---
type: raw-transcript
title: "AI Exploded in 2025 - Here’s Everything That Happened"
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"
fetched_at: 2026-07-21
immutable: true
---

## Transcript

**[0:00:00]** 2025 has been an absolutely crazy year for AI. So, right now, I'm taking on the challenge to quickly cover for you everything that has happened with AI this year. And so, I'll be hitting on the news that points to the trends going into 2026 and who the big players will

**[0:00:17]** be. And I can guarantee that I have missed nothing on this list. Just kidding, of course. I probably missed some things. So, definitely let me know in the comments as I go through everything what you think should be added to this list. We have incredible new tools and LLMs that have been

**[0:00:32]** released. AI coding assistants are taking over the world. Companies are raising billions of dollars left and right with massive acquisitions. A single tool is being used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies now. And of course, we have the Chinese startup that wiped $600 billion off the Nvidia market

**[0:00:50]** cap in a single day. So, just a teaser for what we have here, but I've got 50 items in the list. Let's go ahead and dive right into it. So, I'm going to start with the things that apply to the entire year of 2025. Then, I'll get into

**[0:01:02]** the specific events in chronological order as they happened in 2025. And of course, I will link to all these sources in the description. The first baffling number out of many that we have here is that companies have invested $ 37 billion into enterprise AI this year. That figure was only 1.7 billion in

**[0:01:23]** 2023. Also, 84% of developers are using or planning on using AI tools in their development process. And out of all developers, about half are already using AI coding assistance daily. In 2025, AI startups have captured almost 50% of all global funding. Just take a look at how this has evolved from 2021. It's

**[0:01:45]** absolutely insane. And speaking of funding, this year, 49 US AI startups have raised at least $100 million. And of course, we have the Chinese startup that I alluded to earlier, the release of Deepseek R1. At the time, a very revolutionary open- source large language model. And this is highly

**[0:02:04]** debated, but there are a lot of claims that this is the reason the Nvidia market cap went down $600 billion, the largest one-day loss for a single company in the US stock market history. In January, we also had the announcement of the Stargate project, a company formed to invest $500 billion dollars

**[0:02:22]** over the next four years in building out new AI infrastructure for OpenAI. And speaking of OpenAI, soon after the Stargate announcement, they also released Operator, the agent that uses its own browser to perform millions of different tasks for you. Now, whether or not this lived up to the hype, I'll

**[0:02:38]** leave that up to you to decide, but it was a big deal at the start of this year. Going into February now, the AI engineer Andre Karpathy coined the term Vibe coding and it has gained so much popularity that it literally has its own Wikipedia page now. It's official. Now,

**[0:02:54]** AI regulation in general is a bit too in the weeds for me to cover here, but there is one instance that deserves its spot on the list, and that is the EU AI Act, the first ever comprehensive legal framework on AI worldwide. And we're definitely going to see a lot more

**[0:03:08]** regulation like this going into 2026. And now for the first of many funding rounds and valuations that I'll cover in this video. We have Harvey, the legal AI startup, raising $300 million in their series D. A lot of people don't realize this, but the legal industry is a gold

**[0:03:24]** mine of opportunity for generative AI. Now, March was a very big month for generative AI, especially because that's when Anthropic's model context protocol really took off. But that doesn't belong in this list because it was originally created at the very end of 2024. So for the first March item, we have Manis, the

**[0:03:42]** first of its kind general AI agent that really was the pioneer for a lot of strategies around context engineering that we have now and strategies for building agents that can handle more longunning tasks. Google also released Gemma 3, their next open source large language models built on the same

**[0:04:00]** technology and research that powered their Gemini 2.0 models. And speaking of Gemini, Google released Gemini 2.5 later this month as well. And this model was revolutionary because of how well it handled a large amount of context. And it stood the test of time for quite a while. Generally considered to be the

**[0:04:20]** best general purpose large language model for many months. And as 2025 progressed, there were so many insane valuations and acquisitions and funding rounds. Starting now with the very end of March, OpenAI raised $40 billion, which put them at a 300 billion post money valuation. Now, going into the

