Here Are the Big 2025 Predictions for AI, From a CEO Who Was Right About This Year’s Developments

It’s that time of year, when tech luminaries offer thoughts on where innovations will take us in the year ahead, and Ai promises to be a driving force. Back in December 2023, tech luminary Bill Gates made a bold prediction about how AI would advance in 2024, guessing that “we are 18-24 months away from significant levels of AI use by the general population.” Gates was largely correct, as the explosive growth of ChatGPT shows, while Apple, Google and Microsoft integrate AI into their consumer- and business-centric tools. Looking to 2025, another AI executive with an even more impressive track record has made his forecast, with some startling surprise forecasts. Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, an AI-development platform and user community used by millions of developers and big names like Intel and Qualcomm, expects that we’ll see “the first major public protest related to AI” next year. Delangue published his predictions as a list of bullet-points on his LinkedIn page (almost as if an AI had written them). While he doesn’t detail his thoughts on a very human response to supercharged computing capabilities, based on recent controversies swirling around AI adoption, the pushback could be about anything from AI stealing jobs en masse—perhaps in the style of the Occupy Wall St protests—to inappropriate use of AI tech by police, government bodies or health care systems. Delangue also predicts that a “big company will see its market cap divided by two or more because of AI,” implying AI breakthroughs will suddenly render obsolete some core tech or core business philosophy of a major corporation—perhaps in the way that the arrival of the internet hit newspapers’ core print advertising revenue business model. The third prediction is interesting because it crosses from software to hardware: “at least 100,000 personal AI robots will be ordered,” Delangue said. This is right in line with AI robot developments from companies like Tesla and Figure. It also tracks with pronouncements from Elon Musk about humanoid robots, including his own plans to put them to work on Tesla production lines. Delangue also predicted there will be AI breakthroughs in biology and chemistry—resonating with research uses of AI for tasks like drug molecule discovery—and that China will “start to lead the AI race,” a fact that may interest certain concerned parties, like the U.S. government. Lastly, Delangue said the user base of his own company is likely to rise to 15 million “AI builders,” up from this year’s tally of 7 million users. Before you dismiss these predictions as entrepreneurial hucksterism, it’s worth noting that many of Delangue’s AI predictions for this year were accurate, including rising general awareness of the monetary and environmental costs of developing better AI models. Delangue’s musings could also be seen as a useful weather vane for how changing AI tech in 2025 may impact your personal digital life, as well as the technology applied in your company. If your company has been slow to embrace AI tech, this is another reminder that the AI wave is already washing over us, and maybe it’s time to catch up. At the very least, you should maybe try to ensure that it’s not your firm that’s the cause of the first mass public protests against AI tech. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON