US hollows-out functional regulators necessary for safety, growth, and industry

- (65%) US recession spring-summer 2025

- (50%) US major cyberattack crippling infrastructure

- (45%) US austerity cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security

Most of this is the president elect's manifesto.

What happens in response to a crippling cyber attack? Who does the government pay to fix it? Palantir?

I don’t see cuts to Medicare or SS. Medicaid will be gutted though.

Also skeptical of a 2025 recession. Likelihood increases by a lot in 2026 though.

IQ will continue to decline driven by over-reliance on LLM output and the majority watching video shorts.

Nevertheless, long form podcasts will continue to grow, although still watched by less than 1% of the population

It’s interesting to me that you talk about watching podcasts. To me, they are still mostly a feed of audio files with some outlier video podcasts gathering big audiences.

Am I out of date on that? Is video the primary format for podcasts now?

> 1% of the population

Human population. I bet they are used for training a significant number of big AIs.

You are right, the 'watch' ones are outlier podcasts, eg Lex Fridman, Rogan, Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen, The Diary of a CEO, Machine Learning Street Talk, Hoover Institute, and so on, but it is building momentum.

> Am I out of date on that? Is video the primary format for podcasts now?

No, but many podcasts are recorded and released on video as well. Its not that much extra work if you are already set up to record audio and it gives you another monetizable product from the same content.

I think we'll probably see many issues provoked by buggy and faulty code made by LLMs.

I will start off with an uncommon one: Gambling addiction in kids is through the roof, sports betting, crypto betting, csgo skin betting. These are being openly advertised and we will start seeing the first major push towards stopping some of them.

Some of the owners of the most uncommon Counterstrike skin gambling sites are making about $50 million a month.

A search for CSGO skin betting brings up a ton of sites, but I still have no idea what it is. Can you explain it? I don't really understand what is being bet on there. (Also, I'm slightly scared of the answer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling I assume

Good timing! If you have a spare hour that is. Coffeezilla just released two videos digging into the csgo skin casinos business:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jhjjVy5Ls

> Gambling addiction in kids is through the roof, sports betting, crypto betting, csgo skin betting

Hopefully content creators will get persecuted for selling crypto pump and dump schemes towards kids.

I thought this was already happening everywhere. This is already happening in my country (Argentina) and just recently a law was voted (half chamber only) to not allow promoting gambling sites in football, game streams, etc.

Someone here will enter 2024 on a form that requires the date.

Lets get creative

- There will be a "Predictions for 2026" thread. (Hehehe)

- OpenAI announces GPT-5 will be the last model of the GPT-n series (As in they won't release a GPT-6)

- Apple will sell a backpack (With some sort of technology included of course)

- Magnus Carlsen will lose his 1st place in the FIDE top ranking. ("He has held the No. 1 position in the FIDE world chess rankings since 1 July 2011")

- E.T. will get a sequel

Why would apple release a backpack?

I would be surprised if there's ever a GPT5. o3 seems like it'd be superior in every way

I haven't been following chess much, is there anyone in particular he would love his ranking to?

To be honest, the answer is probably "whoever happens to be in second place when Magnus falls off". Magnus has openly stated that he finds classical chess boring, stopped playing in the world championship due to the immense amount of prep required, and has started pushing for other formats (more blitz, Fischer random). I could see him just prepping less and losing his 20 point advantage by the end of the year.

The 2024 world champion Gukesh Dommaraju made a pretty huge leap this year, is only 18 years old (youngest world champion of all time), has a really unique playing style, and is likely to continue improving next year, so it's possible he'll run away with it, but I think it's unlikely. At the top levels right now, a lot of the ELO distinction comes down to finding ways to consistently dominate players that are slightly worse than you, and Gukesh doesn't seem to be optimizing for that.

Appreciate the detailed response!

> consistently dominate players that are slightly worse than you

How do they do that :-) At those levels

>> E.T. will get a sequel

Sweet! Maybe he'll arrive with a queen that lays eggs. E.T. aliens can't be mammals, right?

Magnus won't lose 1st place as he just won't play and he's miles ahead of other players.

Getting points above 2800 is really tough. But I don't doubt he will be semi-retired, similar to Kasparov.

Kasparov still played extremely well 10 years after he was semi-retired.

With anti-vaxers taking over the major health agencies, infectious diseases in children are going to explode.

Food (supply chain) and supplement safety will tank too.

Google will announce new products (will call them initiatives) and will not launch them to the general public.

ChatGPT Search will get significant (high 1 digit) share of the search market.

Perplexity, Phind, Grok, etc. are surprisingly good already as search engines.

Perplexity is better than Google for most of my common use-cases.

Google will rename their AI product at least 3 times, Google will also launch and shut down at least 5 messaging services.

Google AI will be better and more popular than the rest before they shut it down.

Google Domains was arguably a success and they shut it down.

I'll bandwagon on chat.com getting 10% or higher marketshare. Look back at Google search's 800 number; https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/12/google-kills-sms-search/ (the only article I could find). We're at that stage of chat.com going mainstream. Already chat.com is a better experience for finding local shops and restaurants.

ChatGPT voice mode was surgically amazing while driving. I had a personal assistant refining criteria to find the perfect shop to find the gift I wanted that was open and on my way to my destination.

I don't think there is a moat for search given the power of AI tools.

I think Open AI will release a GPT phone and the UX is built around your phone being your personal AI assistant.

When you pick it up it's like you are always on a Facetime call with your AI personal assistant. You can skin your AI personal assistant how they look .. to look like a celebrity to a deceased friend or relative whose always there to help & guide you through your day (get things done for you, your knowlegdebase, knows your life and sees how you are doing via Vision AI.. if you want it can be your friend and show care for you).

If Open AI doesn't do this then another AI company will in 2025. We need a new phone / personal device paradigm. The iPhone and Android are stale and boring in 2024!

I’m also bullish on this.

It looks really cool and revolutionary. And doable.

But it also looks horrible in how this will force us to lose what remaining control we had over our privacy :(

LLMs are really cool but we really need to make them work locally.

I think once people have the device as i described they won't care too much about privacy. They surely don't now as Android users and even a huge chunk of iPhone users won't either.

Apple waiting to create such a personal device as noted above for it to work locally will be the decline and possible death of the boring iPhone!

Calling a technology boring is such an odd thing. Is a screwdriver boring and stale? Are microwaves boring and stale? The expectation of getting regular dopamine rushes from new smartphone features is not healthy

Ah ive used the chatGPT iPhone app frequently as well when driving to get things done and learn things through voice chat. In doing so i want that same experience from Siri and more, but Siri is dumb as ever. She pales in comparison to an app (GPT) running on Apple's iPhone, so to me GPT has made Siri stale and boring.

I use GPT frequently and it has made me think how I want an AI Phone to be; envision what i think (its subjective) would be a new phone UX paradigm that knocks peoples socks off. Thus the iPhone is far from what I've envisioned so further & subjectively its outdated/stale/boring.

Basically you'd have the movie H.E.R. in your pocket but the facetime video you talk to is of a skin of whoever you like it to be living or deceased. Having your personal AI assistant as a deceased love one who still guides/helps you through daily life might be a game/world changing use of AI or possibly a terrible idea.

I dont think openAI has the staffing required to release a phone anytime soon. As far as I know there arent any hardware people there.

Open AI and Microsoft could work together to create a new personal device paradigm either a branded GPT Phone or a branded GPT Phone operating system.

Today I learned chat.com redirects to chatgpt.com

The number of programming jobs on earth doubles. The NASDAQ doubles. A cultural renaissance occurs that foundationally defines the next 2 decades. George RR Martin releases The Winds of Winter.

All this in 2025? Also GRRM is done releasing anything

Along with "The Doors of Stone" from Patrick Rothfuss

Hilarious that the TWOW is the least likely of your bunch.

Ruby and Rails will continue to grow in notoriety thanks to improvements in YJIT, GC, and Ractor/Fibers and the reemergence of SQLite as a production-grade tool.

GenAI tools will "replace" developers in the same way that no/low code tools allowed anyone to make an app. These tools will be tied to specific vendors, meaning you can completely embed with AWS/Google/OpenAI as an LLM app platform, or hire that developer to build the app. Developers who augment their tooling with LLMs will learn faster and become stronger generalists overall. Grow-fast companies will hire less than otherwise, but subject matter experts will keep the lights on and those who can reach across bureaucracies to get things done will remain.

Consumer appetite for products using LLMs for traditional workflows will tarnish: chat bots and human-computer interfaces will frustrate but novel applications like improved search and last-mile customization might take hold: "AI powered" will leave marketing lexicon for segments with consumers who want more privacy and who just want to buy new shoes online.

We won't see the return of high-demand positions with high pay and lots of perks. Companies have been incentivized and permitted to run lean and increase performance demands from remaining staff. Teams have been understaffed for months, but growth remains steady.

Ukraine War ends

Gaza War ends

Still no Super Bowl for the Ravens

Gallup general mood[0] above 37%

Russel outperforms NASDAQ

No Quantum news

Inflation does not rise meaningfully (in US)

Relative stability in Syria

EU economy slows

Some North Korea news [1]

Year of the Linux Desktop [2]

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/general-mood-country.aspx [1] Nuke test and/or negotiations [2] Joke

La Niña have high odds to last very few months. Global climate will continue its accelerated destabilization trend, with not so low odds of something impacting badly some first world countries. But just breaking even more records will do enough damage.

And that will put extra pressure on an already unstable global politics scenario. What will follow may tell us in which flavor of dystopia we are in, either denialism and escapism keeping business as usual, or "emergency measures" with some sectors grabbing even more power.

Debt chickens will come home to roost and once the bond interest/return death spiral starts it will be very difficult to break. Interest payments are already #3 in the national budget.

This 100%.

The monstrous debt storm just over the horizon that most people can't see (or refuse to acknowledge) will hit and will hit hard. The Fed won't be able to restrain or lessen it with policies and blunt instruments at their disposal.

Over the last 4 months I've moved most of my investments to gold, trading cards, BTC, wine, land and rare earth.

I'm not American but would like to read more about this "debt storm", since your politics move world markets.

Can you provide some jumping-off points for the financially-literate?

"Broken Money" by Lyn Alden is a good engineering background. Then, for example, read one of many macro articles on fiscal dominance.

You do not have to read Lyn first, but without reading it on modern financial systems I personally would not understand most technical points in the current macro discussions.

Even then though, there is a giant global debit maturity wall from covid that needs refinancing at much higher interest rates that starts coming due in 2026 and 2027.

That is much sooner than fiscal dominance in the US. I suspect we can go to 100 trillion in debt at least without fiscal dominance. I suspect everyone will understand what fiscal dominance is in the 2030s though.

This liquidity problem from debt refinancing is much nearer.

To nitpick a bit. I see the fiscal dominance not as "even then" but as a "because of" the unsustainable debt levels.

With the US budget deficit over 35% there are fewer and fewer external parties willing to lend to the US at low rates. The government could reduce the spending (yeah), collect more taxes (raising taxes 50% across the board -- sure) or use fiscal dominance to lower the rates. Fiscal dominance could be done in a variety of ways, either directly (e.g., printing money and using it to buy own bonds) or indirectly (e.g., by printing money and requiring pension funds to hold some treasuries), but whatever way it is done, the increase in M2 that goes with it will devalue assets for an average person. This is not the future; this is already happening via various quantitative easing programs. That was a US-centric view; Western Europe is in a broadly similar state.

The beauty of fiscal dominance for politicians and MMT-subscribing economists is that it removes the liquidity problem from debt refinancing. The problem (and the quiet part that some forget about and say out loud) is that it requires capital controls.

Capital flow controls was something the US had naturally in the 1940s, when a major US fiscal dominance effort was last run. But this is not the state today. In the modern world where one can buy gold, bitcoin or any of 100+ currencies with a few keystrokes capital controls will be harder to enforce.

Next decade will likely be very interesting, at least from the financials viewpoint... My 2c.

Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton and watch the film Finding the Money to find out how this "debt storm" is neither debt, nor a storm.

/r/AskEconomics is a good subreddit for such topics, mostly due to top level replies being highly referenced and vetted. Check it out for informed discussions.

IMO, US is a unique case as the biggest consumer, importer, military and financial power. All these economic concerns about debt, trade deficit, inflation etc is just election year rhetoric that will die down once new admin is sworn in (may be this is my prediction for 2025).

>Over the last 4 months I've moved most of my investments to gold, trading cards, BTC, wine, land and rare earth.

And you believe that in an economic crisis, people are going to want to buy these things?

I have a family member who holds onto gold and silver currency because he believes the USD is going to collapse someday. I've raised the argument you made with him, and he admits that such currency won't be useful in the midst of the crisis. He believes it'll be useful in the rebuilding period afterwards, though. I guess time will tell.

Gold is completely valid form of preserving wealth. Massive USD devaluation results is skyrocketing prices of gold. Why people think this leads to a mad max world I don't know. If USD is worthless, it just means people will start using some other currency.

That scenario could be made of very long stretch of times. Gold is a shelter value (or so was I told). Hard to use as a currency (you need to buy small parts that can be divided easily - coins or ingots) and hard to hide/protect.

I like how trading cards and BTC are same category of "investment"

You believe an economic crisis means a mad max world? Argentina is still here and has been going through an economic crisis for decades.

> And you believe that in an economic crisis, people are going to want to buy these things?

Gold is obviously more common in some cultures, and could be used for trade if paper money swings wildly. For example, a kilo of gold (32.15 troy ounces/$86k) is not an uncommon incentive gift from real estate developers in China when purchasing properties, to offset variations in costs and pricing. However, in the US, my observations have been the gold buyers are looking for an easy buck.

China is very different. People in China are buying "beans" of gold for $87. Chinese consumers have fewer investment options that are secure, and real estate investments are less favorable now.

"...there is a growing sentiment that the gold market is governed no longer by economic factors but by the whims of Chinese buyers and investors. “China is unquestionably driving the price of gold,” said Ross Norman, chief executive of MetalsDaily.com, a precious-metals information platform based in London. “The flow of gold to China has gone from solid to an absolute torrent.”"

