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(2025.01.07) Welcome to 2025: The AI Storm Is Here! Are You Ready?

Written by Jeff Drake
1 · 07 · 25

Welcome to 2025: The AI Storm Is Here. Are You Ready?

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2025! I thought I’d take a few minutes to touch base and talk a little about what the future may entail for all of us. It’s an old adage, but more than ever before, “the future is now!”

Goodbye and Good Riddance to 2024!

If you’re anything like me, you’re happy that 2024 is now behind us. In an attempt to stay positive, I will keep my grousing about 2024 short and just say this:

For many of us, the future ahead is heavily clouded by the potential disasters that could befall our country, given such a significant shift in our government, from democracy to a type of oligarchy under Trump. Previously, it was a common complaint by most working class people that our country is being run by the rich, for the rich, but never before has this fact been so laid bare as it is now, with the 11 billionaires firmly embedded in our government, in positions of power and control. Add to this the fact that the richest man on earth is now openly functioning as co-president, and it is disturbing!

This has to be one of the biggest con jobs in history, next to God, that turning over the control of our government to billionaires will result in good things for the rest of us. Those who voted for Trump thinking he’d help the working class are about to get a brutal reality check. We’re witnessing a full corporate takeover, and it’s going to hit hardest exactly where his supporters live and work.

Hello 2025!

In the meantime, we have to keep on keepin’ on, if you know what I mean. We need to stay strong. As 2025 rolls out, and the AI revolution sneaks up on everyone not paying attention, stay alert, stay informed. Information is our only real defense. AI may not take your job or the job of someone you know in the next 5 years, but, mark my words, someone who is really good at using AI probably will, especially if you allow yourself to sleep at the switch.

The AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is coming, folks, probably within a year! That’s two years earlier than I thought. Some might argue that AGI is still years away, but from what I’m seeing – given the iterative improvements Nvidia, OpenAI, and Google are making – it looks like we’re way ahead of schedule. Anyone still doubting how close AGI is should spend a few weeks talking to ChatGPT-4o. This model could eat the Turing Test for breakfast – so smart, so clever, so helpful, even humorous, and definitely insightful. The only giveaway? Its replies are instantaneous. No human can think that fast. And if that’s where we are now, what will the next iteration look like? Personally, I can hardly wait to find out!

Oh, one last note on the AGI. Models like ChatGPT 4o are so advanced, that they give the appearance of already being the foretold AGI, but they aren’t, at least not yet. However, because they are so good at what they do and they continue to improve weekly, the arrival of the AGI may not initially be noticed! The AGI may just turn out to be a mere stepping stone in time, between the point where we are today and a future that will bring the ASI (Artificial Super-Intelligence). More on this in a future post.

Ringing in the New Year

The darling of the AI industry, Nvidia corporation, just announced what the future of AI looks like from their perspective at the industry event known as CES (Consumer Electronics Show) going on right now in Las Vegas. Having watched the keynote speech by Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, I am somewhat blown away. I predict that Nvidia is going to be the most powerful corporation on the planet in the very near future. I am wondering how long they will be allowed to operate before someone sues them for being a monopoly?

Cosmos? What Would Carl Sagan Think?

At CES Nvidia announced Cosmos, a virtual reality copy of our entire world. It virtually replicates not just what is in our world in general terms, but right down to the physics going on all around us. In Cosmos, water flows like water, vapors appear and disappear the way you’d expect, sand looks like sand, etc. If you’re a Star Trek fan, think “Holo-deck”. If you’re a Carl Sagan fan, imagine a universe where AIs can run limitless experiments to understand reality better than any scientist ever could. I think Carl would be impressed!

Cosmos is already being used to train robots, and this will be expanded greatly very soon. And the possibilities go even further. Imagine not just training robots, but creating a near-perfect simulation where AIs can design new drugs, test engineering projects, or even run economic models before a real-world implementation. For those of us who like pets, think about finally being able to test drugs and cosmetics without killing animals!

I say Nvidia is going to be the most powerful corporation on the planet because they are the first business to utilize AI iteratively: training, executing, analyzing, retraining, etc., then rinse and repeat, over and over. This is leading to the first glimmers we are seeing of exponential growth in an industry due to AI. And Nvidia’s growth is astonishing. As you might imagine, other businesses are lining up to board the exponential AI growth train. Another business doing this is OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. This approach is perhaps one of the biggest reasons ChatGPT is advanced as it is. Google is doing the same with their Gemini LLM. We all need to face reality – AI isn’t coming – it’s here. The only question is: are you going to adapt and ride the AI wave, or be left behind wondering what happened?

Huang also talked about self-driving cars. Self-driving cars? Yep. It seems Nivida has also developed a virtual world for self-driving cars to drive around in. They can have all the accidents they want and learn from their misakes, before being set loose on the real world. This is already having a positive effect on the EV market. It’s true – Tesla isn’t the only electric vehicle game in town anymore. Waymo, backed by Nvidia’s AI-powered simulations, is already rolling out self-driving taxis in California. And if Huang’s confidence in Nvidia’s training models is any indication, it won’t be long before these vehicles start replacing human-driven cars in cities worldwide. It’s a brave new world out there, folks!

Ch-ch-changes! Turn and Face the Strange!

A perfect lyric from David Bowie with which to paint a perfect picture of our future. So many changes are coming. Some will affect entire markets. Spurring on these changes will be what we might call, “The Rise of the Agents!” I’ve talked about agents before. Think of them as mini-AIs, probably narrow in that they are capable of doing tasks on our behalf in a specific area, or focus. However, these agents will be able to work in concert with other agents, creating a force majeure of sorts, delivering a virtual storm of task completions. What might this look like?

I recently listened to someone explain how agents are going to reengineer the market industry. It was eye-opening. How so? Well, think about marketing. Today, you’ve got people studying a particular market, analyzing all the data that is collected perhaps pertaining to how people decide to buy a car. They then create cookies, ads and web sites, etc., all geared towards cajoling or convincing someone that a particular car is just what they need, because it has everything they were look for in a car and more! This is familiar, right? We’re buried in this shit on a daily basis.

Now, take a step into the near future. In this future, you are the one who wants to buy a new car. In the past, you’d spend minutes or hours surfing the internet, reading reviews, trying to figure out which car has got what you are looking for, and which dealer has the best deal. Not anymore! Today, you leave all that agonizing search effort to your personal agent. You simply tell this agent what it is you want in a car, the price range, tech toys, etc. This agent then goes out and does a search on your behalf, perhaps employing other agents in a variety of different fields, who then all work together to return a car recommendation to you  that meets your dream car needs. Cool, heh?

But there is something very different going on in this scenario, which may not be immediately obvious. Did you pick up on it? What I described above isn’t just a new tool at work – it’s actually a fundamental shift in how the marketing business will operate in the future. Think about it – If AI agents are the ones making decisions about what to buy, then car manufacturers, for example, will no longer be selling to us, they’ll be selling to them.” And that, my friends, is a whole new ball game for marketeers!

It isn’t too hard to extrapolate other possibilities from this revelatory way of marketing in the future. For instance, it begs the question as to how long are UIs (user interfaces) going to be useful? Of what good is a browser if all I have to do is ask my AI to give me the information I seek? Of what good is a spreadsheet if all I have to do is ask my  AI to summarize last months bills for me and project future costs? You starting to get the picture?

There is so much more I could talk about in this vein, but I’ll stop for now and close with yet another plea to start learning about AIs and start using them!

Author

Jeff Drake

Retired IT consultant, world-traveler, hobby photographer, and philosopher.

Let us know what you think…

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