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My 5 AI Predictions for 2025

Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
Predict
Published in
11 min readDec 18, 2024

And a few non-predictions

Photo by Joshua Kettle on Unsplash

Predicting (correctly) the future is challenging.

Ask about it — to bring a widely known pop culture icon — Hanna and Barbera, the creators of the Jetsons, who imagined a future with flying cars and robotic maids but didn’t figure the Internet or the smartphone in our future.

In AI, in particular, many failed overoptimistic predictions also caused disillusionment and, in the end, the so-called “AI Winters,” periods when AI funding dried up. The whole field retreated from public attention to obscure research labs, where few of us stubbornly continued our research day in and day out (yes, I started working on AI during one of its Winters).

For instance, the “Encyclopedia of Everything” (Cyc project) led by Doug Lenat in the 80s failed miserably. So did Japan’s “5th generation of computing” based on Logic. So did Expert Systems, which, after an initial success, ended up being utterly forgotten. So did the whole subfield of “Program Synthesis,” where I carried out my PhD research (it still stings).

All those projects looked promising at the time.

This makes some of us who are not young anymore ask ourselves, every time we see promising technologies, whether or not this will stick in the long run or burst like a bubble after the initial hype…

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Rafe Brena, Ph.D.
Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

Written by Rafe Brena, Ph.D.

AI expert, writepreneur, and futurologist. I was in AI way before it became cool.

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