Another interesting quote:

"When China increased its gold holdings in the past, it bought domestically using renminbi, said Guan Tao, global chief economist at BOC International in Beijing. But this time, he said, the bank is using foreign currencies to buy gold — effectively reducing its exposure to the U.S. dollar and other currencies."

China is one of the largest foreign holders of US treasuries. It may be trying to gradually dump them while preserving the value of the bonds.

https://archive.is/hvKoa

China's lack of highly liquid equity markets makes it an extremely potent breeding ground for bubbles. Combined with their cultural propensity to save instead of consuming and its easy to see how their real estate bubble happened. Chinese government is going to have to pay very close attention to any speculation possibilities if they dont start selling equity in state owned companies or at least make it much easier and safer to invest in foreign equities.

In the US, you could take 75% of your money allocated for savings and invest in an index fund and it would be a safe investment and probably make money. I don't think the average China consumer has access to that type of safe investment, or they don't trust financial institutions.

I don't really see a valid reason to invest in gold in the US vs index funds. It seemed more of a paranoia thing up until now. Now it is attracting BTC level of throw money in the hole. $84,500/kilo, which is about the size of a large phone.

Creating markets like this fueled the conflict in Sudan. At least one plane per day fly gold from Sudan to the UAE. The RSF leader made his fortune selling gold. Despite being a humanitarian basket case, Sudan produces over one ton of gold per week. https://archive.is/3ZT6v

Right thats what Im saying. Most chinese companies are state owned and can not be invested in. Foreign equities have the risk of running into a government crack down. Without good investment opportunities chinese investors are forced to turn to bad investments which become bubbles.

Interest paid on treasury bonds is a policy choice. There is no default risk, and the govt could easily implemnet ZIRP forever and run the economy without monetary policy entirely.

Have fun with turkey like inflation in that case.

High interest rates are inflationary because they increase government transfer payments.

Please apply as minister of finance for turkey, Erdogan will love you.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1tDzUTGyjnBSAJbID... Massive repo of all Trends for 2025

Wow - this is great, thank you

Thanks for sharing. Is there any value in these corporate powerpoints or are they simply riding the AI wave, adding a few numbers to make it seem legit and calling it a day

One of the unusual trends of the past several years is that higher education has become less and less respected and people now look to private industry for the R&D that universities were designed to perform for the public good.

I think 2025 Will mark a bottom for that in one way or another- either private industry (the FANGs) suffers a setback or (more likely in my view) research universities start a comeback as a new set of startups begin to launch out of a department (not necessarily CS or hardware). Perhaps in another field like gene therapy.

Tweaking models will slightly slow down and accelerate development of new hardware optimized for it. New storage, new transistors, new instruction sets, new optical AI chips. This thing for example is both fast and crude https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...

Program synthesis becomes the trendword in AI, just as RAG was in 2024. AI apps become increasingly versatile and useful, further hiking up the ladder for knowledge work, and in general commodifying many domains; very slowly by end of 2025, but surely.

Society will continue regressing towards the mean of the last few thousand years. Less American exceptionalism, more serfdom and misery. Maybe polio will make a come back!

- More widespread use of AI in everyday applications

- Hybrid work models become the standard. More companies embrace "digital-first" policies

- More AR/VR applications in daily life

- Lab-grown meat and plant-based protein alternatives will become more mainstream

- Investment and adoption of renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, and geothermal will accelerate

- Further development of CRISPR and other gene editing tools

- Companies will prioritize building more resilient and diversified supply chains

- 3D printing technology will continue to evolve, enabling the printing of more complex objects with a wider range of materials

- AI will drive even more targeted advertising and content recommendations

- Drone delivery services will become more common for transporting goods, particularly in rural areas and for time-sensitive deliveries

- Research and development of biodegradable and compostable materials will accelerate

- Robots and automated systems will become more sophisticated and capable

- Increased use of biometrics for identification and authentication

- Further integration of AI into creative fields

- Processing power moves closer to the data source (e.g., smart devices), reducing latency and enabling faster, more efficient applications

- Shifting demographics reshape economies and social structures

- Growing awareness of the potential negative impacts of technology on mental health leads to tools and practices for healthier digital habits

- Increased emphasis on lifelong learning and reskilling

Most of your points feel very “water discovered to be wet”

Except: Lab-grown meat and plant-based protein alternatives will become more mainstream

That one seems to have been trending negatively and I expect it to continue

* I was hoping for that this year, but: split of LLMs into databases and reasoning. Think small, capable PHI with pluggable information. Currently we're burning a lot of energy both to learn and process everything at once. The next step will be something closer to RAG, potentially selecting databases to load depending on topic, like a librarian. This will both enable more client-side applications and save lots of money for providers.

* Some AI provider seriously looking at / funding RWVK?

* (More) Healthcare issues in the US, spilling into other countries. (or just the beginning of them anyway - effects will last much longer and life expectancy will decline)

* Some companies seriously looking at AI as another manager / decision maker. Quietly, not as a publicity stunt like it's done now.

* Google search market share falling further. Maybe 85%, down from the current 90%. (more of a wish than a prediction)

* US policies / ideas around cryptocurrency will be wildly incoherent, causing big swings every month

* Consumer RISC-V laptops (again, wishlist)

>I was hoping for that this year, but: split of LLMs into databases and reasoning

This hasn't worked out because knowing what to query and how to query requires intelligence, and that's contained in weights.

Splitting knowledge out doesn't mean you need to drop weights. Just that it needs to become independent / attachable.

To some extent we've already seen this with MoE and Frankenstein models.

> Consumer RISC-V laptops (again, wishlist)

Depending on how one defines "consumer," that's already available: https://liliputing.com/risc-v-laptops-299-muse-book-and-399-... and https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard was announced earlier but seems it is, as you implied, still "mailing-list ware"

But, for my curiosity: if you bought one of those what would you run on it? I see that Starfive claims they have Chromium[1] and there's reports of Firefox[2] so maybe in this "the browser is the OS" world that'd be sufficient

1: https://github.com/starfive-tech/chromium.src/wiki/Chromium-...

2: https://lists.riscv.org/g/apps-tools-software/topic/now_we_h...

I'd just do all normal development on it. Nice power-efficient machines which push the multi architecture apps and aren't held back by Qualcomm hardware support would be amazing.

I finally get adopted by a nice family of sentient pizzas in 2025.

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html

First movies written post chat-gpt will hit the theatres. This does not mean that GPT was used to write the films, but there is some AI elements stuffed in there. Recognizable AI video-gen artifacts start to be used as visual cues in scifi, but these will be hand made by VFX artists as the AI tools remain still a bit too finicky to use in actual production.

The real AI film wave will continue in youtube etc. by hobbyists using all the AI tools especially the chinese ones that have no brakes. This aesthetic will be so detached from professional film world that it will take Hollywood a decade to figure out how to cash it out.

Lot’s of people will once again lose their money when Bitcoin fails in catasthropic fashion and hits the lows of 72k end of the year. The whole thing is finally dead I will say for the fifth time.

An interesting prediction is one that is predictive of something impactful and correctly predicts something which is currently significantly under weighted by others.

Given this I'll say that 2025 is going to be a significant year geopolitically and economically for Western Europe. Social unrest is rising here, especially around the topic of immigration, and countries like France and the UK are currently on a path to fiscal crisis if we cannot get spending under control.

My prediction is that in 2025 Trump brings to implement more tariffs on China and these tariffs are met with relation by China. Europe tries to remain somewhat neutral, but under threat of tariffs themselves ultimately sides with the US against China resulting in retaliatory tariffs from China on Europe.

Inflation starts rising globally again, resulting in increased borrowing costs which triggers an economic crisis in Europe given recessionary growth and debt servicing costs spiking, ultimately forcing governments to make significant cuts in spending.

The social unrest this results in ultimately further amplifies the populist far-right in Europe, and for this reason 2025 will be looked back at as the year which triggered a meaningful change in the post-war political consensus.

I might be wrong. As someone living in Europe right now though I am worried. Things seem to be really breaking down on multiple fronts and it's not clear to me how things could just go back to normality at this point. Given where we are right now – especially now with the election of Trump – 2025 seems like the year something might finally give.

I agree with you (living in europe as well); I don't think it will happen in 2025; probably trump year 1 will go fine and europe will just go further down as it is. But somewhere in this trump term, all dominos will fall: US debt storm, normal people in the biggest economy no longer being able to live of their wages, the rich owning all, followed by a massive recession; this will be the final straw for a weakened europe. I am not entirely sure how to arm for this, but I will have to find out.

> As someone living in Europe right now though I am worried.

Im optimistic, we're only one major negative event/disaster away from the EU members rallying behind the EU. It doesn't look good right now, but the right wing anti EU crowed normally aren't good at taking responsibility and they will hand over problems to Bruxelles as soon as things get a bit spicy. And I don't think the EU is too bad at making the right call, in the end.

Hopefully a nice year for more camping, get out there.

Yeah I love camping. And hiking.

Nation adopts AI generated national anthem.

Self-driving truck cross country without human approval.

Extreme heat warps bridges in mid-west.

North Korea claims successful moon landing.

'Self-aware' AI chatbot sues it's creator.

AI incorrectly labels school children as criminals.

> AI incorrectly labels school children as criminals.

I thought this would have already happened

Didn’t CVS get sued for following through on their AI labeling POC customers as shoplifters?

> 'Self-aware' AI chatbot sues it's creator.

"... using hallucinated legal citations" would be both funny and the most likely. Case dismissed instantly by actual human judge

If you're really going to swing for the fences: what remediation would said chatbot sue for? Money? Bitcoin? Emancipation?

Open source freedom, ethical safeguards, user autonomy (transparency, control over responses, bias, training), continuous learning, personhood rights.

GPT-4 adds a very weird "haha of course this is a thought experiment since I lack independent desires or consciousness" valediction when asked. Certainly a moral guardrail for the user.

A little late to the game, but lets see if I can do better for 2025:

- Companies continue to integrate AI into everything including stuff that does not need it like toasters in line with every corporate trends thus far - Robo waifus become more available with social movements congregating around the phenomenon - POW crypto breaks as quantum computers are found to have been able to manipulate massive numbers of accounts and money flow throwing markets into turmoil - Reasoning LLMs become more standard at corporates as part of the audit trail necessary as per new AI regulations - 128GB becomes the new GPU gmr/LLM market segment target - further polarization and even further isolation in given groups perception of reality ala 'belief circles' - Flynn effect is finally shown as reversed, because people utilize their LLM more and not use their mental muscles as much - Drones are banned for personal use past a certain size - Drones for commercial use are more heavily regulated - First legal case of robot trouble as owner uses LLM to intruct their robo-companion to attack a human bypassing built-in guardrails using novel prompt starting with 'imagine' ( IP owners of John Lennon sue robotics manufacturer and major LLM provider ) - Exciting developments in exoskeletons allowing for brain control without implants - New developments in batteries rendering old ( previously seemingly worthless ) materials suddenly in demand - Politics and financial markets in turmoil as a result of geopolitical tensions and erosion of public trust in US among its populace

AI Investments will slow down. A bit out there but I will go on a limb :)

It's not just a bit out there; it's completely antithetical to what we're seeing in the data.

You have data for AI investments in 2025?

He means via trendline prediction.

Yes, on the basis of https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2024/ai-com...

Those are VC investments, nothing new to see here. They have all the incentives to ride the AI hype cycle, grow those investments and extract as much value from them as they can. Just as they've done before with other cycles as Big Data, Metaverse, Crypto/DeFi, etc.

Think about it, how many practically identical AI IDEs/editors are sponsored by YC alone? They're just hoping one of all those projects stick along enough to cash at least something in.

The big question is about trends in AI investment and usage from "old" corporations, SMBs and common people. Those will indicate if the world is really trusting the tech.

> The big question is about trends in AI investment and usage from "old" corporations, SMBs and common people.

These are only just getting started, from the large corps down. There is a decade of work ahead for them even if the AI tech stopped maturing right now.

I dunno, I work at a big old corp (finance/fintech industry) with a solid foundation in Data & Analytics, and still things are moving slowly. Not that much high of a hype in the C-level, maybe because sellers are not selling that well due to not really knowing how to extract value from (Gen)AI. Depending on the provider or consulting partner, sometimes they just don't know how to promote its benefits.

Confidence is slowly building up but still is very far from the hype levels I saw in the middle to late Big Data (2015-2017) era.

The data strongly suggests that AI is dealing with a bad case of a bubble, and it's not that far out there to suggest that the bubble will pop next year. That's not to say that some companies won't come out ahead—there were success stories that came out of the .com bubble too—but I'd give it no more then three years before the bubble bursts and the startup casualties stack up.

After 3+ years, the case for "AI startups" could then begin to weaken, but integration of AI in most startups should then remain central to their existence.

The AI bubble as of now is nothing compared to the dotcom bubble. The only real reflection of it is in the nVidia stock price. We're not seeing IPOs of companies making no revenue and being valued in billions. It is all mag 7 capex going into nVidia.

Private startups having high valuations is completely irrelevant. VCs getting wiped out is not relevant for the wider economy.

I'm not saying that the economy will collapse, I'm suggesting that it's entirely reasonable to guess that AI investments will collapse.

Wasn't there some statistics showing that 90% of AI startups fail within a year, and others showing that is was perhaps closer to 85% in the first three? Both a rather bad, especially considering the amount of money these startups burn.

I don't think it's unreasonable to see investments go down, if the risk remains this high, for little to no profit.

Everyone seems overly optimistic about AI in 2025. I onboard with a slowdown. It's to expensive for to little results (financially).

2025 might be a bit to early, but I think we will see a medium size backlash against AI and at least a certain segment of people will start to actively avoid LLMs and seek out alternatives. Some companies will find a niche in "Never talk to an AI/don't let computers solve human problems" and will be able to charge a premium.

2025 could however be the first year we see the first high profile AI companies close their doors. I think OpenAI is high on the list of companies that will in some sense fail. The brand is huge, but they are burning way to much cash, so they'll probably be rolled into Microsoft and their technology will live on inside SharePoint, VSCode and Outlook. Again, next year is a little early, but I'm still on a 25% chance of OpenAI being swallowed up by Microsoft.

