What do the gods of generative AI have in store for 2025?

THE 12 DAYS of Christmas are meant to start on Dec 25. But not in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). On Dec 5, OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, began a blizzard of product shipments dubbed, gratingly, the “12 days of shipmas”. It has included a full roll-out of Sora, its video-generation tool, as well as Canvas, a writing and coding product.

Not to be outdone, Google has also put the elves to work early. On Dec 11, it unveiled a new generative-AI model called Gemini 2.0. And it launched souped-up prototypes of two AI products powered by the model, called Astra and Mariner. These can take actions on a user’s behalf – making them what industry types call “agentic AI”.

The prominence of products over models in both sets of announcements was noteworthy. While the boffins who work on large language models are striving to get to the next frontier of intelligence, developers are under pressure to release clever products that prove there is a market for all this ingenuity.