I've spent a lot of time trying to understand where the world is heading and how to position myself in the next few years to succeed. So here is my attempt to try and connect the dots and talk about a few of the things I'm noticing. Many of these predictions are quite obvious, but I hope you find at least a few interesting.
The past 3 years have seen wild progress with the release of ChatGPT and the AI revolution is in full swing. 2025 felt like the year where the early AI economy solidified with its first winners: Cursor, Sierra, Harvey, and more have taken over large market share and have produced great products for their customers. The days of startups pivoting into obvious LLM use cases is over as everyone is now trying to play the game thanks to coding largely being automated. In 2026, I believe more industries will experience their own claude code/cursor moment—a moment where many people in the field will internalize the power of these models and most of their work will be automated. Furthermore, I believe the labs will make big breakthroughs this year, particularly with continuous learning, which will open up a whole new world of possibilities, specifically with having agents that will actually be useful in day to day operations. We are about to enter the world of infinite minds. To address the question of the AI bubble: does it exist and will it pop? No. People love to compare today to the dotcom bubble, but every major promise made in the early 2000s became a reality. I believe AI will live up to the expectations (I'm skeptical about godlike intelligence tbh) in the long run (and I think the timeline will be much quicker than the internet timeline). Yes, there is a ton of hype, but these companies are building incredible technology that is fundamentally transforming key industries of the economy and will continue to do so. Anthropic, Google, and other labs have great financials and the only thing holding them back is compute and research, both problems that can be addressed. A big question I have is how the economy will deal with a significant portion of jobs being automated. There is already a ton of skepticism and dislike regarding AI and this trend will continue. It doesn't help that the techies have taken every opportunity to tell you that you won't have a job in the future and that you'll like it. I believe we will see a powerful philosophy emerge in the coming months that strongly opposes AI and technological innovation in general. Technologists would be wise to adopt the industrialist playbook and invest heavily in public infrastructure and finding ways to mitigate the tsunami of social issues that is on the horizon. I didn't imagine the takeoff to feel so strange, every chart is vertical rn.
Sidenote: i believe world models will find their footing this year and be the catalyst for robotics to take off in the coming years.
Crypto is in a weird spot right now. There's a ton of bears who feel like the industry is dead, while the builders are saying it feels like the internet in 1997. I'm with the builders on this one. We are going to experience a stablecoin renaissance this year. With the release of the tempo blockchain in 2026 stablecoin adoption will only accelerate, becoming the default for business, personal payments, and more. The best part, normies won't have a clue that everything is crypto.
Prediction markets found PMF in 2025. Everyone is betting, including my 75 year old grandma. There has been a lot of debate surrounding these new markets and whether or not they are a net good to society. I believe they are, but there are some negative externalities we will have to address as a society. I'm curious to see how prediction markets do in 2026. I believe these markets will become even more mainstream, but I am worried that their strong push to capture the sports betting market (I'm pointing at you Kalshi) could lead to their downfall. Expect to see more opportunities for people to put money into things that were previously not tradeable. The long foreseen future of tokenization will begin to get its first reps. People talk about agentic payments being a thing and I think they are right, but if it happens in 2026 it will be toward the end of the year. It's a hard bridge to cross to let everyday people hand their money over to a bot to do their finances. Crypto is positioned well to mitigate the challenges of this sector with smart contracts, but gaining enough trust will be hard initially, a very cool place to be camped out. Perps are going to go bonkers this year as DeFi adoption and market hype rise. I also expect memecoins to make an interesting comeback, but in unexpected ways. Hovering over all of this, is the long awaited regulatory clarity surrounding crypto. The CLARITY act will likely pass this year and will completely change the entire crypto landscape. What has been the wild west since 2008, will finally have a legal framework, attracting more institutional investors and cleaning up a lot of the riff in the industry. Most of these policies will go into effect in 2027, but the bill will be a huge stepping stone for the industry and will usher in a golden age.
2025 was filled with jokes about space datacenters, but with the IPO of SpaceX this upcoming summer, we will see a boom in the space economy. I see a significant amount of builders taking their winnings and putting it toward building space startups. As AI continues to obliterate white collar jobs, one of the great avenues for smart people to pursue is space and the endless opportunities that await us. Whether that is manufacturing at zero gravity, mining asteroids, or better telecommunication, we'll see the acceleration of the first stages of the space economy take shape. Moon as the 51st state!
One of the biggest promises of the AI era is advancements in biotech. New drugs, precision medicine, and a better understanding of something that has mystified us for so long. I think it'll be longer than we expect to see this promise come to fruition and I don't think it'll be 2026. Companies will make progress, and will release drugs targeting specific diseases, but we won't have an ozempic moment this year. Embryo selection services will leave their fringe status and become more accepted. I'm really excited to see advancements in hardware this year, but I don't think it will happen in the places most people expect (smart glasses). I do expect to see breakthroughs with thought to text models and I believe this will lead to the killer AI hardware product. I expect to see a noninvasive device be released this year.
"Software is eating the world" was a prophetic saying from Marc Andressen and only becomes more true with time. With the advent of tools like replit, lovable, and cursor we are going to see the proliferation of software. Every ad on instagram will be promoting a new app. Expect to see a lot of software, and a lot of people trying to sell you it. In the long run as model capabilities get better, the price of creating software goes to zero. In my opinion, the path of b2b saas may very well be a dead end.