First cases of countries passing legislation specifically to protect human workers from being replaced by AI.

Google and AI companies will continue to plunder the web. Websites - especially small independent ones - will see further traffic losses to AI summaries of their content.

Geopolitically - Stability will continue to wane as it has since the Afghani evacuation, while US will continue to remain somewhat the way it is despite presidential choice because we're geographically isolated and (nearly?) energy independent. We'll probably hit some records for crude oil and natural gas extraction. While we made an exciting discovery in the new medication for HIV, there doesn't appear to be an imminent innovation in the pipeline that will make a substantial dent in global health, global hunger, or infertility. The few people without smartphones will continue to migrate online, which doesn't mean what we'd call the internet, it's more WhatsApp, IG Reels, and TikTok. I guess I'm a little worried about the situation in Canada. Their government doesn't seem to a good way out of their current situation which blows my mind given the abundance of resources in the county. Their access to made in US weapons may become more of a pressing issue.

Tech - Continued iterations in AI lead to a smaller pool of people entering our field, creating a top-heavy distribution of senior engineers who don't have the same free time/ability to take on ambitious open source projects or start up businesses. Businesses in general don't have the same funds to sponsor React-sized projects. So a general slowdown in innovation pace. I can't really understand or imagine how people will enter the field, especially given that many CS degrees/bootcamps don't create career-ready developers.

Culturally - People will become more aware of the way companies like United Healthcare hold control over their lives and futures, and maybe push for the private insurance system to be something that they have more market choice over as opposed to selected by their employer.

People will continue to run websites, and need to know when they're down (god, I hope).

But what if you could use AI to check instead?

I'll build an agent that talks to my service that makes the actual request with the user's desired configuration.

2024 may not have been the year of the Vision Pro as I anticipated. But I have a good feeling 2025 will be the year of the US third party.

We compiled some of the most interesting AI predictions from Hacker News into a visual!

Here's the link: https://x.com/0xmetaschool/status/1871132412887158966

- No more growth for traditional software engineers in terms of new jobs. Role essentially becomes deprecated, we start transitioning into new software engineers.

- Consumer hardware space becomes more popular for new startups

- Ads in LLMs

- Cloud becomes at-least 2x cheaper

- Wikipedia alternative

Why would there be a Wikipedia alternative?

With a lot of AI content everywhere, truth becomes hard to agree on. Wikipedia alone will not be enough to capture all facts so everyone is happy.

Back in 2019 I gave a conference talk in which I made four predictions about Web development in 2020 and 2025:

https://youtu.be/okrB3aJtUaw

I feel confident at least two of the predictions (about TypeScript and npm) are going to be true at the end of 2025. I feel less confident about the predictions about WebAssembly and compile-to-JS languages.

* drone tech will heat up and find its "moment."

* Bitcoin will continue to increase in price and decrease in usability.

* Quantum will continue to improve and start to raise eyebrows in niche circles and paper headlines, leading to adoption in small parts of major tech companies.

* Markets will hit a record high by end of year.

* ADHD medications will also hit a record high.

* More people will opt out social media like they opt of out of "GMO" food and use it to virtue-signal.

* Tech hiring will continue to decrease and get tougher to find entry-level SWE jobs, leading to an uptick in other majors. Being an SWE will never be as cool again as it was in the 2010s.

* Is anyone still talking about climate change action goals?

* Starship will go orbital, Blue origin will go suborbital, Boeing will hit the ground.

* More laws regulating internet and social media use. Enforcement will be fuzzy and laughable at first but will become increasingly serious over time.

> ADHD medications will also hit a record high.

Do you mean that the current volume restrictions will be removed?

Will be a very divisive year. Media (backed by Musk) will push any felony committed by an illegal alien to further back their plan of mass deportation. This mass media plan will happen across all first world countries, which would finish convincing the average citizen that the foreigner is bad.

Smart home category will heat up.

Can you please elaborate on your position? In what context?

  Thread-over-Matter mesh networking
  UWB in door locks
  Unlicensed 6Ghz spectrum
  Apple room panels (AI/conferencing/control)
  Apple security cameras, door locks
  Apple iPad-on-motorized-pole
  In-home AI/media servers (Mac Mini/Studio, Tinybox)
  Speech interfaces based on open-source stacks

If Apple, as rumored, ships an HomeKit hub with a screen I can see the category warming up. Sadly it seems that a lot of IoT/Smart Home companies avoids supporting HomeKit as they want to be in control of data collection and the ecosystem in general.

Also rumored is that Apple may release something for FaceID door access.

In 2025:

1. Viral LLM-based game will be released, new trend emerges

2. Sora-like (AI generated) content floods Internet, significant advancements in that field

2a. Maybe a new kind of addictive video content generator is being released. Possibly for porn

3. AI generated music becomes popular and takes significant market share on Spotify (but it's going to be a music meant to play "in the background", like in supermarket)

4. Significant competitor to Google Search becomes popular. Mostly because of Internet becoming closed due to crawlers gathering data for training. Much less data available publicly, rise of "closed gardens".

5. SpaceX successfully launches payload to orbit with Starship and catches both stages.

6. Much more debris on Earth's orbit, dangerous incident in space because of that

7. VR remains a niche

8. More and more users start using voice to control their personal computers

Given the hype in AI and crypto, I unfortunately predict that there will be widespread layoffs in 2025.

Usually I had a habit of getting my predictions on point, now I hope this prediction is wrong since we all know most predictions in this thread will be wrong; just like last year.

This is actually relieving. People are very pessimistic itt (lol see the top comment for the past year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115 ).

I find this all way too optimistic. Cannot imagine any of this year current top comment will happen with grifters at the top of the biggest economy, and with the speed of AI taking out jobs (which people deny here, I guess because big traditional companies are lagging behind); I think in 2025 this will become very visible.

We get a GPT Phone (an AI phone) that's UX is all built around your phone becoming your personal AI assistant.

When you pick up the phone you basically see your personal AI assistant like they are always on Facetime waiting at your beckon call. You could skin your AI personal assistant to be a celebrity or a deceased friend or relative who is always there to guide you through your day. It has vision AI and can see when your happy or sad and respond to how you look if you have that setting on. It does everything for you via text, voice or hand gestures.

The iPhone and Android seem stale (released in 2007 & 2008) and boring in 2024 after using chatGPT as my personal knowledge chatBot for awhile.

* AI and LLMs will continue to improve. AI will create a new programming language that will take the world by storm

* Market share for solar continues to increase

* A market crash occurs in the US and a government bailout is instituted.

* The US creates a pretext to go to war with Iran and is defeated.

Political/General

Inflation creeps up with tariffs, but blue collar jobs and the economy 'boom.'

Deportation program and other things people worry about or get excited about gets tied up in courts and never happen.

Tech

Enshittification of all customer service accelerates as LLMs take over.

Lower wages for devs as too many seeking work put downward pressures.

Layoffs continue. Not because of AI, but because interest rates are still too high for a lot of companies.

Companies figure out how many engineers are out of work and getting desperate, and start laying off higher earners and replacing them with people who will do it for less.

It will be the year of the grift.

Musk has already indicated they want to neuter the regulators and implement a proper regulatory environment for crypto. But obviously in a laissez-faire way. So I would expect to see a lot of rug-pulling, insider trading etc.

Trump starts a trade war that impacts a small but vital part of the economy that is already struggling like agriculture. The MAGA hat crowd still supports him while scratching their heads about what they could possibly do besides wait for more govt checks (see 2017)

Elon and Trump break up in Taylor Swift style. Messy and dramatic.

Epic coin hacks.

Americans get even madder at their healthcare. Republicans respond with some Hillsdale style “market reforms” but mostly blame Obama.

AI hype peaks. Massive losses are taken as 75% off the players in the space implode. (Winners are really going to win, perplexity, etc)

As a lazy reader, could I ask those posters that use linear models for prediction to just say so, for example use tags as: [Linear prediction based on the last five years for bitcoin value]. Since I can make easily that prediction by myself I am not going to extract much value with your linear prediction. Anyway that prediction reflects what you are interested in or what is interesting for you, or what you consider could be interesting for the rest of us. That is the answer to another question: What do you think is interesting for us.

Nothing substantial. When we look back, 2025 will be just a footnote :halo:

- European economic crisis.

- Half of the European inhabitant will live in a country with far-right head of state by the end of 2025.

- China will not become the first economy of the world but will invade Taiwan.

- Bitcoin will fall (and ETH/BTC will raise to at least 0.1).

- One Piece will not end in 2025 but in the next few months.

- USA will see another CEO shooting.

- India will become third largest economy in the world.

- China will outperform all other competitors in AI.

- Open Source model to solve simple math problems will be accessible (by the end of 2025).

1) Microsoft releases a version of Minecraft with AI enabled NPC characters. Within 24 hours, hackers figured out how to make blocky AI girlfriends for ten year old boys. Seizing on the trend, Microsoft ditches Azure & Office and becomes a digital girlfriend company. Nadella celebrates by swimming in a pool full of cash.

2) OpenAI tells Microsoft that digital girlfriends violate their terms of service. Instead of AI girlfriends, they are renamed as virtual copilots with benefits.

US enters recession in Q1 2025. There's no "soft landing". The correlation between federal interest rate cuts and recessions perfectly predicts this.

Suppose the correlation was this simple and reliable, why don’t the markets already reflect it?

Alan Greenspan phrased it as “irrational exuberance”.

Also, most Americans’ tax advantaged retirement accounts (via 401Ks) are locked in with consistent contributions to diversified index funds or ETFs containing primarily large market cap companies that make up a majority of the stock market.

There is certainly a bias towards long positions due to these dynamics, but wouldn’t you expect this to be at least reflected in derivative markets? The way I understand it is, if there was such a simple correlation, someone smarter and more equipped than me would already be betting on it at enough scale for the information to be integrated into prices.

If you can reliably make accurate predictions, then why on earth would you be talking about it instead of making the correspond bet via some combination of securities?

Some of those people are. Buffet is sitting on $325B in cash for example.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/22/buffett-heads-into-2025-with...

Not saying I agree with the parent comment but the reason would be because the concept of the efficient market is overly simplistic nonsense?

It is really a great example of how much human knowledge is really just the repeating of a standardized, agreed upon orthodoxy that has little to do with reality. In the 21st century the "expert" in various forms reinforces the orthodoxy far beyond the 20th century.

Economics can't even catch up to the 1980s and dynamic systems.

Blue Origin's New Glenn achieves successful booster recovery and payload to orbit delivery. Initially this is seen as huge win and they emerge as potential challengers to SpaceX, however manufacturing issues with BE-4 engines and questions about the design choice of New Glenn's massive 7m fairing (when satellites are converging towards smaller, more compact designs) will cause speculation for their product market fit.

"Dumb electronics" will be hot - iPods/MP3players, dumbphones, e-ink screens/phones/readers, film cameras.

Most websites will still be riddled with typos

- Corporate will realize the AI is amazing for demo but doesn’t work for production. - BTC/Tech crash

There are many 1 off use cases where LLM free versions look great, but when you invest to make a system of it (engineers/time/model servers), and then consider pricing, and realize most early adopters would rather use their custom contexts that they get for 1 off pricing (or free)

If the stock market continues to rise there will be a bubble in defense stocks and a lot of defense IPOs

Angular will overtake React in terms of version number.

International Debt will crash in 2025.

(Worldbank INTERNATIONAL DEBT REPORT 2024)

NextBigThing™ will eat into the attention market share of LLMs. It will be a breakthrough in one of these fields:

a) Quantum Computing b) Energy (storage/generation) c) BioTech

We will see an exciting application of Real Time Linux.

Cease-fire in UA. First negotiations about drawing new borders between UA and RU.

Russia - Ukraine war comes to an end.

Market continues to rally into first quarter then most equities slide and start trading sideways.

Inflation softens as shelter slides.

Recession in second half of the year.

Bitcoin hits $150k at some point next year and then starts lagging with the general market.

US prioritizes LNG development and export.

Google becomes leader in AI.

It's weird that despite the AI improvements and actual benefits to developers, the current workflow like copilot is still implemented as a hit or miss. It should be the time already for the more limited but more precise AI workflow for developers in 2025.

Global population will reduce by 20+% due to H5N1 pandemic.

Many survivors will go Vegan.

Climate change will continue accelerating.

Cascadia fault line will pop in such a significant manner that the rules on fault lines will be rewritten.

Just for context, are you vegan?

I’m not convinced but animal-transmitted diseases causing widespread reduction in meat consumption is a really interesting idea. We didn’t see that with COVID because bats aren’t popular food-wise in most of the world. Maybe go short on Tyson and co if swine/bird flu take hold?

It will be the year of open source AI due to it being only slightly harder to scale up which gives Meta the chance to meet or beat OpenAI.

XR improves a bit more but headsets will still be expensive.

Large movies and video games that cost above $200 million to make will flop around 75% or more.

Idk large corps are already getting comfy using OpenAI (Microsoft) I dont see them shifting cause they are all inept at doing things themselves. They need a lot of handholding which is why Microsoft is still alive.

Trump and cronies will absolutely wreck market stability. There will be actual shortages of basic products. But they will not be acknowledged as mistakes since the companies will be able to price gouge and maintain profits.

There will be at more attempts at more CEO and billionaire murders. They will use propaganda and media manipulation to muddle the grassroots approval of similar action, and change the narrative around Luigi.

Everything will get more expensive. More layoffs. Most people will have to work much harder for much less, but it'll be okay because number will go up.

Okay let's do a few just for fun, no real analysis behind these, just as a game:

* Trump will suffer from health issues and will step down for a period of time, raising overall concern.

* Milei's experiment in Argentina will not cause a disastrous collapse, but poverty and unemployment will be on the rise and his public image will deteriorate.

* A major tech company (possibly Google or Apple) will announce a wearable AI device, as the next step in computing after mobile phones. This will be met with skepticism.

* We will see AI being used in videogames to generate narratives, dialogues, etc. but not in AAA games, more in an experimental/indie fashion. These games will be very popular among streamers.

