Welcome to the 2025 New Year! I want to reflect and provide an opinionated wishlist for the next year based on trends. There are many exciting things happening and I would like to see how these thoughts age (by the time I read this in a year).

Disclosure: The words in this post were not AI-generated or altered in any meaningful way. Spell check and other tools were used, but all content and phrases are my own creation.

I hope AI evolves

I have been rooting for Nvidia and AI in general for at least the past 15 years. I was an early investor in Nvidia specifically because I knew the company was on to something, whether in AI or the general graphics space. I bought (and sold) shares at prices that would make you cry if you knew how much they would be worth today.

However, I am disappointed in the state of AI. “AI” is a very broad term and the most popular forms of AI that people think of are image generation via stable diffusion and chatbot AI via large language models. Image generation has been a useful newcomer to the AI arsenal we have, but it didn’t solve a problem we couldn’t solve before. Image generation allows us to solve problems faster, but not always better. That and it didn’t bring anything truly new to the table. We have always been able to make images with Photoshop or other tools – if we have the skill or money to pay someone with the skill. However, LLM’s like Chatgpt brought something entirely new and innovative. We never could generate coherent responses in natural language like this before. It’s amazing for certain applications that depend on text-based documents – such as programming, drafting documents, summarizing documents, and many other workflows.

There are a few problems with LLMs:

1. They are being too broadly used and touted as the ultimate form of AI. Every little action that can process text is being run through an LLM and many times is totally worthless. Do we really need to reformat the text every time I right click? Does every google search really need an AI summary? It’s AI overload for users and extremely expensive and taxing on our power grid and cloud computing infra, totally wiping out our energy goals.
2. It leads to misinformation, which makes us dumber as a society. Sure, there have been major improvements to the logic and problem-solving performance of some of these models, but that doesn’t change the performance of the model for fact-gathering. It can still rip bogus information from its sources such as blogs. This was indeed a problem before LLM’s, you could always visit a blog on the internet… but you had a source before that you could judge for its trustworthiness. Now, an LLM regurgitates nonsense from a blog post somewhere deep on the internet and mixes that info with statements from reputable sources like the Department of Health… and in seconds you have a professional-sounding response at the top of Google that is total BS.
3. Finally - AI is so much more than LLM’s! AI can use way more than text-based input. Consider for robotics, all the sensors that input data which can be run through AI models to see patterns and perform actions. Consider the amazing advancements possible in medicine and the medical field if an AI model had both the text input of all of your medical records the visual input of your MRI scans AND the sensor input of medical devices. So much could be accomplished that provides hope and help to humanity. Consider culinary creations possible by using dietary requirements, meal preferences, and the ingredients to create meal plans based on your needs. All of this is being ignored because we have a text prompt that sounds like a really smart person at all times.

So, while these recent forms of AI are cool and useful. It’s not nearly with its overly exuberant hype, nor the trillions of dollars of investment and exponentially exploding energy usage. It feels dystopian how reliant we are on such a flawed resource. It feels wrong how lazy we are becoming because these resources are so much easier than studying and fact-finding ourselves. Lastly, it’s also too soon since we don’t have an efficient way to use it. I really hope hardware innovation comes soon to cap energy usage.

I hope the world economy remains stable

There are a ton of geopolitical and issues facing the global economy that could have downstream effects that could cause some morally unthinkable events. I truly believe the old saying it’s the economy, stupid is true. If people are more secure financially and their economic umbrella is secure, then they won’t resort to desperate actions. I feel no need to go into specifics because there are many examples you can associate this with. Leaders of the world make decisions based on the needs of their people, for political purposes, and their own benefits now and in the future.

Here are a few main points I want to highlight:

• There’s lots of change happening: Changes that are both good and bad. Having a stable canvas for these changes are essential.
• Extreme changes in the supply chain promote extreme responses: When we make massive changes to the supply chain for whatever reason, we inevitably make “winners” and “losers”. Those on the losing end have a strong and impedient interest to retaliate. Doing so can make everyone a “loser” in some respect.
• Everyone should have an opportunity to succeed: Any global or national event that disproportionally affects a certain group of people will cause suffering. Even positive changes can have powerful negative consequences, so I believe making big changes slowly over time is critical to stability. This slowness for massive changes enables people to react and adapt over time without causing a huge disruption.

No matter how our world evolves, I hope it evolves at a pace that doesn’t jeopardize our livelihood as a society. I hope our global economy is free and available to everyone. The more that can be included in our global economy, the more success we will all share.

I hope we can remember what it means to be human

Yes… It’s 2025, 5 years since Covid happened and I think it’s still worth talking about. The lockdowns are long gone, but we are still more isolated in many ways.

There were many good things – I truly value some of the positive changes from COVID-19:

1. It kicked off a remote work frenzy that I have enjoyed.
2. It shifted so many people’s future plans – being forced to quit dead-end jobs and explore new paths that they didn’t have time to think about before.
3. It created a world that was more creative and gave us a break from the norm.

Then, obviously, it had severe negative consequences. Many of which we are still battling. I truly believe COVID permanently altered the way society behaves to this day. We became less patient and unable to make concessions to our friends, family, and neighbors. It created a society less “tolerating” of things that cause us to be uncomfortable.

Families have been altered and friendships have changed. Support systems have been destroyed and many are not looking back. I believe this is true for everyone, but it is especially true for children and adults:

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated containment measures have massively changed the daily lives of billions of children and adolescents worldwide.

It will probably be another decade before we can truly know the social ripple effects of covid, but its clear it has had massive implications for children.

I think for my age range it caused people to skip straight to a “home life” rather than exploring the world or moving to exciting locations for a time you usually do in your 20s.

I think “home life” can be anti-social in many ways. Going out can be uncomfortable. It can mean taking risks and doing things that are new and possibly regretful. Staying home is easy. It’s hard for me to distinguish if this is a natural progression from 20 to 30 years of age, or if something related to covid did happen. But I think it’s mostly a net negative. If we don’t spend time as much around people we may not agree with or hang out with, we lose those social skills and how to participate in society in a “human” and reasonable way.

I want to create and contribute more

Like many, the ultimate goal would be to have financial and personal freedom. This is often unrealistic and sometimes not a proper use of time. However, I enjoy creating products, services, and things that work like I imagine before they become reality. I enjoy that creative pursuit. I have always wanted to master a creative craft in tech like image editing, 3d modeling, and video editing, video game creation, but I feel too far behind the curve on most of the technologies needed to master them. So, perhaps I can lightly incorporate some of these ideals into what I believe I have done a pretty decent job at mastering: cicd, cloud services, and scalable applications.

I would love to have some unified portfolio where all my applications borrow from each other, dip into the domain of creative arts, and also provide a valuable contribution to society. In 2025 I want to see that vision through, create truly useful and unique products with the talents that I have and expand into those creative domains… if only slightly.

If others found the products useful or worthwhile, I wouldn’t turn down donations. Imagine, if I had full bandwidth to work on my own products, I could accomplish so much. For now, it’s only a dream, but 2025 I plan to work towards that dream and maybe I could get lucky and see a financial incentive – or the advantage of having a contribution that brings others some use. Either way, I would like that to happen some day.