The Trump administration is not getting enough credit for their performance this year. Surprisingly, the world's top 100 economists don't know anything about anything, and it turns out a few phone calls to Stanley Druckenmiller and Ray Dalio go a long way (who would've thought lol). The Trump administration has been very good about skating to the puck—placing bets on AI infrastructure and reindustrialization. If there is one area that they came up short that I was hoping they would succeed, spending. DOGE was an honest attempt, but you can't do anything significant with spending unless you address entitlements. In 2026, I believe you will begin to see a generational war begin to take shape between the Boomers and the Zillenials. The key issue in politics in 2026 (and the next 5-10 years) will be affordability, the party that addresses this convincingly will be in office for a very long time. The mass extinction of boomers is on the horizon and the economic reality of spending is going to hit the country where it hurts. Campaigning on these issues likely gets you voted out, but someone like Mamdani/Trump can come along and throw the system for a loop, energizing younger turnout. I expect Republicans to lose the House in the midterms, simply due to bad media optics.
The Bauhaus movement defined the aesthetic of the 20th century and has largely trickled down to everything from modern offices to modern tech hardware. We're more than a quarter way through the new century and I think it's fair to ask: What is the aesthetic of the 21st century? Every futuristic aesthetic is often retrofuturistic. What should the future actually look like? I'm excited for artists to take this challenge seriously and show us the path forward. I believe we will get the first glimpses of this new aesthetic this year.
The art world is shifting quickly with old mediums dying and new ones emerging. For instance, the social media personality is an example of a new form emerging. Whether it's shitposters on X, substack girls, podcast bros, or curated instagram posts, it feels like PMF for performance art. The entire avatar that is built across the different platforms is truly something impressive. There have been multiple times this year where I've come across a post on X so profound I had to take a walk just to think about it. In 2026, these new mediums will be taken more seriously and these artists will receive more credit.
Memes also seem to be an emerging artform. It takes a lot of work to be able to tap into the global hivemind and come out of it with an original idea that is funny and has the mimetic properties that make it do well online. It's an artform and places like pump.fun are the breeding ground. Expect to see this medium only get more mature.
Higher education is on its last legs. I expect to see more universities cutting specific programs and expect to see sentiment regarding college drop significantly. On a macro level, I don't know how higher education will stay alive. The big schools are hedge funds that throw dollars around like it's nothing, but at the end of the day the cost of going to college doesn't make sense anymore. The promise that a degree will provide steady employment has been broken, and AI will only kick that can further down the road. If I had to guess, I think we'll see a lot of colleges go under within 15 years time. I don't think people fully comprehend the extent to which LLMs are being used to get through school these days. And as a student, it makes perfect sense when your only chance of getting a job is experience outside of the classroom. I expect to see us move to an era of apprenticeship or something similar.
There has never been a better time to be niche. Streaming platforms have made music so accessible that there is no friction to exploring new music. I was shocked to show up to a Loathe concert this year and have the majority of the audience be late teens/early 20s (I say this as a 23 year old). This has been a trend happening for years, but I expect niche genres to continue to produce the best music and have an album or two hit the mainstream— midwest emo, shoegaze, hyperpop, and more.
A few artists took their discographies off of Spotify this year and I anticipate more will follow. The streaming market is currently broken with Spotify having significant control. I believe AI will throw a wrench into the entire system—people significantly underestimate Suno, eleven labs, and other music gen AI companies. The streaming platforms are going to face a tough dilemma of having to deal with AI generated music while artists will protest. I see 2026 as the year a few people figure out how to make good AI music, leaving the industry with a lot of questions to answer.
There's something that has been brewing culturally over the last year or two, and it is the reaction to the dullness/gluttony of the 2010s and early 2020s. The elites lost their credibility and nobody trusts them. It's also clear that the "just be super based" reactionary movement isn't going to cut it. Woke went too far, but inverting it isn't the answer. Effective Altruism isn't cool anymore, and there's increasing skepticism of slot and slop machines. I think as a culture we are really trying to answer the question of what is worthy and valuable and how we should spend our time. I believe we are entering an era where our culture wants to claim autonomy and independence from the machine. People want heroic lives full of meaning and they are finding it with religion. I expect this trend to continue.
I will be the first to say I am not the person to comment on social media trends and where it is going, but I read a fantastic 400+ slide powerpoint that highlights where content is heading and how people are approaching the medium (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aSrP4Pojh7EZde8EZL5kTOH_DAY0SoXzEWF6o2RmFg4/edit?usp=drivesdk) I highly recommend checking it out. The key trends I see continuing in 2026 are themes that reflect the cultural zeitgeist. People want craft, not slop. Consumers increasingly want creators who are more chalant and are willing to document the journey. Throw some sidequests in there as well, and while you're at it, clip everything.
Zooming out on social media. There seems to be a few groups of people who understand the power of a decentralized media and what it enables you to do. With enough capital and political power, you can take over the timeline and create an "organic movement". To these people, the game isn't to predict the future, it's to build the infrastructure that determines which futures are legible, which questions get asked, and whose answers feel authoritative. Hollywood is dying and it is being replaced by venture capital in SF. Weird times
So much of this year was centered around the theme of the attention economy. Whether it was the NYC mayoral race, or the rage baiting marketing tactics of the AI startup Cluely, the people who won this year were those who controlled the timeline and were bold about what they were doing. Yeats' poem the Second Coming has been at the back of my mind for some time now. The poem is about civilizational breakdown and the uncertainty of what replaces a collapsing order. There's a line in the poem that has always haunted me, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." This is always true, but it's truer now than usual. Things fall apart only to fall in place. May 2026 yield itself to the builders and architects with aspirations of making a better tomorrow.