1. Rising software costs (but reduced labour overhead….)
- Ai agents will begin to carry out tasks, rather than just telling us what we should do. Expect to see this functionality added to almost every business app you use.
- Expect to see software vendors pricing their services by labour cost savings you’ll make, rather than by the licences you use.
- Already seeing this trend emerging in Open Ai with their new $200 a month Ai plan. Very likely you’ll see more of the same when they launch Autonomous agents in the new year.
- In theory the rising software costs will be offset by reducing labour overhead, but that’s easier said than done for most businesses.
2. Grok takes the lead in the Ai arms race
- Elon successfully scaled his supercomputer (colossus) beyond the previously believed 32k GPU limit. Reports suggest that xAI’s Colossus cluster has been expanded to utilise 100,000 GPUs, with plans to increase this to 200,000 in the very near future.
- Grok caught the competition napping and Grok 3 is about to be launched, taking full advantage of its superior tech hardware / brain.
- Add to this the fact that Elon has simultaneously leapfrogged the competition in acquiring the very latest Nvidia GPUs by paying $1B premium, expected in Q1 2025.
- Rumours are building on a standalone Grok 3 app launching in the new year.
- Combine all of that with the fact that Grok is the only Ai with direct access into the X / twitter ecosystem for learning data and you can see there’s potential for the Ai no one’s heard of to be the one everyone uses.
3. Google continues to lose its grip on Search (Ai Powered Search takes the lead)
- In 2024 the Perplexity Ai search engine laid the groundwork for what’s to come. Anyone that’s used perplexity already struggles to go back to google and its ad filled cluttered search results.
- Ai search will be won by the company with access to the most training data. More accurately, won by the company with access to the most training data but unencumbered by an existing business model.
- Google will continue to struggle blending Ads with Ai generated search results, and organic web pages.
- Publishers will get increasingly angry with google using their website content as training data for google LLM only to appear regurgitated at the top of search results re-written by Ai. (library sprinkled with paying advertisers)
- This could be the year that another giant in search is born. X / Twitter and Facebook both have the potential to access huge amounts of training data from within their own walled gardens.
- X.com is perhaps best placed right now to take advantage of momentum, especially with the lead their Ai is about to make in early 2025.
4. Google Chrome faces a real threat (from two fronts)
- Unfortunately for Google their 2025 troubles are not over. A perfect storm is brewing around their chrome browser.
- As part of an investigation into monopolistic practices, significant legal pressure is now building in the Department of justice, calling for the breaking up of some key google assets. Top of that list is their Chrome browser.
- At the same time this is happening rumours are building over the potential launch of a new browser from Open Ai.
- Open ai has the freedom to reimagine the browser in ways google cant primarily because of the way ad revenue is generated by the business.
- There’s even speculation that the new Ai browser may be built around the integration of autonomous agents rather than us mere humans….
- I don’t see a situation in 2025 where Chrome ends the year unscathed
5. “Context” becomes king (and challenges for the most overused buzzword of 2025)
- Context is a significant factor in how humans make decisions. More importantly it’s a key component of enabling Ai to go beyond the ability of rewriting your next email or making a funny emoji you’ll never use
- 2024 might have been all about writing Ai prompts (apparently prompt engineering is now a career path) but 2025 will be all about context
- Software companies will increasing sell their ability to add context to your data (for a price of course)
- If you thought the last 10 years was a data obsession (self confessed dataholic, writing this with zero irony) just wait until your employer asks for every touch point with colleagues and customers to be captured for “context training”
- Expect to see GDPR style legislation scramble to catch up with the impact of someones latest VR glasses analysing a customers facial expressions for context to be added to their sales training data….
