WE MAY SURVIVE

Artificial intelligence is the most impactful technological development of our time— more than computers or the internet and, perhaps, comparable to the Industrial Revolution, but happening on a much faster timescale.

- BY GEOFFREY HINTON

I believe 2025 will stand as a pivotal year in the history of AI for three main reasons: notable progress in AI’s capabilities in fields like image and video generation, mathematics, and software engineering; unprecedented levels of investment; and a dawning awareness that the huge benefits of AI may be accompanied by huge problems.

First, it is important to understand exactly what AI is. In the past, computer systems could not understand natural language. Now they do, and they do it in much the same way as people: they convert words into sets of features that capture the meanings of the words and use learned interactions between these features to refine the word meanings until they fit together nicely.