Episode Details

Ho Ho Ho, Alex here! (a real human writing these words, this needs to be said in 2025)

Merry Christmas (to those who celebrate) and welcome to the very special yearly ThursdAI recap! This was an intense year in the world of AI, and after 51 weekly episodes (this is episode 52!) we have the ultimate record of all the major and most important AI releases of this year!

So instead of bringing you a weekly update (it’s been a slow week so far, most AI labs are taking a well deserved break, the Cchinese AI labs haven’t yet surprised anyone), I’m dropping a comprehensive yearly AI review! Quarter by quarter, month by month, both in written form and as a pod/video!

Why do this? Who even needs this? Isn’t most of it obsolete? I have asked myself this exact question while prepping for the show (it was quite a lot of prep, even with Opus’s help). I eventually landed on, hey, if nothing else, this will serve as a record of the insane week of AI progress we all witnessed. Can you imagine that the term Vibe Coding is less than 1 year old? That Claude Code was released at the start of THIS year?

We get hedonicly adapt to new AI goodies so quick, and I figured this will serve as a point in time check, we can get back to and feel the acceleration!

With that, let’s dive in - P.S. the content below is mostly authored by my co-author for this, Opus 4.5 high, which at the end of 2025 I find the best creative writer with the best long context coherence that can imitate my voice and tone (hey, I’m also on a break! 🎅)

“Open source AI has never been as hot as this quarter. We’re accelerating as f*ck, and it’s only just beginning—hold on to your butts.” — Alex Volkov, ThursdAI Q1 2025

🏆 The Big Picture — 2025 - The Year the AI Agents Became Real

Looking back at 51 episodes and 12 months of relentless AI progress, several mega-themes emerged:

1. 🧠 Reasoning Models Changed Everything

From DeepSeek R1 in January to GPT-5.2 in December, reasoning became the defining capability. Models now think for hours, call tools mid-thought, and score perfect on math olympiads.

2. 🤖 2025 Was Actually the Year of Agents

We said it in January, and it came true. Claude Code launched the CLI revolution, MCP became the universal protocol, and by December we had ChatGPT Apps, Atlas browser, and AgentKit.

3. 🇨🇳 Chinese Labs Dominated Open Source

DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, Kimi, ByteDance — despite chip restrictions, Chinese labs released the best open weights models all year. Qwen 3, Kimi K2, DeepSeek V3.2 were defining releases.

4. 🎬 We Crossed the Uncanny Valley

VEO3’s native audio, Suno V5’s indistinguishable music, Sora 2’s social platform — 2025 was the year AI-generated media became indistinguishable from human-created content.

5. 💰 The Investment Scale Became Absurd

$500B Stargate, $1.4T compute obligations, $183B valuations, $100-300M researcher packages, LLMs training in space. The numbers stopped making sense.

6. 🏆 Google Made a Comeback

After years of “catching up,” Google delivered Gemini 3, Antigravity, Nano Banana Pro, VEO3, and took the #1 spot (briefly). Don’t bet against Google.

By the Numbers

Q1 2025 — The Quarter That Changed Everything

DeepSeek R1 crashed NVIDIA’s stock, reasoning models went mainstream, and Chinese labs took over open source. The quarter that proved AI isn’t slowing down—it’s just getting started.

Key Themes:

* 🧠 Reasoning models went mainstream (DeepSeek R1, o1, QwQ)

* 🇨🇳 Chinese labs dominated open source (DeepSeek, Alibaba, MiniMax, ByteDance)

* 🤖 2025 declared “The Year of Agents” (OpenAI Operator, MCP won)

* 🖼️ Image generation revolution (GPT-4o native image gen, Ghibli-mania)

* 💰 Massive infrastructure investment (Project Stargate $500B)

January — DeepSeek Shakes the World

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