**[0:04:40]** month of April, Meta released their Llama 4 models. They have their herd here. Three different options that we have, Behemoth, Maverick, and Scout. Now, we haven't actually seen much from Meta since then. And so, I really hope that going into 2026, we'll get maybe Llama 5. I really hope that Meta picks

**[0:04:57]** up the slack here. Then we have OpenAI releasing their 03 and 04 mini models, continuing to push the limits for what is possible with the reasoning capabilities built into these LLMs that is so common now. And then going back to open source, Alibaba released their Quen 3 models at the very end of April. And

**[0:05:16]** these are still some of my favorite open- source large language models to use. They really have stood the test of time. Now, going into May, OpenAI introduced Codeex, their cloud-based software engineering agent that integrates directly with GitHub, so you can work on your repos remotely. You don't even have to be in your local

**[0:05:33]** development environment. They also released the Codeex CLI later. This still is one of my favorite platforms for AI assisted coding. We also had the release of V3 from Google. This is when AI video generation started to finally actually feel good. OpenAI agrees to buy Windinsurf for $3 billion only for the

**[0:05:52]** deal to fall apart a couple months later in July with Windsurf CEO going to Google. It pretty much seems like Google acquired Windsurf especially with all the features that come out in anti-gravity, Google's new agentic IDE that was released along with Gemini 3 that we'll talk about later. Enthropic

**[0:06:09]** released their family of Claude 4 models. This is when Claude really became the coding king for me and I got obsessed with using Claude code. It still in my mind is the best agentic coding assistant. Now going into June, Cursor reached $500 million in annually recurring revenue. At this point, it was

**[0:06:28]** very clear that Cursor was the fastest growing platform and still is in SAS history. Also this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of the Meta Super Intelligence Labs. This is when we had all the drama of Mark Zuckerberg apparently paying all of these 9 figure salaries to poach top

**[0:06:46]** researchers from other companies. Now going into July, Amazon has released their own coding agent, Kira, which is an AI coding assistant that I'm starting to respect more and more. And I heard that after their reinvent conference in December, they are starting to get a lot of enterprise interest. And at the end

**[0:07:02]** of July, open source large language models continue to fight back. Moonshot released at Kimmy K2 which apparently according to the benchmarks beat chat GBT and cloud encoding. This is very much up for debate but I still do like seeing open source LLMs pushing the boundaries. All right, so we have been

**[0:07:19]** blitzing through a lot already. So let's take a quick break for our sponsor and then we'll get back to finishing off our list. So the sponsor of this video is Zapier which is actually my original noode automation tool. They've built a lot in the AI space this year, including

**[0:07:34]** the Zapier MCP server, which allows you to connect your agent to over 8,000 different applications. So, literally, no matter the capabilities that you want to build into your agent, you can do it with the Zapier MCP. Take a look at how easy this is. First, all you have to do

**[0:07:49]** is set up the app connections in Zapier. So, you go through the OAF flow or whatever to get your credentials like for Google Drive connected. Then, you go into the MCP server tab, which I'll link to in the description to set up your server. You pick your client and then

**[0:08:02]** you pick your tools. You can search through all of the services that are available. Like I can do Google Drive for example. You pick the individual tools that you want in the MCP and you configure all of the parameters. Once you have that set up, then you go to the

**[0:08:14]** connect tab and right here there's a button to just add it directly into Cloud Desktop or for other MCP clients you can just copy this URL and set it up just like you would a typical streamable HTTP MCP server. And so for example in cloud desktop I'll go to the settings in

**[0:08:30]** the top right and then I will go to the connectors and then I can add a custom connector and I just have to paste in the URL that I copied here and I can call it Zapier and then boom you are good to go. It'll take you through an

**[0:08:41]** OOTH flow with Zapier so that it's nice and secure but then you will immediately have it available as capabilities to cloud desktop. And so for a very quick demonstration I used the Zapier MCP server in cloud desktop to find my Google Drive folder and create a file here. So you can see both tool calls,