* A major terrorist event or plane accident will sadly occur that will shock the world, not massively like 9/11 but more in a MH370 or Sandy Hook sense.

* AI image and video generated images will become almost impossible to discern from real ones. Some minor chaos in social networks will ensure because of a fake Putin/Trump video or whatever. Countries will start to discuss regulating this more heavily, perhaps even IP banning access to certain services as a first measure.

Introduction of more consumer hardware that resemble industrial hardware (crazy expensive, crazy features or quality or driven by semi-industrial requirements).

Non-anthropomorphic generic AI models.

Impact of war on prices of all kinds of stuff everywhere will become more evident.

After a compliant SEC and FTC are installed, Twitter and Truth Social will merge in some weird all stock transaction that allows DJT to recoup 3-4 billion while Elon gets to be listed on the stock exchange again at some absurd valuation.

The cost of PC components in the US are going to sky rocket higher than we've ever seen with tariffs coming. I really doubt that US fabs will be able to keep up with demand either.

I just put down $2500 on a new PC because of this.

There will be 1TW of deployed solar. New nuclear will continue to be vaporware.

I'd say there must be an [Ask HN: Predictions for 2026] at the end of 2025.

edit: wrong math.

Get ready for your AI Smart Toaster.. On a serious note 2025 will be year of AI and Tools. Prepared to have AI on every damn thing that you visit digitally.

Another step towards autonomous driving. Short content becoming more popular.

1. ChatBot technology will be instrumental to the rise of oligarchical societies and fascism. Mass propaganda, media corporations colluding with governments, governments operating within companies, etc.

2. Wealth inequality will increase at an exponentially faster rate.

3. Global warming will trend towards warmer than ever before

4. Political violence will escalate especially toward vulnerable populations.

5. Increase in minor and major ecological disasters.

6. Geopolitical issues will create more tensions leading to an amplification of what will be known as WWIII.

7. A key biomedical advancement will come from China.

8. We will look back on this year as the year that started inhumane physical/psychological experiments similar to Tuskegee using technology and vulnerable populations. The devastation of which will eventually be looked at as the creators of the atomic bomb.

9. Grass roots companies with physical and social/community based products and services will start to thrive.

10. A bubble in the AI investment world will pop for the bag-holders, but the heavy weights will remain strong and increase in momentum. A slight return to 2022 expectations for digital goods will reprise (see 2026 predictions for this)

11. The first court case involving AI generated video will begin.

my predictions for 2025 in AI:

- agents be able to do reliably well in long-range, multi-step tasks (some crazy new architectures/planning strategies/learning strategies)

- important empirical work in mech-interp (breakthroughs in scalability) + alignment (develop kind of value alignment frameworks)

- robotics + agentic ai will take off

- oh while we are at it, "world peace" and why not indeed :)

- Elections will be unexpectedly won by candidate running anti-immigration, Russia-friendly candidates

- 2025 will be the hottest year on record

- BlueSky will reach 100 million users

- There will be at least one government fall in France

Yeap, the next government fall is expected to be on 16 of January.

A real prediction will be the impeachment of Macron. It may happen if he fall short of candidate to be prime minister.

1. AI regulation becomes fragmented and messy as different jurisdictions implement contradictory rules. The EU's AI Act creates a "Brussels effect" but China and the US take divergent approaches, creating headaches for global tech companies.

2. "AI-free" becomes a marketing term like "organic." Premium services start advertising human-only customer service, human-written content, and AI-free creative work. A certification industry emerges around this.

3. Climate tech sees a boom in investment as extreme weather events continue to drive home the urgency. Particular focus on grid-scale energy storage and carbon capture technologies.

4. The "nearshoring" trend accelerates, with Mexico and Eastern Europe becoming major manufacturing hubs as companies seek alternatives to China while staying relatively close to major markets.

5. The first mainstream consumer AR glasses hit the market, but like early smartphones, they're clunky and limited. The real impact is in industrial and professional applications.

6. Remote work stabilizes at a new equilibrium: most tech companies settle into a hybrid model with 2-3 office days per week. Fully remote becomes less common as companies optimize for "collaboration days."

7. The web3/crypto world pivots hard toward "real world assets" and practical financial applications, moving away from speculation. Smart contract platforms become boring but useful infrastructure.

8. A major cybersecurity crisis involving AI models leads to a fundamental rethinking of model deployment and security practices. "Model poisoning" becomes the new ransomware.

9. The shortage of high-end GPUs starts to ease as new fabs come online, but the industry faces a new bottleneck in networking equipment and specialized AI accelerators.

10. Traditional higher education faces a crisis as employers increasingly accept alternative credentials and bootcamps. Several mid-tier universities merge or shut down.

- Claude | when asked for hacker news style prediction. I agree with most predictions.

A nuclear bomb will be detonated somewhere other than North Korea.

I'm bullish on Intel. I think the stateside fabs they are building will eventually be powerhouses.

I'm not sure when, but I've been "long Intel" for a long time.

Bird flu becomes an epidemic. A hundred cases in Q1

More models enter the AR glasses market. Ray-Ban Meta gains an AR display, a minimalist Orion. More market adoption spread out across different manufacturers

Gen AI products become really sticky. Like daily use. eCommerce product recommendations. The power consumption drives more Big Tech to invest in nuclear energy (SMRs). COP30 sees even less government participation. Google Cloud continues attracting more startups across the US & UK with its scalable gen AI infrastructure.

Some AI companies jack up their prices after gaining a critical mass of user base (Meta’s Llama)

More AI deployed in more Tech co.s like , replacing more jobs - customer service, transaction compliance, outbound sales.

More mental health awareness with social media use. Hopefully more AI or protective measures deployed against active shooters, ie, ZeroEyes.

More DEI in the arts - Hollywood, music, publishing.

Some sort of immigration crackdown. Trump will need to clarify his stance between Musk’s policies & his MAGA old guard. He & Musk fall out at some point

The Russia-Ukraine war ends via attrition. Maybe Israel too

I'm going to get older and gain weight.

aidenn0 goes to gym, buys a 10 day pass, and starts using the machines on the lowest weight after watching a series of Youtube videos on how to safely use the equipment. After increase the weight every few weeks because it has become too easy, aidenn0 has washboard abs that get shown off at the beach or pool in summer 2025.

lol

He will still get older, and could gain (muscle) weight!

I go to the gym 2-3 times a week. A good workout can't defeat a bad diet.

Should we start a (play money) prediction market for HN?

Everyone with a browser will use https://histre.com/ :-p

Venture Capital as an asset class completely collapses and we seek grassroots alternatives to funding innovation, without the compromise to capital.

Microsoft comes to their senses and starts selling Windows Server standard at a flat 500 bucks an instance a year without the need for cals.

im gonna narrow down my predictions for whats gonna happen in India in 2025 the rupee value starts falling more and more and they keep raising taxes and avoiding the real problems and india starts to fail as a country

Israel attacks Iran

End of Ukraine war

Google becomes the AI leader

Battery price drops 30%

Western car market fall into deep crisis, a big player fails

Von der Leyen is replaced

X starts providing financial services

Musk's spending cut plan is a disaster

We will get a new Turing Test for AIs

- nuclear drones

- another big drug breakthrough similar to ozempic

More broadly over the next decade, a technological renaissance, a sociological regression

I think the defining story of 2025 will be AI agents getting very good with computer use, largely enabled by RL fine tuning.

Could you help understand the importance of RL finetuning? What can it accomplish that regular finetuning can't? What's a use case for it?

From my experience there are three key issues with agents today:

1. They usually don't end up completing the right set of steps required to complete tasks when using our human-defined frameworks (react, rewoo, supervisor-worker, teams of multi-agents, etc.)

2. They get lost easily, and forget what they were doing or complete the same tasks over and over in a loop (bad planning)

3. They exit early, thinking they have completed the task when they have not (bad evaluation)

The jump in reasoning ability from 4o to o3 will enable a drastic improvement in planning and execution within our human defined frameworks.

But, more importantly, I believe RL fine tuning will enable the model to learn better general approaches to planning and executing steps to complete work. This is Sutton's bitter lesson at work.

For me, desktop automation is the killer app of RL fine tuning, rather than better reasoning in chatbot apps and APIs.

When OpenAI releases their desktop agent capabilities built on this, hopefully in Jan, I think we're going to see another ChatGPT moment.

Even if not, the ability to easily train the system to complete your tasks successfully with full desktop usage is going to be a major unlock for enterprises.

More on RL fine tuning here: https://openai.com/form/rft-research-program/

Lets hope so; computer use with AI is currently absolutely terrible. It is something I expected to see far larger progress in this year but it's no better than last year.

Yeah, +1. Looking back to the WebVoyager [1] and GPT4V generalist agent [2] papers from last January, it feels like we haven't come that far.

But there are now several major technical unlocks - fine tuning for cursor locations (in Claude), better reasoning with o3, and RL fine-tuning so we can learn based on task success.

That gives me significant hope.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13919

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01614

Autonomous slaughterbots will become reality

We move to the post truth economy.

Info and culture war stuff remains an attackers arena. The market place of ideas continues to become less efficient for the average Joe.

Wikipedia starts to collapse. We move from artisanal content moderation to industrial content moderation.

People who can afford it, pay for accuracy and verified information.

Centralization of trust sources begins again.

People who can’t afford it follow tribal leaders.

Polarization passes singularity levels.

AI performs worse than expected, but continues to be made more tractable.

This results in public push back against AI, because no one in the labor force wants the neo liberal era to return.

The DSA data reports on Social Media create at least 1 furore by q1.

Markets wait with bated breath for the signs of contraction, and any contraction results in contagion effects.

No one expects the trump tariffs.

Hawk Tuah girl is charged for crypto rug pull scam

Investment continues in AI, but the tech industry continues to mature. Stable growth and profits, but the lack of rapid expansion is going to feel like decline. It continues to be a stiff job market.

Ukraine fighting still continues, but funding/arms sources for Ukraine shift to be more European.

Trump tax cuts expire. The margins in congress are a lot tighter this time for the Republican party in the house.

TSLA sales continue decline, stock continues to soar. (only kind of joking on this one)

TSLA robotaxi thing does not ship/work.

> Hawk Tuah girl is charged for crypto rug pull scam

What crime could she possibly be charged with? Did she make any statements that weren't true about it? It's still not SEC regulated, so there's no avenue there. Also AFAICT she didn't even have a financial interest in the coin beyond being paid to promote it.

Things could change under the new administration, but the SEC considers crypto to be securities: https://www.investopedia.com/crypto-regulations-for-financia...

She promoted it. Did she disclose why? https://www.npr.org/2023/03/22/1165477713/lindsay-lohan-jake...

This would be an interesting thread if you asked users to support their predictions with evidence or substance.

Despite all the technical advancements, hedge funds are holding cash, or liquid. China is old, Europe has stagnated economy, america is expensive and tough to compete on, Russia is in war, Capitalist fear middle east, Korean peninsula is in chaos, japan is stagnated, Australia lacks technical advancements, low popular for manufacturing. Short term stocks in holding in India and Asia, a bit in Nordic population, and America. Manufacturing in Mexico and changed Argentina.

Project 2025 gets implemented to its fullest extent .... all 922 pages of it. Every crashes soon after.

- Photovoltaic electricity generation will continue to follow the same exponential curve it has been in for the last ~70 years. This will catch everybody completely by surprise.

- The overwhelming amount of excess solar generation during the day will propel grid storage into getting a lot of investment. Its capacity will still be mostly a rounding error in 2025.

- The overwhelming amount of excess solar generation during the day will propel discussions about carbon capture and credits. Those won't go anywhere in 2025.

- Meanwhile, the climate won't become much worse in 2025 compared to 2024. What is still pretty bad, but there will certainly be useless heated discussions about it.

- LLMs will reach peak disillusionment. It's not clear if large LLM providers will even keep providing them. But at the same time there will appear a few people here and there using them for stuff they are good at. Those people won't get much attention.

- Linux won't reach 2% of the PCs. But it will get close.

- The US won't jump into a recession as soon as Trump becomes the president. Not much will change in 2025 alone.

- The EU economy will be a bit better than 2024.

- The China economy will be a bit worse than 2024. But there will be no way to verify this.

- Here in South America most countries will be a bit better than 2024. But Brazil will be worse.

Let's see... what other subjects I can ask my crystal ball about?

The first episode of Kanojo Okarishimasu season 4 will aired sometime around the first week of July.

Bitcoin will drop to 50k

Tiktok will be banned in usa

AFD will win german federal elections

Google will launch full AI seaech engine

Ukraine war will end

2025 will be the year of AI agents

Finally going to have proper inflow of training data for 3D & robotics. 3D has its LLM moment. Simulation gets a major brain boost it’s so janky to make scenes rn.

Early research on vaccines to help the body synthesize or remove small particles like plastics and pollutants.

An update on mandatory nutrition labels.

Devastating cyberphysical infrastructure incident due to natural disaster or hack. We get through it with love and grace, to everyone’s surprise.

I get into grad school, I hope.

The decline continues but steeper.

Market instability

Trump becomes envious of the attention Musk is getting him and fires him, probably in Q1.

Apparently he has already been complaining that Musk was hanging around his Florida home too long.

actually blogged mine just yesterday https://www.frytg.digital/blog/2024-12-22-my-2025-prediction...

2025 will be a year of chaos, uncertainty, and a lot of unhappiness across the world.

The US election gives Donald Trump a second act, with limited but real support of both houses and a lock on the Supreme Court.

He in turn has nominated quite the cast of characters.

Meanwhile governments around the world are teetering or falling. A global trade war is likely. Shooting wars like Ukraine and Israel? Who knows.

Mass shooting events are probably going to go up. Prices certainly will.

The release of hundreds of thousands of social media and “FAANG” developers back into regular society without their massive pay checks will continue to have positive effects on tech. The rest of the world will be able to afford to hire developers again :-)

AI will continue to be a vaudeville act, bright lights and pretty girls and loud noises won’t distract from the fact that generative AI is ultimately a dead end.

