AI breakthroughs to look out for in 2025 and beyond
Like most of us, I've been following some of the recent AI breakthroughs to try and make sense of what's going on in the industry. Here's what I expect this year and beyond.
AI isn’t going anywhere. It is, inevitably, going to be a part of our everyday lives. But breakthrough technologies do not have a linear progression curve. They go exponential. This means it can be very hard to keep track of whats going on. I’ve tried to keep up with the AI news as much as I can and amid all the fluffs, here are some big changes we can expect to see in 2025 and beyond.
Microsoft’s Willow moment?
A couple of weeks ago, we saw Google have a major breakthrough in Quantum Computing with its Willow chip. They’ve come with a new way to decrease the number of errors as they add more qubits to their calculation. This is huge because for decades adding more qubits always introduced more errors. The stage is now set for Quantum Computing to advance rapidly while reducing the errors and to be used in real-world applications as we’ve all been waiting for decades.
However, we’re not fully there yet. Although we do have to acknowledge this breakthrough, Google estimates atleast 5 -10 years before we see the impact in the real world.
There’s also another company working on Quantum Computing. Microsoft. And they’re close to having a big moment of their own. Apparently, they’ve taken a different approach to this and rely on something called Topological Qubits. According to Microsoft, expect a mojor announcement on this in 2025. Interesting times ahead.
Super Agents
We’re not there with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) just yet. However, there are signs that we are close. Tech leaders like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg have been teasing us about something they’ve been working on. Super Agents. These aren’t your regular ChatGPT chatbots, these are AI agents capable of learning human habits, take decisions on their own and just overall be a great help in almost all industries. For example, a Super Agent can let you know when you’re about to run out of detergents and order a box on its own without you ever asking for it. When Mark Zuckerberg recently said they are looking at replacing mid-level software engineers in his company, this is what he was talking about. AI Super Agents coding and deliver on their own. Scary times ahead for Software Engineers.
AlphaFold
AlphaFold from Google Deepmind has been making some news lately. The team has been working on AlphaFold 3 where they try to understand how drugs bind to proteins and other biomolecules. This is extremely useful in developing new patterns in early-stage detection of life-threatening disease. The Deepmind team has been working tirelessly to use AI in various real life applications like creating plastic eating enzymes. Over the past few weeks, Google Deepmind has been making their AlphaFold 3 model open source which has paved the way for rapid development. Expect more accuracy and more medical breakthrough from this in 2025.
AI is advancing really fast. Sometimes faster than most people can keep up. This is how ground breaking technology moves and I, personally am very excited to see whats in store in the near future. Follow more of my thoughts on x.com/akshay