---
type: source
title: "AI Exploded in 2025 - Here's Everything That Happened"
description: "A fast chronological recap of the ~50 biggest AI events of 2025 (models, coding agents, mega-fundings, and acquisitions) read as signals for where the industry is heading in 2026."
youtube_id: -FVl-hbBTOY
url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FVl-hbBTOY
slug: ai-exploded-in-2025-heres-everything-that-happened
published: 2025-12-31
duration: "0:17:41"
recency_rank: 46
raw: "../raw/ai-exploded-in-2025-heres-everything-that-happened.md"
tags: [year-in-review, agentic-coding, open-source-llms, trends]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

This is a year-in-review roundup where Cole races through roughly 50 of the most significant AI developments of 2025. He first covers year-wide trends (record enterprise investment, AI startups capturing nearly half of global funding, developers adopting AI coding assistants en masse) and then walks chronologically month by month. The through-line is that AI coding assistants took over developer workflows, open-source LLMs (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi K2, GLM, Mistral) kept pressuring the frontier labs, and staggering sums of money moved via fundings and acquisitions.

Along the way he flags the conceptual shifts that will matter into 2026: Karpathy coining "vibe coding" (now with its own Wikipedia page), Manus pioneering the context-engineering strategies now standard for long-running agents, and Anthropic's Claude Skills gaining traction as a more context-optimized, progressive-disclosure alternative to MCP. He also highlights the move toward remote and cloud agentic coding (OpenAI Codex, Claude Code for the web) as the future direction he is personally building toward.

The closing beats emphasize consolidation and circular investment among Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic, Anthropic donating MCP to a new Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, and Claude cementing itself as the coding king (Claude Code hitting $1B revenue, Opus 4.5 topping coding). The video frames all of this as evidence of trends, enterprise adoption, agentic coding, and open-source parity, accelerating into the new year.

## Concepts covered

- [Vibe Coding](../concepts/vibe-coding.md)
- [Context Engineering](../concepts/context-engineering.md)
- [Skills](../concepts/skills.md)
- [Progressive Disclosure](../concepts/progressive-disclosure.md)
- [The Problems With MCP Servers](../concepts/mcp-problems.md)
- [Agentic Coding](../concepts/agentic-coding.md)
- [The Evolution of AI Coding](../concepts/the-evolution-of-ai-coding.md)

## Entities

- [Cole Medin](../entities/people/cole-medin.md)
- [Andrej Karpathy](../entities/people/andrej-karpathy.md)
- [Anthropic](../entities/organizations/anthropic.md)
- [Claude Code](../entities/tools/claude-code.md)
- [OpenAI](../entities/organizations/openai.md)
- [Codex](../entities/tools/codex.md)
- [DeepSeek](../entities/organizations/deepseek.md)
- [Manus](../entities/tools/manus.md)
- [Cursor](../entities/tools/cursor.md)
- [Kiro](../entities/tools/kiro.md)
- [MCP (Model Context Protocol)](../entities/tools/mcp.md)
- [Zapier](../entities/tools/zapier.md)
- [Google Gemini 2.0 Flash](../entities/tools/gemini.md)
- [Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B](../entities/tools/qwen.md)
- [Neon](../entities/tools/neon.md)

## Key moments

- **[0:01:12]** Year-wide trends: $37B into enterprise AI, 84% of devs using/planning AI tools, AI startups capture ~50% of global funding
- **[0:01:53]** DeepSeek R1 release and the claim it triggered Nvidia's $600B one-day market-cap loss
- **[0:02:38]** Karpathy coins "vibe coding" in February; term gets its own Wikipedia page
- **[0:03:33]** Manus launches as the first-of-its-kind general AI agent, pioneering context-engineering strategies
- **[0:05:16]** OpenAI introduces Codex, cloud-based software-engineering agent integrated with GitHub
- **[0:05:58]** Anthropic releases Claude 4 family; Cole gets obsessed with Claude Code as the coding king
- **[0:07:19]** Sponsor break: Zapier MCP server connecting agents to 8,000+ apps
- **[0:11:27]** November: Claude Code for the web launches, competing with Codex for remote agentic coding
- **[0:13:26]** Claude Code hits $1B revenue; Anthropic acquires Bun; Opus 4.5 released as the coding king
- **[0:14:32]** Anthropic donates MCP to the new Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation
- **[0:14:52]** Claude Skills framed as a context-optimized, progressive-disclosure replacement for MCP

## Transcript

[Raw transcript](../raw/ai-exploded-in-2025-heres-everything-that-happened.md)