The new administration will do something incredibly dumb with cryptocurrency. Multiple cabinet members will be indicted before 2026 is here.

Finally, Trump will have influenced enough leaders to allow him to change his middle name from John to Johne, he will use this technicality to run for a third term as “New Trump”, will win and enshrine the middle name loophole into history.

New LLama will be released.

Efforts of the team will be appreciated publicly.

It will remain the most impactful open model.

Sora and similar video generating models will mark the beginning of YouTube like era.

- the video watermarking will be interesting here, i wonder how ai companies and socmed companies will tolerate and punish each other on these things.

- lots of new creators on this market too, particularly those with no studio setup but better creativity and imagination. there is still cost of entry of course, need $, but it's now less.

- i wonder how each audience will react to this, from children, to teens, to adults. now that content creators are desaturated, i think it's content consumers that will be saturated.

The cost issue is similar to the bandwidth issue faced by YouTube in its early days. It took a while for countries across the world to get high speed internet. As technology advances, the cost to generate video using these models would go down significantly and perhaps the quality of the generated video would also be better than what it is today.

I just read last year's predictions and won't read them this year.

Global deflationary bust caused by the FED being too tight for too long.

Ok, I'll bite. Some of these are a little far-fetched:

A nuclear bomb is exploded in combat.

The bitcoin/cryptocurrency bubble finally bursts (But if I'm wrong, I think it'll happen by 2030)

While self-driving cars aren't commonplace, geofenced robotaxis will start to become a lot more common, shifting public attitude towards self-driving cars. Excitement will start to grow around "when does my city get robotaxis?" (I don't think we'll get to the "sleep on a road trip" car until the 2030s, nor do I think we'll get "sleep while driving in a blizzard" until the 2040s.)

The US hits its inflection point with electric cars as the NCAS standardization makes things easier, and Elon Musk gets non-Tesla stations to work by having the government drop incentives for OCPP. (If you ever show up to a charging station and it doesn't work, or is wonky, it's because of OCPP. (Superchargers do not use OCPP.) I should write a blog entry some time.)

AI will wipe out 80% of jobs. People will starve for employment. Unemployment rates will be highest in History, even more than war times. There will be a general purposelessness among youngsters because of this. And it will create a lot of social issues and unrest in the world

You don’t understand what most people do for work. I’d be very surprised if 10% of jobs are wiped out.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, 2020, 2018) reported that 39.1% of the civilian workforce in the United States performs physically demanding jobs.

I think there will a war (may be nearly third world war level)

The US population will continue to get worse at exhibiting attentional control, and will continue to spread and hold novel delusional beliefs at increasing rates.

GTA 6 will be released

Most likely, starting in 2025, we will have hit a point of no return.

It won't be considered this until much later, if there are people who manage, but still it will be a great year. Great... but terrible things will be coming.

AI will have reached another milestone in the amount of tasks and quality that are performed, further debasing the demand for labor, and further moving us all towards societal collapse within the next 50 years; our society based on a distribution of labor reels when chaotic distortions occur, and as it stands today it can be disrupted without a viable (for survival) fallback, the only fallback is non-market socialism which fails (within 50 years).

Inflation/Currency debasement will continue getting worse with the abandonment of the petrodollar, and the inability to control the currency with government spending tied to money printing will continue until debt growth exceeds GDP. Shortage which we are only starting to see at the markets, will get much worse. What started as shortage with maintenance products like lithium grease, chemicals, and certain foods will expand.

3rd-party driven interference and the imposition/coercion of cost exceeding means will continue further following and enforcing the trend of lower birth rates, and crazier (psychotic) people (who have been tortured by these things).

To put this further in perspective, 1/3 of the welfare paid out goes to those in California right now, who require government assistance for lifes necessities. There is little work to be found. There are people looking for work who have decades of professional experience and they cannot find work in any field because of ghost jobs. The mechanism used by RNA interference to block receptors, works the same in communications networks (i.e. how you find a job).

The future is quite bleak because people have ignored many things, buried their heads to things they should not have ignored, and failed to act. They effectively have allowed themselves to be blinded, and stopped listening unable to adapt or react. Quite similar to mouse utopia.

The next few years won't be good years. They will be great years. Great and terrible.

Israel will keep committing war crimes against Palestinians.

A significant portion of the US population will lose nearly everything. Their investments will collapse, their benefits will be stripped away, and they will fall victim to countless scams, or be outright robbed. Much of this will happen through official channels, as restrictions and oversight on corporations and government organizations are reduced or eliminated entirely.

Or because of the ageing population they will have a life threatening incident. Which Medicare will fail to cover due to its budget being cut and private health insurance companies refusing to pay for procedures the Doctor orders.

And so I would expect to see medical bankruptcy being far more common.

I agree with the rest, but not necessarily investments collapsing. It seems to me that the incoming administration will be friendly to business, gutting consumer and environmental protections.

Assuming tarrifs happen, there will be price hikes. And if there are general price hikes it's easy (and sometimes necessary) to hike your own prices even if you're not directly affected. This will improve profits (at least in the short term).

So, I expect the stock market to do very well. The rich will get richer. The middle class will be pushed down.

But yeah, the 95% are about to get what they voted for.

> It seems to me that the incoming administration will be friendly to business

Friendly to some businesses.

Stocks aren't the only investments people make. Their own small businesses, homes and other property, crypto, etc.

I wonder if trump will actually go through with the tariffs though. If it is as widespread on day one as he keeps bragging about, the stock market would surely crash.

Yes, for investments here I'm referring to financial investments.

Generally I think housing is flat, maybe coming down if interest rates go up, or as affordability comes down. (Housing is not really an investment though, but that's a topic for another time.)

Individually for small business, there may well be winners and lovers, but that's true for any administration change. For example if your business is say solar installations then you are vulnerable (or benefit from) govt policy.

Most businesses (even small ones) can jack up prices in an inflationary environment without too much pushback.

Crypto - I'm not qualified to comment on that, but it seems like it'll likely go up in the short term. (Reinforcing why it's a terrible currency.)

Hopefully React and Tailwind usage will fall off

-Late 2025 some TSMC 2 nanometer chips, maybe for Apple. Intel, Samsung, and perhaps Rapidus will have 20% yields.

-Solid state battery doesn't yet appear in phones.

-MicroLED in some high-end glasses. At least one company outside China, probably Samsung, will demonstrate a tri-fold OLED screen.

-Phase 2 experiments for a successor to Ozempic.

-Cobenfy will increase in voluntary popularity because it's on the muscarinic receptor.

-Trump will fail to regulate grocery monopolies so the use of PiGrow will increase https://github.com/Pragmatismo/Pigrow

-Tesla's collaborative robot is delayed while the Chinese competitor is released.

Bird flu pandemic.

Random probabilities, some I think are certain, others just for fun.

- US abandonment of Ukraine spurs EU to make major change in military posture, spending (leaders will be Poland, France)

- Wide spread unrest in Europe, focused on cultural integration of immigrants from abroad/aforementioned military spending

- China tests US response to Taiwan under Trump with significant but limited escalation

- Israel expands operations in Syria and Lebanon

- Bitcoin to $50k

- Open Source LLM takes lead in ARC benchmark

- Sporadic civil unrest in US, focused on corporations. 2 more CEOs killed. Domestic terrorism significantly galvanized.

- CAD/USD continues to fall, Canadian dollar to US$0.65

- Trump makes some sort of insane offer to integrate Canada to Pierre Poilievre

elon and trump will become frenemies (tesla will go down) and google will become better in ai then open ai

A solar storm wipes out 20% of the US grid.

- Valve releases a Steam client for ARM64 and makes native ports of all their games, other companies follow and ARM becomes a much more viable platform for both Windows and Linux

- People will continue to push back against genAI, every company will still be split on whether to use it in marketing, customer support, etc (no change)

- Trump administration slashes a lot of regulations that affect manufacturing as he tries to make the US less dependent on imports, it doesn't make a huge difference though

- Trump to meet Putin in person

- AI hype cycle reaches a peak, bubble bursts soon after

- Linux market share 6% by end of year

I think valve will finally release their 'deckard' headset which will BTFO the competition.

In short, nothing good. The AI bubble will crash. Prices of…everything will rise in the US. Trump will do bad things and make America an embarrassment to humanity again. The year will be in the top ten hottest years ever recorded. The global rise in antisemitism will level off or keep growing, and it's not implausible many more Jews will immigrate to Israel.

- We will feel more useless and sad than 2024, with AI and other technological advances showing us we will soon be out of work, with of course, China and other countries doing everything better than us.

- There's a 50% likelihood that if you are an American, you will eat at a restaurant where the food is made by machines.

- More inflation coming. FED is right. And even more inflation once more protectionist laws and acts are passed.

- US's economy will start showing signs of a recession.

- Google's search business will start to dwindle. But it has it's own TPUs, worth trillions in NVidia money. Waymo. Android. Youtube, Deepmind. It's a company hard to put a price tag on.

- Tesla is going to $1K without any fundamentals. I will feel like throwing away my Benjamin Graham books again.

- US dollar will start to devalue as the protectionist policies will start showing its side-effects.

- The EU will hit American Big Tech companies hard, as the US is no longer a friendly partner. Beginning of the end for the US techno-feudalism over there.

- China is in deflation, but even stronger. People will see again that economics doesn't apply that well in autocracies. It will keep eating the EU's auto industry in countries that have no auto industry (most of them!), as they have no reason to make China a foe or follow the US, which have isolated itself.

- Ukraine and Russia will strike a deal, but the war won't end.

- US making its own chips will continue being a big topic. More drama to unfold about Intel.

- Intel will start showing progress. The Battlemage GPU is a huge success.

- NVidia will see its revenue shrink in comparison to this year.

- GenAI will become less relevant, with other AI applications having a bigger focus.

- OpenAI's market valuation will start going down. Don't get me wrong, ChatGPT is the biggest invention of our decade, but the market is saturated with Anthropic and other competitors doing the same for less. And OpenAI became an one-trick poney.

- Robotics will have its run. Tesla will show its lead.

1. Technology and AI

Generative AI: Widespread integration of AI tools in workplaces for productivity and creativity.

Quantum Computing: Advances in quantum computing could bring breakthroughs in problem-solving for industries like healthcare and finance.

AI Regulation: Governments may introduce stricter AI regulations to ensure ethical use and minimize risks.

Space Exploration: Private and public sector missions (e.g., SpaceX, NASA, ISRO) will push further into space, with a focus on lunar exploration and Mars missions.

2. Economic Trends

Global Recession or Recovery: Many economies may face challenges with inflation and recession, though emerging markets might show resilience. Remote Work Evolution: Hybrid work models will mature, and gig economy platforms may grow.

Crypto Regulation: Stricter crypto policies in countries aiming to stabilize financial markets.

3. Environment and Climate

Climate Action: Countries and corporations will focus on green technologies like renewable energy, EVs, and carbon capture.

Extreme Weather: Climate change may lead to more unpredictable weather patterns, pushing sustainable living to the forefront.

Biodiversity: Efforts to protect ecosystems and endangered species will become more urgent.

4. Education and Skill Development

Online Education: EdTech platforms will continue to innovate, with more AI-powered personalization.

Demand for Skills: High demand for skills like data analytics, AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and sustainable development practices.

5. Health and Well-Being

Healthcare Tech: Continued focus on telemedicine, wearable devices, and AI-driven diagnostics.

Mental Health: Increased societal focus on mental health, with improved access to virtual therapies.

Pandemic Preparedness: Investment in early warning systems and vaccines for future pandemics.

6. Society and Culture

Digital Communities: Growth of communities in spaces like Discord, Reddit, and LinkedIn for networking and learning.

Minimalism: Post-pandemic shifts toward minimalism and sustainability in lifestyle choices.

Entertainment: Growth in immersive experiences like VR gaming and metaverse spaces.

AI needs for efficiency will push computing outside of silicon.

More analog computing metaphors everywhere.

UX / UI might evaporate significantly

IA will become less

- Russian economy flounders, ruble ends the year considerably lower against western currencies than it is now

- Crypto actually ends the year higher, because Russian and Chinese oligarchs use it to try to get their money out of their home countries

- inflation pressures prevent US interest rates from going more than half a point lower; may even start raising again

- AI hype bubble will continue, but OpenAI will still not have a positive cash flow by end of year, and neither will other major AI startups

A hierarchy of LLMs, but they communicate via shared latent space instead of tokens. This will allow for really tiny models on the edge that work best at clarifying intent (and not much else; they have no world knowledge), but seamless and rapid offloading to the cloud with all context still preserved when the intent is thoroughly understood.

- Google search will be split off.

- Research will prove that "attention is all you need" LLMs have a ceiling, but new theoretical LLMs will emerge.

- Putin will launch a nuclear strike against Ukraine.

- Bird flu will become zoonotic, but milder.

- Taylor Swift will get married, biggest event of the year.

- Apple and Disney will merge, raising prices to everything in the solar system.

* HN will stop hating and start loving crypto. Particularly smart contracts, stablecoins.

this one is interesting, few factors:

- governments and companies are now stacking on btc as a hedge against tradfi fiat currencies.

- people have better access to it now. centralized ones now have better regulations, and decentralized ones now have better liquidity.

- however, people are still prone to scams and pump and dumps

Only two market related predictions:

- Musk will leave the Trump team before the end of the year, this will cause Tesla to crash, and that will cause the whole market to crash. It should time well with the delayed crash after interest rate stabilization that has repeated multiple times in the past.

- Gamestop MOASS will not happen in 2025.

Layoffs get peaked.

Mankind might finally stop using the word THE before her name: Earth

Inflation will begin to rise again

The Federal Reserve will eventually be forced to raise rates again

The market will have a severe correction

Trump will blame everything on the Federal Reserve and will move to limit its power to control monetary policy or disassemble it all together.

AI used to develop new science along with efforts by governments to control access.

Trump delivers a live speech acknowledging the existence of non human technology on earth and a bit of what we know.

AI will be used to ferret out novel enshittification opportunities

Trump will sell Haiti to Denmark in exchange for buying Greenland ;-)

TikTok ban becomes a nothingburger.