**[0:08:57]** everything's working perfectly, and we even have the file at the bottom here so I can click right into it in my Google Drive. And it was so easy to set this all up. And so I will have a link in the description to the Zapier MCP server. Definitely check it out. Now,

**[0:09:11]** surprisingly, August was a pretty quiet month for Generative AI. The biggest thing that we had was the introduction of GBT5 from Open AI. Getting into September now, we have more funding. The funding train never stops. Anthropic raises $13 billion, putting it now at a $183 billion valuation. Now, there have

**[0:09:32]** been a lot of lawsuits in the AI space this year, but one of the interesting ones that happened more recently is a group of authors sued Anthropic for using their books and other materials in their training data. And Enthropic ended up paying a whopping 1.5 billion settlement. Now, I don't mean to just

**[0:09:49]** pick on Anthropic here. There are a lot of different lawsuits for all of the LLM providers, but it is crazy. They're paying around $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement. Also, in September, Perplexity, the AI search startup, raises $200 million at a $20 billion

**[0:10:06]** valuation. It's very impressive to me that Perplexity has stayed on the cutting edge and remained competitive, even though people think time and time again that all of the common agents and LLM are going to replace Perplexity with their built-in search. And continuing the funding train, Mistl, the French AI

**[0:10:22]** startup, raised€1.7 billion, and they continue to put out some of my favorite open- source LLMs and a lot of their closed source stuff is really powerful as well. And finally, to end things off, in September, OpenAI released Sora 2. And this, my friend, took the world by storm. The capabilities here for both

**[0:10:41]** the video and audio generation, it's just insanely cool. And continuing with OpenAI going into October, Sam Alman said that in October, ChatGpt hit 800 million weekly active users. I wish my applications had that many weekly active users. Also, IBM and Enthropic announced a partnership to accelerate the development of enterprise ready AI. I

**[0:11:04]** was actually there at the IBM Tech Exchange conference when they announced this. Very, very cool. Anthropic is definitely continuing to push themselves as the enterprise LLM provider especially for coding. Now getting into November, Microsoft announced the formation of the MAI super intelligence team. What they're working towards here

**[0:11:22]** is humanist super intelligence. Incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for in service of people and humanity more generally. Now this is kind of vague to me right now, but I think we're going to find out a lot more about this going into 2026. Anthropic releases Cloud Code for the web.

**[0:11:39]** Certainly a competitor to OpenAI's codecs that I talked about earlier. Being able to work on your repositories with agents running remotely, so you're not even in your local development environment. I definitely think this is the future of Agentic Coding. Something I'm even working on myself, building custom systems for remote Aentic coding.

**[0:11:58]** Then Google takes AI image generation to the next level with Nano Banana, especially Nano Banana Pro, which was released at the end of November. It is insane the quality of images that we can generate with AI and especially how realistic they look now. Microsoft, Nvidia and Anthropic all announce

**[0:12:16]** partnerships. So Anthropic to scale Claude on Azure, Anthropic to adopt Nvidia architecture and Nvidia and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic. So definitely a bit of a circular investment here which speaks a little bit to the possibility of an AI bubble. But it makes sense for all these big

**[0:12:32]** companies to be working together. And we right now are only halfway through November. There is so much that happened last month. Next, we have the release of Gemini 3 from Google, which is often considered to be the most powerful LLM from a general standpoint right now. It absolutely crushes it on the benchmarks

**[0:12:49]** and handles long context tasks very well. Now, at the start of this video, I alluded to the fact that there is a single application that is already adopted by over 90% of Fortune 500 companies, and that application is Microsoft 365 C-Pilot. And I believe they reached that 90% mark in November

**[0:13:06]** of last year. Just absolutely crazy. The enterprise adoption for a single product. Enthropic continues to crush it with Cloud Code. Cloud Code reaches $1 billion in revenue and Enthropic acquires Bun, the JavaScript runtime to continue to make Cloud Code more and more scalable because let me tell you,

