What to expect in the year ahead

The coming year will be full of artificial intelligence, robots and a Starlink communications experience that will have many moving from their current providers.

- JAMES HEIN

Let’s dig in with my predictions for 2026.Research and development into what is labelled as artificial intelligence will continue unabated this year. The US and China will lead the push, but we will see many new large language models (LLMs) appear. A shout-out here to Tony Heller, the developer of Visitech.ai. This is a platform designed to simplify the understanding and visualisation of large and complex datasets from crime to climate and comes from a one-man operation. The generative AI LLMs will continue to grow and this year we may see a collapse of some of them as the number of hallucinations starts to grow. These are made-up answers when the AI can’t find a better response as the training is primarily to give a response and not to respond with: “I don’t know.” This will require a reset in the building and growth processes for a large language model.

More AI systems will be implemented in factories, package-sorting systems and even delivery processes as driverless vehicles start to become more common. The latter still have issues, like recently driving through an active crime scene in the US, but they will eventually iron most of these issues out. This will reduce the number of human jobs required in some places, but that is a whole other issue. In a bizarre twist I saw it reported that