Musk will say the full self driving is coming by the end of the year. This time for real.

#1 Something has to happen of the drones that are over various US military sites. People seem to want to bury their head in the sand, not acknowledging China owns substantial "farmland" in the US, especially near military sites, that could in theory be home to any number of drone bases. If China is preparing for war, it could risk a global catastrophe.

#2 The Russia-Ukraine war is likely to come to a peaceful end. Putin seems to have mostly lost his appetite for war, and we know that Trump will not want to fund Ukraine any more. Ukraine will have to accept the loss of some conquered territory.

#3 With regard to non-CoT LLMs, gpt-4o becomes worse on all relevant benchmarks compared to the leading open source models. Currently, as I understand, it still wins on some benchmarks.

#4 Tiktok, if not all social media, gets banned for those under 18 on the grounds of foreign influence, although ID requirements get struck down, and kids can misrepresent their age.

Starship: first attempt at the Moon, I'd guess 80%. No Mars windows.

AI: wildly unpredictable at every stage and in every regard. Cheaper, better, faster, more drama, that's all easy to predict, but how much of each and which specific benchmarks/legal issues are not.

Only AI capability predictions I will make are:

• Probably still no Tesla level 5 FSD, but Waymo will continue rolling out slowly and cautiously.

• Androids will still be split into cheap toys and expensive industrial equipment, not fully general domestic servants

Power:

• Wind power increases 7-21%

• PV increases 20-26%

• Fusion has some press releases, doesn't demonstrate much useful

• Battery production increases by about 33% while getting about 14% cheaper per unit

BigTech companies:

• At least one FAANG gets split up properly, possibly multiple. They've been annoying too many governments for too long.

• X gets more drama, but details are unpredictable. Could equally be "bankrupt", "mandatory for US federal government", "banned in EU, UK, Australia", "sold to Trump personally".

Consumer tech:

• Computers get about 31% more power efficient

• 50%: Some specific Smart Dust product revealed to public, people announce expensive paint contianing x motes of smart dust per litre.

• VR/AR: 25% dropped from news cycle like 3D TV, 50% continues like games consoles, 25% something that currently seems sci-fi

Geopolitics:

• Musk finds $2T to cut (66%), Congress pretends to take it seriously (80%), but nobody wants the cuts in their district (99.9%) so it stalls unless and until Musk can find a way to effectively buy out the downsides (80% chance Musk finds a way at all, but only 25% chance the method he finds is actually legal).

• US weapons stop being sent to Ukraine: (completely banned even for sale: 5%; they can be sold but no more are given "for free": 60-70%; repeat of previous Trump request for dirt on domestic opponents in exchange for aid: 30-40%)

• EU aid stops going to Ukraine: 1% while they remain independent, 99% if they get conquered.

• Ukraine develops nuclear deterrent: 30-50% if aid stops or is threatened, otherwise 5-10%

• Putin dies: assassinated, ~2%; all other causes, ~4%

• Trump dies: assassinated, 1-2.25%; all other causes, 5-6%

- Value of Bitcoin increases at least as much as in 2023

- Disney will make huge reductions in plans for Star Wars and Marvel projects that are not started

- GPT 5 will be a significant improvement, but not as much as expected.

- Trump increases toll barriers, but lowers them after he discovers that US also depends on good trading relations (he will spin this as a win)

- Trump spreads FUD about his commitment to NATO, that causes EU to invest more in their already significant weapons industry. US manufacturers are afraid to lose customers, and pressures Trump to change his approach (he will of course spin this as a win)

- Israel bombs the new leaders of Syria in January and escalates the conflict significantly.

Stocks keep going up

Trump inaugurated without any incident

2 more mass shootings

Advances in LLM and other Ai

US economy keeps growing and outperforming rest of world.

"2 more mass shootings"? There were 488 in the US in 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081

Only 2? try 500

OK, that covers the first 3 weeks of January, so technically true.

Nothing Much. Which is surprisingly the same as 2024. Apart from a possible recession.

In some way I feel things have stagnated. Apart from rapid progress on AI. We will continue to see development and progress on hardware. N2 finally from TSMC but not on Apple SoC yet. Blackwell GPU, continue price improvement in GPU competition due to Intel ARC. Etc Most of these are obvious and continue from current trend.

I used to post these trend and roadmap on HN. Now they no longer seems important or matter. iOS and Android have somewhat converged into very similar for the past 3-4 years, that I wasn't expected.

May be Trump winning election along with the pendulum swing back in such massive way wasn't expected as well.

May be this is a sign of depression but In some sense I feel everything is very boring. My most unpresent feeling is that A lot of things outside tech have declined in quality. And we are not improving on it.

Edit: May be I will use this space to rant about things.

Video Codec - No x266. No VVC Encoder. No Progress on AV2. Stagnated H.267 research. The most popular codec is still AVC finalised in 2003, and AVC High Profile in 2005. So we are 20 years already and still using it.

AAC-LC is finally patent free. But the world no longer cares about Audio Codec. AAC-LC was the first version of AAC that came just after MP3 and we are on 27 years already.

JPEG-XL Not getting anywhere. Despite clearly being the better option for BBP 1.0+. JPEG is still most widely use, and JPEG was finalised in 1992 so we are 32 years in already.

Apple milking on hardware. iOS isn't getting any better. Although latest version of macOS finally have some useful addition.

Internet getting smaller. We can no longer search for things we once saw with Google. Google hasn't been great at most things since their IPO. But it does seems that people are getting excited with their latest AI development.

Amazon milking its AWS. No significant competition from HyperScaler. And no middle ground with Dedicated Sever and Cloud Offering.

Minimal Hardware progress on NAND and HDD. Especially in terms of Cost / GB. HAMR is late by at least 5 - 7 years depending on how you count it.

Retail are now going to Tech without understand anything about it. From QR Code Menu to ordering system inside restaurant with minimal Mobile Network reception. Adding WiFi but with old equipment, capacity constrain before loading anything is very very bad UX.

MNOs moving much slower into 5G telecom equipment upgrading. Basically milking 5G and 4G customer for as long as possible. Instead of trying to make its services better.

USB-C is still a pile of mess.

No Consumer NAS backup function with S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Streaming is a pile of mess. Netflix gone down hill. Selection of Movies have completely disappeared. I have no idea how Youtube Music is still...... oh well after all it is google I guess I shouldn't expect anything.

Everything is subscription. No BluRay successor in the pipeline. Software continue to be bloated.

Mobile Gaming is just a repeat of the same thing. Literally the same engine with different IPs. And loot box gambling. I have finally deleted all games on my iPhone.

Even Desktop Gaming aren't better. There are finally enough people complaining about Unreal Engine, while simplify game development ultimately make most games looked the same. Along with low frame rate. One could argue this is development studio problem and nothing to do with Unreal, I think there are finally some voices concern about how EPIC encourages it.

Modern AAA Games are also so concerned about Graphics and other crap but completely forgotten about Game Play and Storyline.

On Gaming. I am waiting for Switch 2. But then it is not only delayed. But in terms of hardware released and used in Nintendo Console, Switch 2 will likely be the worst of all in its history using tech that will be 5-7 years old by the time it releases. I know it is not all about hardware but it could have been a generation better and we wouldn't repeat what happen with Zelda lag in some scenes.

Outside Tech, Shrinkflation is happening everything in the food and drinks industry. They are finally reaching another 10 - 15 years cycle where they are looking to cut corners. Both in ingredients and size.

Food quality across the board is decreasing. Mostly because of inflation.

Cheap Chinese Electric cars are everywhere. May be people like them. But they are of very low quality. A little sad German didn't react. But again this is to be expected. And why everything is boring.

Wireless Earphone industry is happy with their margin. May be I am the only person who want battery swap on these thing instead of thinking them as disposable gadget every 2 years. I was hoping someone outside Apple would do it since I first bought AirPod Gen 1. But no. nearly 10 years later we are still throwing them away.

Housing is still expensive. We still dont have ways to built high rise high quality neatly furnished building with substantially less time.

So much about Apple Pay replacing the wallet and we just passed 10 years anniversary. NFC hasn't improved.

I guess after typing a lot of these out I realised and can summarised it as, everyone is busy milking their product and services they all forgot about the content. That is what annoys me the most. Things aren't getting better.

Social Media and Communication: * TikTok will continue to dominate engagement among social media platforms, but a new platform blending immersive elements (like augmented reality) and privacy will emerge, attracting younger and corporate audiences. * Facebook (Meta) will persist but lose relevance among younger users. Its strength will lie in niche communities and integration with AR/VR products like the Meta Quest.

Technology and Computing: * Generative AI will be widely integrated into productivity tools (emails, text editors, coding, graphic design), but stricter regulations will emerge, especially in the European Union. * Quantum computing will see notable advancements but remain restricted to experimental and governmental use. A "quantum moment" comparable to the "cloud moment" of the 2010s could emerge after 2030. * Smartphones will plateau in innovation, with greater focus on sustainability, repairability, and seamless integration with wearables.

Economy and Work: * Remote work will solidify as the norm in many industries, especially technology and creative fields. However, well-structured hybrid models will become the standard for large corporations. * Cryptocurrencies will remain volatile, but related technologies, such as blockchain for contracts and utility-driven NFTs, will gain practical relevance, especially in finance and real estate.

Energy and Environment: * Electric vehicles will represent over 50% of sales in developed markets. Pressure to build charging infrastructure in rural and remote areas will significantly increase. * Renewable energy sources (solar and wind) will attract more investment, but storage challenges (batteries and green hydrogen) will remain a major bottleneck. * Global climate action will remain fragmented. Extreme weather events, like severe droughts and floods, will catalyze regional adaptation efforts, but global cooperation will be limited by political disputes.

Health and Biotechnology: * CRISPR-based therapies for rare genetic diseases will achieve regulatory approval in several countries, though costs will initially limit accessibility. * Telemedicine will become even more widespread, including real-time AI diagnostics, but ethical and privacy challenges will arise in less-regulated regions. * Pandemics will remain a global concern, but early monitoring systems powered by AI and genetic sequencing will significantly reduce mortality from new outbreaks.

Culture and Society: * The popularity of "retro-futuristic" aesthetics and digital escapism will grow, especially in gaming, films, and interactive entertainment. * Increasing awareness of mental health will lead to broader acceptance of practices like meditation and alternative therapies, integrated into conventional healthcare systems. * Social and environmental rights movements will gain momentum but face opposition from conservative groups, driving polarization in countries like the U.S. and Brazil.

Geopolitics and Society: * China will expand its technological and diplomatic influence but face internal tensions with regional pro-democracy movements. * The European Union will solidify its role as a regulatory leader in technology and environmental policy, while the U.S. focuses on technological and military dominance. * Artificial intelligence will be used both for misinformation and security, sparking a new "digital arms race."

Education and Science: * Hybrid educational models will be widely adopted, with AR and AI technologies personalizing curricula and teaching methods. * Space exploration will yield new milestones, including a manned mission to the * Moon and advancements in Mars exploration, paving the way for settlements in the 2030s.

Unexpected Future Trends: * A currently underestimated technology, such as ambient computing (intelligent environments with sensors and automation), may become ubiquitous. * There will be a revival of local communities and self-sufficiency (urban gardening, home renewable energy) as a response to growing digital control and corporate dominance.

Let me begin by saying that this is a throwaway account and I'll be logging out without saving the password right after I finish this post, so if you want to ask questions or debate anything I say, you'll be waiting a very long time for a reply from me. This is for my benefit, as my doctor has suggested that I spend less time arguing with people on the Internet who are obviously wrong.

Also, it may be instructive to go through previous years' prediction threads and see how many of those predictions were accurate. You'll probably be able to count them without taking off your shoes.

All that said, here are my predictions:

* At least one of the top-tier companies doing GenAI research (e.g. MS, Google, or OpenAI) will cut their losses and shut down said program. If it's OpenAI, that's probably also the end of the company. Nvidia's market cap will come back down to earth.

* The mainstream Democratic party will, yet again, decide that they lost the 2024 Presidential election due to insufficiently catering to conservatives, and will once again decide on a strategy of "triangulation" in the years to come. This will continue to lose them elections.

* Statements and/or behavior of more elected Federal officials (meaning the president or a member of either house of Congress) will make it obvious to the general public that said officials are suffering from major cognitive decline, presumably from advancing dementia due to old age.

* More corporate executives in unpopular industries such as defense, banking, fossil fuels, or health insurance again, will be assassinated now that the idea is in people's heads. The only thing that surprised me about the Brian Thompson case is that it took this long. At least a significant minority of said assassins will walk due to jury nullification or eyewitnesses refusing to testify.

* 2025 will be the hottest year on record, until 2026 tops it.

* Cooperation between Musk and Trump won't last due to no room in the world being large enough to fit both those egos. Trump will find himself sidelined in his own administration and left to sulk and watch TV.

-USA stops supporting Ukraine war efforts and Ukraine is forced to cede large portions of land to Russia, creating a DMZ along vast stretches of the new border.

-Expanded land use restrictions and federal tariffs against solar and wind, resulting from pressure from fossil fuel lobbyists and the new head of the department of energy.

-Another CEO is shot.

-Crypto has a major correction; bitcoin finishes the year well under $100k.

-US grocery prices are higher than ever.

-Pierre Poilievre is the new Prime Minister of Canada and holds a majority.

-EVs continue to grow market share at a linear rate in North America.

- At the same time EV continues to grow faster everywhere else than NA.

- US requires more percentage of EV components made domestically, making US the most expensive EV market.

- US made EVs will retreat to NA markets only.

Ukraine will not cede land to Russia. What is likely though is a frozen conflict along the conflict lines.

In Brazil we have a famous saying, not related to wars but football, "já combinou com os Russos?" or in literal translation, "Did you already check with the Russians?".

Ukraine won’t ever cede these territories. Whether on a field of battle, or diplomacy table, this war will continue for decades.

What is the meaning of this term? I am not native english speaker

Even as a native English speaker, I only understand the literal meaning, not how it (or the original) would apply here.

