This year, I thought it'd be fun to share my thoughts on where the tech industry is headed and what we'll see in the upcoming year. This is mostly for my personal record, but figured that it might invite some interesting comments. It'll also be fun to revisit this post at the end of the year and see how my predictions fared.
Artificial Intelligence
While it's a very contentious topic in the tech community, I think 2025 will see more concrete applications of generative artificial intelligence. The rapid iteration of LLMs has started to plateau, and companies across the board now better understand the limitations and constraints of LLM-backed systems. As such, we're ending the era of "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks," and entering an era of refining the use cases that have proven value. I suspect a few products and applications will really start to shine this upcoming year. In particular, multi-modal interactions will start to get really refined, and hopefully the cost and availability will also come down. This will help products like NotebookLM really start to shine, and hopefully we'll see some more helpful assistant-like interfaces such as Gemini Live and Talk GPT.
Job Market
As far as the job market, I think the current trends will continue. My suspicion is that influx into software engineering will slow significantly over the next few years. I think we'll see less career-changers and a decline in computer science degrees. Part of this is that folks are starting to realize that the golden goose is slowing down, and tech is no longer the easy-win for a lucrative career. Many career changers are also likely realizing that software development is actually a pretty demanding and draining career field, and all those TikTok videos of free lunch are not painting the full picture. My guess is that in 2025 we'll see the junior market continue to be relatively saturated, but the senior market just get stronger as finding quality candidates will be hard. This trend towards senior roles in the US will be exacerbated as companies start to employ artificial intelligence for rote tasks, and offshoring becoming more prevalent.
Industry Regulation
This is perhaps the most fundamentally shifting prospective for the upcoming year. Public sentiment and appetite towards large tech companies is just getting worse, and there are some interesting legal issues surrounding the big players: Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. Many of these are taking place on US soil, but there's been some interesting shifts in Europe and Japan as well. On the other side of the coin, I think people are starting to realize that good regulation is actually very difficult and can quickly backfire. For example, all the "cookie permission prompts" and viral news stories like Pornhub geo-blocking certain states. Additionally, I suspect the Trump administration will not be as bullish on regulation, and some of the existing cases may either stall out or be settled into fines rather than regulation.