**[0:13:26]** the demand for it is incredible. On top of that, Enthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5, which most people will tell you that it's not even a competition. It is the AI coding king. Sonnet 4.5 was already amazing, but now Opus is just crushing it for AI coding. Now, there

**[0:13:42]** hasn't been that much news around DeepSeek since the start of the year, but now going into December, they released Deepseek version 3.2, an open- source large language model that competes with all of the big guys, Gemini, Claude, and GPT. Now, this is open source, but it's such a large model

**[0:13:58]** that most people can't actually run on their own hardware, which is a bit of a bummer, but unfortunately, that is what it takes right now to compete with all of the top dogs. And continuing with open source LLMs, we also have the release of GLM 4.7, an LLM that is

**[0:14:14]** designed specifically to be very powerful for AI assisted coding. And in their benchmarks, it compares extremely well to the DeepS version 3.2 2. We just covered CloudSonet 4.5, GPT 5.1. The point of these open- source models is that they're almost as powerful as the big guys, but they are a lot faster and

**[0:14:32]** cheaper. So, Anthropic's model context protocol really took off earlier this year, and now in December, they announced that they're donating MCP as a part of establishing the Agentic AI Foundation. This is a directed fund under the Linux Foundation co-founded by Anthropic Block and OpenAI with support from a lot of other absolutely massive

**[0:14:52]** companies. And so hopefully what this means is that all these companies are starting to work together to build out AI for the greater good. Now, as much as MCP is incredible, Enthropic also recently released Claude Skills. They did this back in October. It's really started to gain traction this month in

**[0:15:09]** December though and it's becoming a replacement in a lot of ways for MCP cuz it's a lot more context optimized. And so it's this idea of progressive disclosure where we only give capabilities to our agents when it actually needs them. So we save a lot of context up front. This kind of paradigm

**[0:15:26]** is going to be very popular going into 2026 for building any kind of agentic system. Definitely not limited to the claude ecosystem either. OpenAI releases GPT 5.2. Definitely a lot of improvements over GPT 5.1. Now, Enthropic with Claude seems to be quite focused on AI coding as the

**[0:15:44]** specialization of the LLMs, but GPT is more general purpose like Gemini, so seems to be kind of competing more with Gemini 3. OpenAI also gets a $1 billion investment from Disney, especially thanks to Sora. definitely showing that there is a lot of use case and demand for AI generated videos with audio. So,

**[0:16:04]** we haven't talked about data companies that much in this video, but they're certainly doing well, too. Datab bricks is doing their over $4 billion series L and is valued now at 134 billion. They also acquired Neon recently, one of my favorite database platforms. They're definitely rocking it. And then at the

**[0:16:22]** very end of this year, Nvidia announced that they are buying Gro's assets for about $20 billion. Now, the title is kind of strange cuz it doesn't say it's an acquisition, but it definitely feels like an acquisition when you really dive into it. So, definitely a lot of interesting things that will unfold here

**[0:16:38]** going into January as well. All right, to end things off for us here, I literally have an article dated December 30th of this year. Meta is going to acquire Manis. And it's cool cuz I talked about both of these companies already. Mannis was very revolutionary when it was released at the start of

**[0:16:53]** this year and Meta hasn't made a splash in the generative AI space in a while now and so it definitely seems like they're doing some things behind the scenes that we might find out about more maybe quarter 1 or quarter two of next year and so they're going to be

**[0:17:07]** integrating Madness into its products including Meta AI. All right, so that my friend is all the big things that happened in the AI space in 2025. So definitely let me know in the comments if you think there's anything that I missed and also what you're looking forward to going into 2026. And in

**[0:17:23]** January, I'll definitely be making some content on my predictions and what I'm focusing on going into the new year. So if you're looking forward to that or just building AI agents and using coding agents in general, I would really appreciate a like and a subscribe. And with that, I will see you in the next
