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AI in 5 years from now

4/16/2025

Let's place some bets

AI/LLM's in 5 years from now.

Do you know what will happen? In reality, we hardly know what will happen in six months.

But, if we allow ourselves a five minute break from this online circus of seriousness, we can place some bets. :-)

In this post I commit to a list of predictions on AI/LLM's in 5 years. How wrong will I be?

You are not allowed to argue unless you commit to your own predictions!

My predictions

General

  • LLM's are expensive. If they don't get cheaper, at least a third of projects using it right now will have to drop it as soon as investments dry up, because it doesn't have enough ROI.
  • General Artificial Intelligence is still "around the corner", but nobody else believes it anymore at this point.

Chat bots

  • Chatbots provide marginal value for companies at best. Angry customers still want to talk to a human.
  • Sadly, countless cases of fraud, manipulation and suicide.
  • Talks of banning chatbots from impersonating humans, but that may take another decade.

Text generation & manipulation

  • This is what LLM's are good at, they will only get better.
  • Authors with distinct style, wit and humor will become more popular though.
  • People will at some point realise that, if they care about their mom, they shouldn't send her an AI generated message.

Search

  • LLM's get more popular for general search queries, because their chats don't have ads or false SEO manipulation.
  • But at some point, enough people drop Google for AI chat, AI chat gets ads and we're back to square one.

Illustration

  • For low budget and illustrations where quality doesn't matter as much, humans will be largely replaced.
  • Human illustration has gotten increasingly quirky, and gets explicitly employed to either embrace the imperfect, or invoke pre-AI nostalgia.

Art

  • We get cynical about "art" that could have been generated. We assume that everything is.
  • However, art that is imperfect such that it undoubtedly was created by humans, will be valued more.
  • Unfortunately, all other art is, to a greater or lesser extent, devalued.

Development

  • Smart autocomplete and fast mockup generation catapult experienced developers' productivity.
  • Many, many more developers get stuck in junior hell, forever fixing problems that their own prompts created.
  • Product cycles will speed up (even more) dramatically, the amount of garbage and insecure apps skyrockets.
  • Security will be a better business than ever to be in.

Testing

  • Using AI to generate tests doesn't usually win the time it saves, we still need to do the thinking about business logic ourselves (dang).
  • AI will do lots of chores, like smoke testing, healing tests and generating test data.

News reporting

  • Sorry, not an expert on this, but it will probably get worse.