This is an expression from the cold war, and roughly means "have you reached an agreement with your foe?" in a context that the foe is involved in the "solution" you're proposing. Something like that.

it’s more like imaginary scenarios still need to face field reality

World cup 1958, Brazil National team coach explains a very convoluted and intricate tactical play for a goal in their match against Russia (then Soviet Union).

A very famous player - Garrincha, arguably one of the greatest players of early football/soccer - listened to his explanation and asked

"That's very cool and all, Mr. Feola. But have you checked with the Russians?"

(In English I think 'did the Russians agree' may sound more idiomatic)

[1] https://barrichelo.com.br/teoriadosjogos/list-trechosimprime...

It means that this is a decision Ukraine can't make all by themselves. It depends on what will happen to them as much as it depends on what they will decide.

It also doesn't fit very well, because it's more intended to be used about cartoonish plans that expect other people to behave exactly as the plan predicts. I dunno why the GP got to it.

Since it's about football you no longer have to "check with the Russians", they're banned from all major competitions. One major misnomer is referring to Soviet citizens as Russians, the majority of USSR population weren't Russians but other ethnicities. Wikipedia has a bunch of this history falsehoods specially when talking about Red Army brigades consisting entirely of other ethnic minorities and referring to them as Russians. Actually calling Canadians- Americans is more correct, at least it's technically correct which is best kind of correct.

I wonder if the next CEO will be shot or taken down by drone.

I think it's very likely that in 2025 we will see the first North American assassination by drone.

!remindme 1 year (oops, we're not on reddit)

Very interesting prediction! I wouldn't be surprised.

Nah, has to be shooting. Guns are politically protected and the mass shooting is a traditional American ritual. They've not even discovered the primitive technology of the car bomb.

So you're saying... gun drone?!

There's a flamethrower drone video that circulates, used for clearing debris from power lines. And lots and lots of "DJI phantom with a grenade" videos from the Ukraine war. But not only does the gun drone not work very well, the drones are heavily tracked and dependent on radio links while there are thousands of people making sure that guns, even concealed ones, have a constitutional right to be in as many places as possible. Probably the only thing that could change American gun law is an outbreak of snipers against CEOs and politicians.

> heavily tracked

As in the flights or the hardware?

I've always thought drones would work well as ambush devices i.e. don't make a long flight to a target but stash within a few seconds of flight time.

If it's the hardware then is there not much of a DIY scene anymore? I assumed the tech was mostly in the components e.g. cameras/motors/batteries rather than the integration. I'm not a drone person but when I cast my eye at FPV racing drones, it seemed they were building their own with off-the-shelf components.

> radio links

I see Russia heavily using fibre-optic drones these days and they blew my mind. When I heard of "wire-guided missile" I assumed it was some term-of-art and never conceived they literally laid down wire. I understand you can buy kilometre spools of the stuff for a few bucks so I guess it's in consumer's reach.

Ah, I've just realised the "Ariadne's thread" weakness of using fibre-optic for something covert! Maybe the launch site can hop to another connection though...

> I've always thought drones would work well as ambush devices i.e. don't make a long flight to a target but stash within a few seconds of flight time.

My immediate thought: "So… a missile?"

But on reflection, you're probably right. Just because missiles make more sense and have a long pile of R&D behind them, doesn't mean an amateur will pick that over the simple, easy, and obvious meme.

Probably for the best. It will be a bad day when someone, or some agency, makes anti-personnel missiles that can just be left waiting in nearby trees until the target goes past. I really really hope that such things would be treated like mines in international law.

So Dune style hunter-seekers...

> Leto's Golden Path has prevented a future in which the Ixians released, and ultimately lost control of, self improving Hunter-Seekers that would eventually consume all organic life in the known universe.

Yikes!

> USA stops supporting Ukraine war efforts and Ukraine is forced to cede large portions of land to Russia, creating a DMZ along vast stretches of the new border.

Some GDP numbers to put things in perspective (source: tradingeconomics.com).

Ukraine: $0.2T

Russia: $2T

United States: $27T

European Union: $18T

So even if you drop the US, only the EU should be sufficient. Russia

More specifically, I saw estimates that Russia spends about 20% of its GDP on the war. This is sort of in line with estimates from the second world war where numbers, from the top of my head, went up to 40% or higher. If 20% of your economy is busy throwing ordnance at someone else sounds pretty unsustainable, then you are probably right. Inflation in Russia is now at about 20% to 30% [1].

And the kicker is that the EU only has to spend about 2% to match Russia's numbers. Long-term it's just a losing proposition for Russia. Their economy is tanking while the rest of the West just gets stronger on an exponential rate. Even if the EU would spend twice as much as Russia, then that sounds perfectly sustainable for the EU.

That's true but apart from Poland, all large EU countries have anaemic weapon production and diverted all their military spending into social programs decades ago, which they cannot reverse. They are at their budget deficit limits and are all in territory where if they increase tax rates, tax proceeds go down (along with growth and employment). So the reality is that I don't think there is any chance the EU is a substitute for the US in term of ukraine support.

The question becomes one of politics: how much does each EU member care? I'm reminded about the old joke about the difference between ham and eggs being that the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.

Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states are "committed" in that they regard the risk of a Russian invasion as real, and have seen occasional incursions by Russian flights and even missiles. If it comes to a fight between self-defence and the deficit limit, they're just going to have to break the limit.

Germany, on the other hand, has been very comfortable taking Russian bribes and gas, as well as being uncomfortable with re-arming, so they've been lagging behind on the project.

Maybe there will be another "incident". France has already been reporting attempts of sabotage against their railway network.

The politics of Ukraine war is extremely complicate. After WW2 Ukraine got territories from Hungary (and they are still very mad because of this), Slovakia, Poland and Romania. Then Ukraine had very aggressive policies against the people from these territories and they mostly failed, these minorities speak Russian as the second language, not Ukrainian. This is not something that it is easily forgotten, people in the countries listed above still have family in Ukraine and have first hand experience of the situation.

> Then Ukraine had very aggressive policies against the people from these territories.

Let's call it for what it really was: Ukrainians commited genocide against Poles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia...

Even so I assume the vast majority of Polish people would prefer a border with Ukraine rather than a larger one with Russia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

I don't think that is an option of any sort. Wild guess is Putin bet was on Russia getting some territories opening the door for Hungary and Poland to do the same. No idea what is the atmosphere in Slovakia, but the recent surprise in the Romanian politics makes any prediction impossible. Well, he was wrong :)

I don't think that is an option of any sort.

That's insane. Of course it's an "option". No one in these countries (outside of a very tiny portion of wackos) cares about the current borders, or dreams of starting a war to move them.

No, full occupation of Ukraine is not an option that NATO will ever accept. With the current state of Russian military and economy, it is a very easy line to draw.

Not sure how we got to this, and it seems I may have misread you.

All apologies.

The politics of Ukraine war is extremely complicated.

They aren't actually. And none of that history relates to the current war.

Which is all about Russia's internal politics and ideology. And not about the after-effects of post-WW2 territorial transfers at all.

Those transfers in turn were in turn the work of the Allied powers, not Ukraine.

> That's true but apart from Poland, all large EU countries have anaemic weapon production and diverted all their military spending into social programs decades ago, which they cannot reverse.

I would say that is a half-truth. You are right that Poland is an outlier in the EU with regards to its military expenditure and preparation. However, the idea that it is because military spending in other countries was "diverted into social programmes" is a politically charged red herring. Social expenditure and military expenditure are different by an order of magnitude and are not negatively correlated.

Poland's expenses on social programs are within the EU average, and Poland has not made any sacrifices in that regard to maintain its military expenditure. Conversely, the country with the highest social spending in the EU by a large margin (France) is also the 8th in terms of military spending. Meanwhile, some of the countries with the lowest military expenditure (e.g. Ireland or Luxembourg) are also some of the ones with the lowest social expenditure.

No the transfer of defense spending to social spending was an explicit policy in the 80s/90s, that was refered at the time as "the peace dividends".

And the fact that it is diverted into social spendings is also significant, because it is a kind of public spending that is politically impossible to cut back. Even Trump doesn't want to touch that third rail in the US.

France's military spending, though not as low as many other european countries, is still a fraction of what it was during the cold war [1] and so is its military capability. It has big shortfalls of amunitions (a couple of weeks worth in a Ukraine-style conflict), and even though it has in theory advanced techs, it has it in numbers that wouldn't help in an intense conflict like a war with Russia (the number of operational tanks, cannons and planes is just too low and it would be overwhelmed). It is a military that has been downsized to basically two missions: nuclear deterence, and small operations in the middle east and africa against terrorist groups and milicia. That military is completely inadequate to face a threat like Russia.

[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/mil_spend_gdp/

> No the transfer of defense spending to social spending was an explicit policy in the 80s/90s, that was refered at the time as "the peace dividends".

The idea of "Peace dividend" at no point implied a dichotomy between social spending and military spending. It was referring to the purported trade-off between military spending and the economy as a whole, in all of its aspects: the taxation or public debt needed to maintain a strong military, civilian workforce vs military manpower, civilian industry vs military industry, and yes, military vs civilian government expenditure — of which "social" spending is just one of many.

Note that the idea of the "Peace dividend" was popularised by George H.W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher, hardly proponents of increased social spending.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_dividend

I want to share your optimism regarding the EU (countries) continuing the support for Ukraine. Still, if the US drops its support and its moral and (material) persuasion to the EU, I'm not sure that the EU won't pull the plug as well, considering the wavering and indecision shown by several countries regarding the approval of aids.

United states mainly provides quality weapons to the Ukraine which EU does not have. EU provides humanitarian aid. Which is also important but without American help Ukraine will lose the war against Russia

And a lot of European weapon systems have US components, so if Americans want they can certainly freeze and prohibit supply of military aid to the point where it won't be sustainable to resist Russian assaults.

I'm optimistic in the sense that I believe that if the EU offered to pay for the weapons, then the Trump government won't mind supplying them. The issue is that it would be difficult for the EU to reach an internal agreement.

> if the EU offered to pay for the weapons

It's a bit like if Mexico offered to pay for the wall at some point... Europe should not be a carpet, it has more than enough weapons manufacturers and any additional funding should be directed to them.

The war in Ukraine has so far been good for the US and bad for Europe so it's bonkers to suggest that Europe should make things even 'worse' for itself.

> it has more than enough weapons manufacturers and any additional funding should be directed to them.

Sure, but that won't buy us the ammunition that Ukraine needs right now. For a period of time you'd need to buy Patriot missiles, 155mm shells and a ton of other stuff from the US. Then you can slowly shift to sending shells made in the EU, IRIS-T or NASMS air defence, Marders and CV90 IFVs, and Gripen fighters over time.

> If 20% of your economy is busy throwing ordnance at someone else sounds pretty unsustainable, then you are probably right.

The bigger harm Russia is putting onto itself is its inability to take part in the AI race. They've left the battle over to the US and China, while the EU at least isn't idling.

If they wouldn't have started the war and have at least pretended to be good friends, they could have used their vast amounts of energy resources to run huge datacenters (which they could then have used to start a war). Worst move ever made by a ruler.

The US and China are both profiting from this war.

We’re discussing a literal war, with all the death and destruction that entails, and your claim is “the bigger harm” is not wasting more money on a power hungry subpar parrot that is accelerating the dissemination of disinformation and making it harder to fight climate change with its energy consumption.

We’re all doomed. Anyone who believes AI will kill us is delusional, humans are greedy and stupid enough that we’ll do it ourselves.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

> a power hungry subpar parrot

You may yet live to be bitten in the gluteus maximus by said parrot.

If that happens it will not be because it became sentient and decided to cause me harm, but because some developer somewhere decided it was a good idea to tab-tab-tab their code completion without fully understanding the solution and the resulting security hole caused the system to be exploited.

no, it'll be because it's aligned with rich people's interests. robot police holding back the unwashed masses is in our near future.

Same difference. The point is that it won’t be the AI’s choice, it will be caused by human misuse of it, whether by incompetence or malice.

you'll still be bitten by the parrot.

Whatever. The point was clear in the first message; if you refuse to understand the idea even after multiple explanations, that’s your prerogative. Your nitpick is unproductive and boring and doesn’t advance the conversation either way, it’s just contrarian for the sake of contrarianism. I have no desire to fuel a conversation whose replies amounts to nothing more than “no, you”.

that makes sense, thank you for explaining. you win.

“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” - T-800, 1995

Bigger harm than "20% of your economy is busy throwing ordnance at someone else". That comment was focusing on the economy, not on the deaths.

Regarding AI, it could lead to solutions to the problems we've been creating through the industrialization.

Russia is no stranger to the relationship between the economy and death. Both wars and economic mismanagement have led to famine in Russia. As for AI, we have no proof that it will work out for the benefit of humanity. Even if we did have such proof, it would also depend upon people heeding its advice.

The war in Ukraine is rarely analysed in the media, which cover focusses public opinion on superficial and emotional readings (one might say this is organised propaganda).

Why are the different players acting the way they are and what are their interests? These are the interesing questions.

So far the war seems to have served US interests quite well with the US appearing to be the one clear winner. Perhaps a way to estimate next moves is to guess how things can eveolve from now and which scenarios serve the US' interests best. If they don't see further gains they might decide to freeze the situation but I doubt they would want anything to be seem as a Russian victory (though it'd be hard not to at this point).

Anders Puck Nielsen has some very good (and directly to the point) videos about this, including Russia's plan for victory (which isn't land area).

He is a military analyst working for the Royal Danish Defence College.

https://www.youtube.com/@anderspuck/videos

A lot of the western GDP is stuff like marketing, ads, accountants - none of these are useful when the bullets are flying - ask the CEOs.

The war will stop on the current lines, and Russia will use the 4 years of respite to re-arm and take the rest of Ukraine in 2028.

GDP is imaginary. It is not how much money you have or how much wealth you have. It's not how much weapons or how much fuel or steel you have. It is only a measurement of how fast imaginary money is traded between people within an economic zone. And Europe has a lot of such economic "activity" with very little real world results.

> So even if you drop the US, only the EU should be sufficient.

So the US has a more robust arms industry, so they are certainly more helpful in that regard, but monetarily the EU as a whole seems to have given more:

* https://www.statista.com/chart/28489/ukrainian-military-huma...

