Returning to the previous year’s calls
The 2025 report graded its 2024 forecasts as five hits, two partial outcomes, and three misses. Hits included an open alternative surpassing o1 on reasoning benchmarks and NVIDIA’s challengers failing to make a meaningful dent in its market position. The humanoid-investment prediction was a miss: investment grew instead of trailing off.
What the next set of predictions tested
The new forecasts asked whether improving capabilities would produce externally visible consequences: retail sales through agents, end-to-end scientific discovery, audience attention, diplomatic crises, and political resistance to infrastructure. Their full conditions matter. A partial development should not silently become a hit by dropping the harder half of a forecast.
The ten forecasts, as published
- A major retailer reports >5% of online sales from agentic checkout as AI agent advertising spend hits $5B.
- A major AI lab leans back into open-sourcing frontier models to win over the current US administration.
- Open-ended agents make a meaningful scientific discovery end-to-end (hypothesis, expt, iteration, paper).
- A deepfake/agent-driven cyber attack triggers the first NATO/UN emergency debate on AI security.
- A real-time generative video game becomes the year’s most-watched title on Twitch.
- “AI neutrality” emerges as a foreign policy doctrine as some nations cannot or fail to develop sovereign AI.
- A movie or short film produced with significant use of AI wins major audience praise and sparks backlash.
- A Chinese lab overtakes the US lab dominated frontier on a major leaderboard (e.g. LMArena/Artificial Analysis).
- Datacenter NIMBYism takes the US by storm and sways certain midterm/gubernatorial elections in 2026.
- Trump issues an executive order to ban state AI legislation that is found unconstitutional by SCOTUS.
2025 report, slide 304 (PDF page 305). See the predictions scorecard for subsequent grading.