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> 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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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

* 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...