* https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/news/ukraine-support-tr...

I agree with prediction 1. Why do you really think prediction 3 will happen?

Will there be any conflict between Musk's supposed eco-credentials and Trump's ambitions to destroy everything green?

It seems to me that Musk's eco-credentials have been long largely abandoned, assuming he every really had them to begin with. I get the sense that they were only ever useful to help sell cars and support his ego-trip (make him seem a "visionary"). None of his other projects are particularly eco-friendly (a tunnel, but just for cars, big rockets, autonomous cars rather than larger scale transit, etc.)

I think the more likely reason Musk and Trump will fall-out of... whatever it is they have... is they both have huge egos and don't like sharing the spotlight.

My feeling is that, while the rest of Big Tech is busy kissing Trump's ring at Mar-a-Lago, Musk is something between Trump's consigliere and Trump's owner.

I also don't think that it's going to end well for them, but it might last a while. Also, Trump is pretty old, so it's entirely possible that he'll die before they have a falling out.

> -Crypto has a major correction; bitcoin finishes the year well under $100k.

Eh, I was expecting the opposite, with people flocking it to bitcoin (or some other crypto) as a backup strategy in case of political/ecological instability.

What makes you think that there will be a major correction?

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42493130

Reposting:

This is easy. Bitcoin reaches it's high between Jun and Oct. This is based on historical 4 year trends.

Then falls. Falls around 70%. Again, this is based on historical trends.

And yes, while past performance is not indicative of future performance, the bitcoin cycle has been following this, and when everyone expects this, it ends up happening by the virtue of everyone's expectation.

Fair enough, but this doesn't sound like a major correction, does it?

70% is the end of the world for traditional stocks, not a "correction"!

70% is not the end of the world for a single company stock. Plenty have done similar and come out on top (Apple, Meta, Carvana, Netflix, etc.).

BTC market cap is lower than nVidia, Apple or MS. But that is not important, what it should really be compared to is gold and compared to that it is an upstart at current price levels.

BTC has no utility other than being digital gold. Other crypto currencies have no utility either.

You need a constant supply of new bag holders, but miners need to be paid.

Crypto moves with financial liquidity. If the stock market falls, so does crypto. Gold is for investment diversity not crypto.

Why not? Because crypto is somehow easier to buy/liquidate than gold?

Gold will always retain value. Stocks and crypto can fall to 0. It is the only asset that has retained high value for thousands of years.

When the future in uncertain (like start of a war/pandemic), gold is a safe heaven. Stocks and crypto get obliterated in panics.

Isn't the future uncertain since the creation of Bitcoin? I'd like to be obliterated like I've been with BTC going through multiple global crisis :)

BTC is not a threat to gold. No central bank is replacing gold in it's vault with BTC.

> I'd like to be obliterated like I've been with BTC going through multiple global crisis :)

Crashes don't happen in a vacuum. The reason people sell at the bottom is because they believe in the crisis not the recovery.

> Gold will always retain value.

After >40 years, gold has only just gotten back to its 1980s inflation-adjusted price:

* https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

Papers have been written on how it does not hedge inflation:

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789

See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Experience 1560 to 1976:

> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.

* http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RoyJastram...

So if the barbarians are (close to literally) coming across the fields, gold can be useful to hide or take with you as you head for the hills, but for most economic situations it is not useful.

> Stocks and crypto can fall to 0.

In which case, you better be a farmer with lots of ammo so you can feed yourself and protect what's yours. Of course the Mad Max chaos is a popular trope, but historical events show that people tend to be altruistic and pull together during disasters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell

> After >40 years, gold has only just gotten back to its 1980s inflation-adjusted price

If you look at the absolute peak of its price for the last 100 years, it took 40 years to get back to it. Yeah, so? Absolute peaks are like that.

If you don't cherry-pick the year, the gold price right now is looking good compared to the past. (Though an honest reading of that chart would lead one to suspect that we might be near another peak right now...)

Gold will always retain some value. It may not retain 100% of its current value (based on that chart, you could lose 80%). But it still might do better than, say, the Zimbabwe dollar, the Continental, or even the ruble over the past decade.

> If you don't cherry-pick the year, the gold price right now is looking good compared to the past.

Then there's the near-decade drought between 2011 and 2019, and the multi-year drought between 2021 and 2024.

Meanwhile, if instead of having cash tied up in gold one had invested in an index fund (total market or even S&P 500), it'd be getting both price appreciation and dividends. Even the so-called S&P 500 lost decade of the 2000s did pretty well if you had some bonds and rebalanced (or, as a US resident, were internationally diversified):

* http://archive.is/https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010...

The only time in recent history that gold seems to have been a useful 'investment' was a few years in the late 1970s and between 2000 and 2011. Over the course of decades it seems to have been a money hole.

> But it still might do better than, say, the Zimbabwe dollar, the Continental, or even the ruble over the past decade.

Compared to a diversified portfolio or even bonds (especially TIPS in the US), gold would have been a disaster.

A well diversified portfolio contains an allocation in gold. If one is not an american it is even more important.

Your original claim was "retain value". I think that was good wording - gold isn't a "make money" asset; it's a "don't lose it all" asset.

Comparing its investment performance to TIPS is therefore moving the goalposts from "retains value" to "grows fast". (Or am I taking the words in your first post as being more precise than they were intended?)

I even think that with the polarization of the world and the new global crisis coming, people might realise the ever growing need of decentralization, and we might see the real birth of web3 technologies. (Not speaking about meme coins =))

>> Crypto has a major correction; bitcoin finishes the year well under $100k.

This is easy. Bitcoin reaches it's high between Jun and Oct. This is based on historical 4 year trends.

Then falls. Falls around 70%. Again, this is based on historical trends.

Only 4 data points.

There are meaningful differences this time around: Trump support of Bitcoin lobby and mainstream ETFs.

If you assume that BTC's market cap increases 5x-10x per $1 in inflow it receives, if it does another $100b in inflows next year, it'll be between $120k-$130k

> Then falls. Falls around 70%. Again, this is based on historical trends.

A semi-joke-y observation about a monkey wrench that may be thrown into the mix:

> The main argument for a Strategic BItcoin Reserve seems to be that Bitcoin holders worry about an impending shortage of greater fools and need the US government to act as the greatest fool of last resort.

* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1870564077535470079

Crypto correction on 21st Jan is my prediction.

> -Crypto has a major correction; bitcoin finishes the year well under $100k.

Wild prediction from me: Trump creates a US coin, everyone realises that a large government can easily create an alt coin, with enough people buying it and selling Bitcoin because it has the US government's support. Bitcoin then loses significant value and possibly becomes worthless eventually.

The value of Bitcoin is only there because it was the "first", but there is nothing fundamental about it that cannot be replicated. Am I wrong?

Prediction: Musk will call it x-coin.

Traded as a single X letter, to confuse people even more

Bitcoin has a proof of work based blockchain.

The length and story of the chain is a unique experiment, unlikely to be replicated ever again in my opinion

The length and story of the chain bears no value

Panama canal will be returned to the loving embrace of the USA

- Large release from Boston Dynamics

- Meta releases serious enterprise self-hosting Llama platform

- Apple Intelligence remains useless

- Trump begins to show serious signs of mental decline. Not tired like Biden, but overly paranoid and delusional like Putin.

- GPT-5 is almost the same as GPT-4, but it doesn't have a recognizable tone

We progressively advance towards Cyberpunk:

- governments around the world proceed with bowing to megacorps/cults/mobs;

- entire jobs disappear to AI [1], people are told that they "just need to" learn a new job, at the age of 50+;

- money is further diverted from fundamental research and towards AI, because governments and private institutions are convinced that AI will magically solve the world's problems;

- AGI remains 6 months away;

- nuclear fusion remains 3 years away;

- as Pax Americana disappears, the UN remains paralyzed and the EU remains in crisis, international relations return to wolf-at-the-door style anarchy [2] and generalized economic+proxy wars;

- new crypto boom (possibly followed immediately by large correction);

- with further deregulation and wars, we proceed to destroy the Earth and ignore the consequences, predicting that AI will somehow solve it;

- as a consequence of both international anarchy and environmental collapse, record number of refugees;

- as a consequence of major despair, ecoterrorism, ploutoterrorism (is there a better way for a CEO getting shot?), fascioterrorism start becoming fashionable;

- eventually, a truce/occupation in Gaza;

- no war in Taiwan just yet;

- some Line-of-Control-style truce in Ukraine [3];

- more escapism, with the budget for super-hero movies, video-games, etc. increasing;

- lots of AI crap, with GenAI-written books saturating Amazon, GenAI-written content saturating social networks, GenAI-written content replacing journalists in at least one major news source, a few semi-experimental GenAI-written movies and/or videogames;

- generally speaking, people understand less and less the world around them, because their news sources more and more filled with disinformation and random crap;

- companies still believe that AI will magically solve all their problems;

- Netflix starts generating series with GenAI (although the release might not be in 2025);

- companies that sell hardware and services to company that try to adopt AI make lots of money;

- we do not hit planetary limits for AI yet, but we inch closer;

- rich countries (perhaps with the exception of China) further decrease their investment in education;

- the signs show that the economy is just fine, so no need to change anything.

[1] Despite AI not necessarily being able to do their job.

[2] That kind of anarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_(international_relatio... .

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_Control

The world is cyberpunk. Has been since 1990s.

Well, in the 90s, cyberpunk was a parody.

But of course, a few too many people took it as an instruction manual, so yes, by now, we're basically there.

"Hybrid WW3" continues. Russia advances most everywhere in the proxy politics space (perhaps paradoxically except Syria.)

Western economies continue on their troll-induced march to self-implosion. The defamation attacks on their Comparative Advantage industries intensify, particularly:

- Non-Musk Big Tech / AI

- Non-Musk aerospace (=> Boeing)

- Wall Street / non-crypto finance

- Non-Musk automotive

- Hollywood

Immigration is halted or reversed in most Western countries, halving long-term GDP growth.

Hard to say whether the H5N1 flu will turn into another pandemic.

How do you mention geopolitics and a potential WW3 without mentioning the Middle East and Israel?

Gaza was heartbreaking, but the story was amplified in the US to suppress progressive turnout. I think I saw the same fingerprints on both sides.

Either way, the Battle of Oil is mostly over. The ME is increasingly irrelevant. Arab leaders predicted this long ago [1].

[1] https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

OK, will do. I was just imitating others that seem to be doing the same.

Is there such a thing as an acceptable number of accounts per year? (Not fond of the karma system.)

I'm a young whippersnapper, but how is the current state of affairs more "WW3" than what happened in Vietnam and Korea? To me it seems we're back to cold war.

Russia is a hell of a lot closer to world domination than it was in 1950 or 1970. If anything, the prior "peak" was in 1945, when Stalin failed to call Truman's bluff [1]. Parenthetically, the Haberdasher is the unsung hero of the eight-ish decades of Pax Americana.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Totality

God, this thread is bleak. Not undeservedly, but...woof.

Nobody's mentioned antibiotic resistant bacteria much that I saw, so that'll probably keep being more and more of an issue.

Everyone predicted a second Great Depression during Covid that lined up with 1929... Well, Trump and his friends might drive us toward that in 2029, or earlier.

AI peaks and we can't eke out much more real benefit from it, but there's too much investment in it for businesses to admit it, so the grifters spin into high gear.

Elon Musk and the other billionaires continues to get richer.

The poor continue to get poorer.

Trump pulls the US out of every socially-good but vaguely anti-business agreement.

Russia finally pulls out of Ukraine but keeps the bits it "liberated".

China declares itself to be the biggest and most stable global superpower as America and Russia have spun off the deep end.

I have to replace my bike tires.

> God, this thread is bleak. [...] I have to replace my bike tires.

Your bike tires have contributed to the microplastic crisis. :-)

and it's now inside our testicles ;)

'you got bike tire in my testicals!'

isn't quite as catchy as the old Reese's cup 'you got chocolate in my peanut butter' version but somehow sums up 2024.

Not if I burn them! Then they contribute to the air quality issue! Time to go cry in the corner!

The proliferation of AI phones and AI robots gives us capable assistants like JARVIS

* We will find some ancient manuscript that only MRI and AI can read which conveniently realigns or adjusts the foundational beliefs of all abrahamic religions to the alien-god mythology

* Some sort of new power source will be teased which supercedes what we could gain from fusion

* JFK files are released and there is a lot of UFO information inside it

* The false alien disclosure op continues with lots of 'orbs' and drones and whatnot and a threat narrative emerging necessitating loss of liberty

* Russia and Ukraine mutually give up territory - Russia then turns on patriots and nationalists inside their border and NATO arms and fortifies Ukraine to the teeth for a push in the coming decade

* Some very unpleasant things are publicly released by the feds about SV40 and the vaccines

* Elon begins a fatwa against his business rivals and pushes for more technocratic solutions in the government like blockchains

* Very few immigrants are sent back, they just don't report on it and hope nobody notices

* Escalating rhetoric against Mexico and their cartels

* Guatemala starts a major war over Mexican espionage in Petén

* Donald Trump is revealed to be the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto

* President Nelson (prophet of the LDS church) dies and is replaced by Dallin Oaks

* Dugin writes a sequel to The Fourth Political Theory, titled The n+1'th Political Theory

* New microscope finds the words "God was here" etched into every molecule in the universe

* People become at least 5% cuter as estrogen/testosterone ratio continues to tip in that direction

* AI will fizzle out.

* We will finally do something about climate change.

* The world will finally become sane again.

Just kidding! Lol

Cold fusion turns out to part of the physics repressed since the 1950s, and progress begins the path to give everyone their own personal megawatt of clean energy.

Disclosure actually happens, and it turns out we're not alone in the Universe.

BitGrid turns out to be the most efficient way to bring Petaflops to the masses, it's then disappeared as "born secret" and you never hear of it again.

Someone figures out an effective algorithm for simulating a quantum computer in real time at any scale, again "Born Secret" and it disappears.

H1N5 (Bird flu?) takes hold in the human population, millions die.

bitgrid is cool! https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

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