The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
10 big predictions for 2025 (News)
Mon, 06 Jan 2025
M.G. Siegler goes way out on a limb with some BIG predictions of things that could happen this year, Simon Willison's year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up-to-speed on the state of the LLM, Allen Pike describes a method for magic, Tom Critchlow thinks small databases are magic & James Stanier agrees with me about Parkinson's Law and the usefulness of deadlines.
Full Episode
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 6th, 2025. Well, how did your 2024 exit? Did you close open file descriptors, delete temporary files, and free allocated memory? Or was it more of a segfault and core dump kind of a finish? Me? I'm still holding on to a couple of loose threads, but I managed to return zero, and I'm ready to execute again.
So, let's get into this week's news. 10 Big Predictions for 2025 Tech journalist M.G. Siegler goes way out on a limb with some big predictions of things that could happen this year, one of which he believes actually has a chance. Here's his list with all of his reasoning removed because why not, right? Number one, Apple buys an AI company. Number two, someone buys Warner Bros. Discovery.
Number three, Intel gets bailed out. Number four, Elon Musk bails on the White House. Number five, Amazon's Alexa overhaul proves less than remarkable. Number six, Microsoft and OpenAI kiss and make up or break up. Number seven, NVIDIA comes back to earth a bit. Number eight, threads passes X slash Twitter in active users. Number nine, Google starts to feel real pressure on search.
And number 10, Mark Zuckerberg, Unchained. Of course, MG does defend these predictions in the blog post, which is linked. Some of these sound not too outlandish to me. Specifically, I can see numbers 1, 4, 5, 7, and 9 happening. That's Apple buying an AI company. Elon Musk bailing on the White House. Amazon's Alexa being not so remarkable. Nvidia coming back to Earth.
And Google starting to feel real pressure on search. That might already be happening. What do you think? Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Simon Wilson's year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up to speed on the state of the large language model ecosystem. He also comments on much of the commentary around LLMs, which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Simon says quote, I think that telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice no matter how much truth that represents. There is genuine value to be had here but getting to that value is unintuitive and needs guidance.
Those of us who understand this stuff have a duty to help everyone else figure it out. an unreasonable amount of time. Alan Pike describes a method for magic, quote, the pianist whose fingers seem supernaturally nimble, the presenter whose message seems viscerally compelling, and the artist whose paintings seem impossibly realistic all wield the same magic.
They've invested more time than you'd expect. Allen also provides a formula for getting over that fear of commitment. I'll give you a hint. It's similar to the formula for eating an elephant. It's now time for Sponsored News. Mobile debugging hands-on workshop. Picture this scenario. You get a crash report. App crashed on checkout page. But you can't reproduce it on your Pixel.
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