In 2025, AI brought us new models that were far more capable of research, coding, video and image generation and more. AI models could now use heavy amounts of compute power to "think," which helped deliver more complex answers with greater accuracy. AI also got some agentic legs, meaning it could go out onto the internet and do tasks for you, like plan a vacation or order a pizza.
Despite these advancements, we might still be far off from artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This is a theoretical future when AI becomes so good that it's indistinguishable from (or better than) human intelligence. Right now, an AI system works in a vacuum and doesn't really understand the world around us. It can mimic intelligence and string words together to make it sound like it understands. But it doesn't. Using AI daily has shown me that we still have a ways to go before we reach AGI.
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As the AI industry reaches monstrous valuations, companies are moving quickly to meet Wall Street demands. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others are throwing trillions in training and infrastructure costs to usher in the next technological revolution. While the spend might seem absurd, if AI does truly upend how humanity works, then the rewards could be enormous. At the same time, as revolutionary as AI is, it constantly messes up and gets things wrong. It's also flooding the internet with slop content -- such as amusing short-form videos that may be profitable but are seldom valuable.
Humanity, which will be the beneficiary or sufferer of AI, deserves better. If our survival is literally at stake, then at the very least, AI could be substantively more helpful, rather than just a rote writer of college essays and nude image generators. Here are all the things that I, as an AI reporter, would like to see from the industry in 2026.
It's the environment
My biggest, most immediate concern around AI is the impact massive data centers will have on the environment. Before the AI revolution, the planet was already facing an existential threat due to our reliance on fossil fuels. Major tech companies stepped up with initiatives saying they'd aim to reach net-zero emissions by a certain date. Then ChatGPT hit the scene.
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With the massive power demand of AI, including Wall Street's insatiable need for profitability, data centers are turning back to fossil fuels like methane gas to keep the GPUs humming, the tools that perform the complex calculations to string words and pixels together.
There's something incredibly dystopian about the end of the planet coming at the hands of ludicrous AI-generated videos of kittens bulking up at the gym.
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