🎇 In 2025, everything moved fast. Four frontier AI models launched within 25 days. A heist at the Louvre took eight minutes. The TikTok ban lasted less than 24 hours. Markets crashed and recovered before analysts could explain what happened. Wars escalated, paused, and resumed. A British airline jingle from 2022 became the year’s most inescapable sound. This was a year that rewarded speed and punished anyone who blinked, so ICYMI…

👾 AI… again and again and again

The AI industry rode into 2025 on a wave of hype and ended it with a more sober assessment of what the technology is capable of — both good and bad. The year saw an unprecedented pace of model releases, with every major AI company shipping significant upgrades multiple times.

OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini in April with native agentic capabilities. GPT-5 launched in August featuring unified reasoning, a 400k token context window, and full multimodal processing. GPT-5.1 followed in November, and GPT-5.2 in December. The company hit USD 1 bn in monthly revenue mid-year (and USD 8 bn in losses), and reached 700 mn weekly active users by year’s end.

The competition was fierce. From 17 November through 11 December, the industry witnessed an unprecedented concentration of frontier model releases — xAI’s Grok 4.1, Google’s Gemini 3, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 all landed within 25 days. Gemini 3 topped several benchmarks, reportedly triggering a “code red” memo from OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

But 2025 seems to be setting up a year of reckoning for AI. MIT Technology Review called it “the great AI hype correction,” pointing to research showing that a whopping 95% of businesses that tried using AI found zero value in it. GPT-5 — which was hyped to be a “PhD-level expert in anything” — botched the landing in August, triggering the biggest vibe shift since ChatGPT first debuted.

💻 Consumer tech

Nintendo’s Switch 2 was one of the year’s most anticipated hardware launches. The console brought a sleeker design with magnetic Joy-Cons, a larger 1080p HDR display, significantly stronger performance, and mouse controls.

Apple made its boldest hardware bargain in years with the iPhone Air, unveiled in September as the thinnest iPhone ever made at just 5.6mm thick. Apple CEO Tim Cook called it “the biggest step ever with iPhone,” but it comes at a cost — and we don’t mean the USD 1k+ price tag. The tepidsales reportedly caused rival manufacturers, including Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, to scrap their own ultra-thin phone projects.

The foldable phone market took another leap forward when Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Trifold on 1 December, making tri-fold tech widely available for the first time. Huawei’s Mate XT had proven the concept earlier, but Samsung brought it to the mainstream.

Other hardware highlights:

  • Google became the first major Android phone maker to adopt Qi 2 magnetic wireless charging, introducing Pixelsnap to its Pixel 10 series as its MagSafe-style accessory;
  • LG’s new OLED TVs pushed peak HDR brightness above 2k nits while keeping its trademark near-perfect black levels.

🎭 Entertainment

Television staged a remarkable comeback in 2025. After years of post-strike uncertainty, the industry delivered an embarrassment of riches. Netflix’s Adolescence, a four-part British limited series about a teen accused of murder, dominated the Emmys (Owen Cooper became the youngest recipient of an Emmy award), and sparked a conversation about incel culture — all while being shot in single continuous takes.

KPop Demon Hunters became Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time, spawning a global phenomenon. The animated film about a K-pop trio that defends the human world from demons through catchy pop music earned nearly 300 mn views, with four songs from the soundtrack placing on the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10 — a historic first for an animated film.

The streaming landscape entered its endgame. Netflix moved to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a transaction that would have been unthinkable five years ago, accelerating consolidation that’s rapidly shrinking the number of major players.

Kendrick Lamar headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, fresh off receiving five Grammy Awards for his Drake diss track Not Like Us. The performance drew 133.5 mn viewers — the most-watched Super Bowl halftime ever recorded. His halftime rendition of Not Like Us, performed to a loudly singing crowd, represented what many called the definitive conclusion to the prolific Kendrick-Drake feud.

💃 Viral moments

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that memes don’t need to make sense to take over the world. Exhibit A: 6-7. Derived from Skrilla’s song Doot Doot (6 7) and basketball edits of LaMelo Ball (who is 6’7″), the phrase became the year’s most inexplicable punchline among grade schoolers and the chronically online.

Then came Italian brainrot — AI-generated creatures with vaguely Italian names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (a crocodile-bomber hybrid), Ballerina Cappuccina (a ballet-dancing cup of cappuccino), and Tung Tung Tung Sahur (an Indonesian wood log with a baseball bat) that inexplicably captivated Gen Alpha. One popular video counted at least 100 different characters.

