Hi Reader, happy new year! 🎉

I wanted to share with you the three most important articles I found that look back at AI progress in 2025 and look forward at what is coming in 2026 and beyond.

I’ve extracted the key points from each article, but if you have the time and interest, I’d encourage you to read the full articles!

💠 The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients​

By Ethan Mollick

• “Jaggedness” describes the uneven abilities of AI: It’s superhuman in some areas and far below human level in other areas.
• The inability of LLMs (Large Language Models) to immediately create new memories and permanently learn from them is an important source of “bottlenecks” to AI progress.
• “Jaggedness creates bottlenecks, and bottlenecks mean that even very smart AI cannot easily substitute for humans. At least not yet.”
• Sometimes, when a single “jagged weakness” is fixed, “the entire system can jump forward.”
• “If you want to understand where AI is headed, don’t watch the benchmarks. Watch the bottlenecks. When one breaks, everything behind it comes flooding through.”

🙈 Presenting the Case That the Future Will Be Unrecognizable​

By Steve Newman

• When AI becomes more adaptable than humans, the world may transform to such a great extent that it will become unrecognizable to present-day humans.
• This level of AI could be more impactful than “agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, and the atomic bomb”, and as impactful as “the emergence of Homo Sapiens as the dominant species on Earth.”
• “I would not be surprised to see AI to cross the critical threshold…in a matter of decades, and the Unrecognizable Age to follow fairly soon thereafter.”

📆 2025 LLM Year in Review​

By Andrej Karpathy

• LLMs developed reasoning-like strategies by being graded on objective problem solving rather than subjective human feedback.
• LLM intelligence is jagged, but so is human intelligence.
• Benchmarks of LLM performance are no longer trustworthy.
• “Not only does vibe coding empower regular people to approach programming, it empowers trained professionals to write a lot more (vibe coded) software that would otherwise never be written.”
• Google’s Nano Banana image generator is an “early hint” of what the GUI (Graphical User Interface) for LLMs will look like, since “people love to consume information visually” and thus “LLMs should speak to us in our favored format.”

🤔 In case you were wondering…

Do I use AI to write these emails? No.

If my goal was to send you a newsletter every week, regardless of whether I had something “important” to say, then AI would be a great way to achieve that!

Instead, I’ve decided to only email you when I actually have something worthwhile to say. And in those cases, you deserve to hear directly from me!

I hope your year is off to a great start! I’ll see you in the next newsletter 😄

- Kevin

P.S. Many people have asked when my Machine Learning book will be ready...

Unfortunately, due to some challenging personal circumstances, I was not able to finalize the book in December as I had promised. 🤦‍♂️ However, I still hope to publish it very, very soon! 🤞

In the meantime, you can download the first three chapters for free!