Gazing Into the Crystal Ball
Waymo surpassing Uber in SF, the rise of AI agents, Musk trying to buy TikTok, AI hedge funds & more Silicon Valley predictions.
Silicon Valley is paid to think about the future. So it’s a dangerous proposition for us reporters to jump into the predictions racket. We’re competing with the pros.
And making predictions by proclamation has it’s own downsides: Startup investing is calibrated so that you scale up your confidence as a company’s footing looks surer and surer. There isn’t quite the same dynamic with non-monetary, ego-only predictions. Fundamentally, you’re either right or you’re wrong.
Still, come this time of year people are practically throwing their predictions at us and people are asking for ours. Forecasts about what’s going to happen over the next 12 months are flittering about like Harry Potter receiving his Hogwarts acceptance letters.
A top tech publication recently reviewed their 2024 prognostications and scored themselves a “D,” “A,” “F,” “F,” “F,” and “B+” — a brutal self-analysis in an age of grade inflation.
Still, The Information got back on the horse this year and predicted that Amazon would buy Lyft and that Elon Musk will try to buy TikTok. (In January 2023, we wrote a similar, surely, somebody could do something more constructive with Lyft story, but so far it’s remained independent.)
This year, we’ve made a few predictions about 2025 of our own — but mostly we’re doing what we do best: talking to our sources.
Here’s a rundown of how people think 2025 is going to shake out:
Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson — who has a demonstrated track record of seeing into the future — made some pretty bold predictions of his own this week. We’re not exactly sure how many of them we are supposed to take at pure face value.
Wilson’s predictions include:
Apple and Google will leverage their existing market power to surpass OpenAI/ChatGPT in consumer AI prompts by the end of 2025.
Waymo will surpass Uber in rides taken in San Franciso and Los Angeles by the end of 2025.
An AI-produced animated feature film will be nominated for an Oscar.
An air taxi service in New York City will offer an alternative to the L train commute.
A housekeeper robot named Judy, from Dyson, will be a massive success, selling millions of units.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi’s annual predictions post, where he solicits takes from top venture capitalists and startup founders, showed the rise of AI agents to be the top theme for the year to come.
“The next big thing in 2025 will be web usage shifting from humans to agents. This will be so much more than ‘book my flight for me’ — agents will automate the billions of repetitive clicks on the internet today,” predicted founder Jamie Cuffe.
As for our own predictions, which Trivedi kindly included in his post as well, we’ll offer two. One is about what Cerebral Valley podcast listeners know is a favorite topic of ours: AI applications.
Eric’s AI prediction for 2025
The next big thing in 2025 will be in the world of artificial intelligence, where it’s going to be cool to be a GPT wrapper again. Consumers and businesses both need help figuring out how best to use already very powerful language models so we're going to see a bunch of applications crop up that help people get the most out of these models. Startups will build sales motions, integrations, customer know-how, etc. and won't need some huge technological moat to justify their existence. Of course no one will want to call their company a “wrapper.” Think more “GPT refiner.” These companies will get data particular to their use-case, do some human reinforcement learning, and deliver an easy-to-use product that leads the horse to water instead of an intimidating empty text box.
Our second is media-focused (and transparently Newcomer-aligned!)
Eric’s independent media prediction for 2025
The next big thing in 2025 will be the year independent media became mainstream media. The Trump campaign's reliance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, All-In, and the rest of the independent media ecosystem will convince marketers that they need to fully embrace an independent media strategy. That will help dump more professional money and mainstream enthusiasm into “independent” media. It will also mean that it will be the year blaming the “mainstream media” loses its coherence as the ill-defined independent media swamps traditional media in relevance and reach.
Three more predictions from us here:
This will will be the year large language models make a big impact on the public markets. We’ll see AI native hedge funds. And there’s a real risk (promise?) that the foundation model giants themselves could be making a lot of money with their cutting edge technology by outsmarting the markets before they give all their customers access.
We don’t see an AI wall in 2025. I think there’s still a lot of room for model outputs to improve.
More than a quarter of the volume of posts on social media in the second half of 2025 will be AI generated.
What Our Sources Are Watching For
We surveyed investors from firms including IVP, Union Square Ventures, FPV, FirstMark Capital, and more to hear their thoughts about which deals will get done, which companies will go public, and what firms will see partner shakeups. We allowed all partners the option to stay on background for this piece so they could speak more candidly.