  • The Studio Ghibli AI filter let everyone transform into Miyazaki-style characters — until a Miyazaki quote resurfaced in which he calls AI-generated art “an insult to life itself;”
  • Labubu plush dolls — toothy collectibles from The Monsters toy series that many described as “creepy” or “slightly ugly” — became the year’s most obsessed-over collectible, going from niche to ubiquitous seemingly overnight;
  • A Coldplay concert jumbotron delivered the year’s most talked-about relationship scandal when a kiss cam moment exposed what appeared to be an affair between two concertgoers;
  • The Jet2 holiday jingle (“Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday!”) originated from a 2022 British airline ad but exploded in 2025, backing over 1.4 mn TikToks of vacation mishaps. Thanks to the trend, Jess Glynne’s Hold My Hand became one of TikTok’s top songs of the year.

📜 Making history

On 8 May, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected Pope, becoming Pope Leo XIV — the first pope born in the United States. The 69-year-old Chicago native and Augustinian friar spent much of his career as a missionary in Peru. He chose his name in honor of Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical “Rerum novarum” established modern Catholic social teaching and promoted labor rights.

In one of the most audacious heists in recent memory, France’s crown jewels were lifted from the Louvre in broad daylight. The thieves used a furniture elevator truck to break in, drilled into display cases, and fled on scooters with an estimated USD 102 mn worth of historical jewels. The haul — including pieces tied to Empress Marie-Louise and Empress Eugénie — has not been recovered.

History books will also remember 2025 for its firsts:

  • The first soft landing of a commercial lunar lander (Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost);
  • The first woman appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (Sarah Mullally);
  • The first colossal squid filmed in its natural habitat;
  • And, less triumphantly, the first time the average US tariff rate exceeded 20% since the Great Depression.

🌐 Politics

Political playbook:

  • Germany got a new chancellor in Friedrich Merz after a chaotic election that saw the far-right AfD more than double its vote share to 20.7% — holding a record 152 of 630 Bundestag seats;
  • Japan inaugurated its first woman prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, while Namibia elected Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, its first woman president;
  • In September, Nepal’s government fell to a “Gen Z revolution” sparked by social media bans, resulting in at least 76 deaths and parliament buildings set ablaze.

The world’s fault lines deepened:

  • The Russia-Ukraine war entered its fourth year with no end in sight — Russia gained less than 1% of Ukrainian territory while losing roughly 1k soldiers daily;
  • India and Pakistan exchanged missile strikes in May after a terror attack in Kashmir killed 26, the most serious escalation between the nuclear powers in decades before a ceasefire was called on 10 May;
  • Israel conducted military strikes in six different countries as the genocide in Gaza continued;
  • Sudan’s civil war displaced mns as the Rapid Support Forces attacked civilian areas.

🔍 Trends to watch

AI grows up: For the third consecutive year, artificial intelligence dominates the prediction landscape, and 2026 will be the year AI moves from proof-of-concept to proof-of-impact. After 2025’s “hype correction,” enterprises are demanding measurable outcomes, not just impressive demos. Where 2024 forecasts centered on whether AI hype was justified and 2025 focused on deployment at scale, the 2026 conversation is about integration and consequences.

The robot dawn: 2026 marks the year humanoid robots go mainstream — sort of. 1X will deliver its first USD 20k Neo Beta units early in the year, and Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and others will accelerate their efforts. But expectations should be managed: these robots will still take 45 minutes to empty a dishwasher. The real action is in physical AI — intelligence embedded in robots, drones, and smart equipment for real-world interaction. Industry analysts predict humanoid robots ready for home deployment remain 2-3 years away.

The human element: Despite all the AI hype, 2026’s most important trend may be rediscovering what humans do best. Microsoft envisions small teams launching global campaigns in days, with AI handling data crunching while humans steer strategy. IBM research shows 81% of employees are confident they’ll keep up with future tech advances — despite 61% expecting their job role to change significantly due to emerging AI, and nearly half worrying about obsolescence by 2030. The organizations that thrive will be those that help workers learn with AI rather than compete against it.

🔮 Predictions

Alternative forms of connectivity will cause significant disruptions for telecoms in 2026 as advancements in fixed wireless access, low-orbiting satellites, private 5G networks, and even 6G mature. New players could emerge that connect phones solely via satellite, bypassing traditional cell towers entirely. Starlink and competitors will continue expanding, particularly in underserved regions.

Executives are ending 2025 on an optimistic note, with global economic expectations brighter than at any point this year. McKinsey surveys show confidence in domestic economies rising across developed and emerging markets alike, with concerns about trade policy receding.

The RTO wars will continue but settle into hybrid norms. ”Some form of hybrid will be dominant, rather than a five-day return-to-office,” predicts University of Pittsburgh professor Mark Ma.

The Economist warns that 2026 will be defined by uncertainty as the reshaping of geopolitical norms continues. Russia and China may test American commitment to allies through “gray-zone” provocations in northern Europe and the South China Sea. Tensions are expected to rise in the Arctic, in orbit, on the sea floor, and in cyberspace.

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