What Happened in 2025
Writing a brief history (as I see it) of what happened in 2025 by different technology areas:
Generative AI
Gen AI hit mainstream popularity
The models got deployed at scale
The models did not get meaningfully better in terms of usefulness
We discovered agents via models chaining and started building useful applications
Generative media found PMF almost as much as text models
SaaS
Birth of the microsaas era via vibe coding and the solopreneur
Cost to build SaaS decreased dramatically, meaning product and specialization became all that more important
Crypto
Crypto lost it’s ideological underpinning and devolved into effectively gambling (prediction markets, memecoins, perps)
Stablecoins got regulatory clarity and are gaining serious momentum for b2b and overseas / FX transactions - the first real-world use-case
The cycle thesis was disproven, bringing the price of BTC into uncharted territory post-halvening
This article comes at the perfect time! It's so insightful. I'm wondering how Gen AI models weren't meaningfully better but agents still led to useful aplications.