Nate’s Notebook: The State of AI in 2025

Source: Nate’s Newsletter Date: 2024-10-16 URL: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/nates-notebook-the-state-of-ai-in-bb7

Summary

An October 2024 podcast episode reviewing the year’s AI developments and framing what they mean for 2025: Nvidia’s hardware hegemony, US-China geopolitical AI competition, advances in generative AI and reinforcement learning (especially robotics), explosive startup funding, and emerging AI safety governance. Positioned as baseline context for the acceleration that would follow.

Implications

Capital thread. The “geopolitical AI arms race” framing from October 2024 was already accurate and became more acute through 2025 — export controls, chip restrictions, and national AI investment packages all accelerated. The Nvidia hardware dominance thread has held; the question by 2026 is whether AMD, custom silicon, or open-weight models have meaningfully eroded that position.

AI economics thread. Explosive AI startup funding in late 2024 created the conditions for the consolidation pressures of 2025-2026 — many well-funded AI startups will fail to find product-market fit before capital runs out, and the survivors will define the next infrastructure layer.

Historical context. Useful as a late 2024 state-of-the-field summary: the threads Nate tracks in October 2024 are the same ones that play out through the entire 2025 radar period. Good baseline for comparing how the field actually evolved against these projections.