Artificial Intelligence continues to evolve at breakneck speed, with breakthroughs in 2024 shaping the trajectory for the years ahead. To explore the latest advancements and future trends, we interviewed prominent AI experts. Here’s what they had to say about the most exciting developments, the major trends for 2025, and how close we are to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Key Takeaways for 2025:

• AI agents and teammates will become more prevalent in business and personal applications.

• Multimodal AI and long-running agent loops will reshape how we interact with technology.

• Enterprise AI adoption will accelerate, bringing both opportunities and challenges.

• AGI remains a distant goal, but advancements in contextual and cognitive AI will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

The road to AGI may be longer than some anticipate, but the journey is filled with groundbreaking innovations that are already transforming our world. As we look to 2025, one thing is certain: AI’s impact will only deepen across industries, shaping the future of work, creativity, and human potential.

Navin Chaddha, Tech Investor and Managing Partner @ Mayfield Fund

What breakthrough in AI Technology excited you the most in 2024?

In 2024, the breakthrough in AI technology that excited me the most was the application of diffusion models to text generation. While diffusion models have already revolutionized image generation with tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, their potential for text generation is game-changing.

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

I predict 2025 will be the year of AI Teammates. We'll see these digital collaborators emerge across all business functions, from marketing and research to supply chain management and back office functions. They will revolutionize the workplace by freeing up time, enhancing our capabilities, and boosting our creativity.

How close are we to AGI?

Given the rapid progress in recent years, I believe we're at least five years away from AGI.

Chetan Puttagunta, Tech Investor and Managing Partner @ Benchmark

What breakthrough in AI Technology excited you the most in 2024?

Reasoning models.

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

AI applications: AI applications will continue to advance and be able to create significant value across industries, domains, and modalities.

How close are we to AGI?

Seems like we’re at some form of AGI already or very very close to it.

Jerry Liu, Co-Founder and CEO @ Llamaindex

What breakthrough in AI Technology excited you the most in 2024?

The general availability of multimodality as a feature in the major language models (gpt-4o, Anthropic). On a practical level this has fundamentally reshaped data processing/transformation - even if most people haven't realized it yet. This also brings us one step closer to AGI-level capabilities like computer use and perception.

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

Long-running agent loops in production. Agents running in the background and able to reliably perform a variety of different tasks vs. a simple chat interface. Agent architectures getting consolidated and more general (instead of very constrained, custom architectures).

How close are we to AGI?

Whenever infinite context windows are a thing.

Adam Carrigan, co-founder @ MindsDB

What breakthrough in AI Technology excited you the most in 2024?

One of the most impressive breakthroughs in 2024 was Google’s NotebookLM. It takes content like websites and slide decks and generates hyper-realistic podcasts. The way it seamlessly combines different technologies and executes them so effectively made it the standout innovation for me.

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

I believe 2025 will be the year of enterprise AI. Companies will significantly accelerate their use of AI to enhance customer experiences, empower employees, and drive business outcomes like revenue growth and cost savings. However, this rapid adoption will bring challenges like ensuring data privacy, managing user permissions, addressing hallucinations, and overcoming other hurdles critical for deploying trustworthy, production AI at scale.

How close are we to AGI?

In 2025, we will hear companies and individuals claiming to have reached AGI, but these claims will come with significant asterisks. True AGI that matches public expectations and media portrayals is still a few years away.

Santiago Valdarrama, Computer Scientist and Tech Influencer

What breakthrough in AI technology excited you most in 2024?

In 2024 we started seeing the raise of AI Agents. While we are still early, it seems clear that agents will become one of the most useful ways for automating tasks and integrating AI into our lives.

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

Companies will shift focus to Test-Time Training (helping models learn at inference time) from regular training. This will potentially open a very large runway for models to rapidly improve on tasks they weren't not trained on.

How close do you think we are to AGI?

It depends on the definition of AGI. In my case, I'm interested on reaching a point where models can generalize and become proficient at solving tasks they weren't trained to solve. While we are making progress, I still think we are several years away from getting to that point.

Ania Kubow, Tech Influencer and YouTube creator

What breakthrough in AI technology excited you most in 2024?

Having done quite a few AI Chatbots for my YouTube tutorials, I see a continuous improvement in this area, and much more personalised bots. This includes quite literally - personal AI assistants for you and me.

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

I feel there will be a strong focus on multimodal AI systems with video at the forefront - as we are only at the beginning of this media type.

How close do you think we are to AGI?

I think we are still quite a long way away from AGI. And however long it takes, I suggest adding 5 years more to that to tackle the ethical implications responsibility.

Kirk Borne, Data Scientist and Tech Influencer

What breakthrough in AI technology excited you most in 2024?

Multi-modal AI excited me the most in 2024. This has been discussed for years, and people have used multi-modal data before now. However, now with deep learning vector embeddings and vector databases, the different modalities (text, images, videos, audio, databases, streaming sensor data) are almost transparent to an AI, thereby enabling a good emulation of cognitive and contextual intelligence in the AI across multiple sensors (similar to humans' five senses).

What major trends or advancements do you foresee shaping AI in 2025?

For me, the most significant future advancements in digital technologies (AI, ML, Data Science) are always centered on the most pervasive human use cases: cybersecurity (privacy, security, and fraud prevention) and healthcare (medicine). Precision medicine (personalized and community-based; high-accuracy diagnoses and treatments) along with precision (high-accuracy; day-zero) cyber defense & offense are advancing rapidly with AI, Gen AI, Agentic AI, and related implementations. These use cases are not meant to exclude other very vital human needs: education, food security, human welfare, supply chain, human work, countless business/industrial processes, etc. I am just saying that AI will continue rapidly advancing medicine/healthcare and cybersecurity on a global scale in 2025.

How close do you think we are to AGI?

I don't think AGI (as portrayed in movies) is very close. However, the arrival of significantly improved contextual and cognitive AI (which will look a lot like AGI) is here (or nearly here) already. Full-on AGI (with all the creative, intuitive, empathetic, and ethical characteristics of human intelligence) is not close -- maybe one-off simulations of this type of AGI are close, but not on the scale of a new global species.