Ex-OpenAI's Bob McGrew: 2025 Is the Year of Reasoning (sequoiacap.com)

Bob McGrew, the former Head of Research at OpenAI, predicts that 2025 will be a pivotal year for AI, emphasizing reasoning as the key development area. He contends that foundational technologies such as Transformers, scaled pre-training, and reasoning are already established, setting the stage for significant advancements. With reasoning capabilities now at the forefront, and the diminishing returns of pre-training becoming apparent, McGrew highlights the urgency for startups to focus on creating genuine scarcity in an increasingly commoditized agent economy, where AI services will drastically undercut traditional human-based pricing. The implications of this shift are vast, particularly in fields like law and medicine, where AI's ability to replicate previously human-exclusive work will disrupt existing service models. McGrew also underscores the emergence of robotics, where advancements in language interfaces and vision capabilities allow for quicker solutions to complex tasks. He notes that the ability to leverage existing foundational models for new applications signals a turning point in rapid deployment. As proprietary data loses its value with AI's ability to replicate tasks, the emphasis will shift toward building trust relationships and effective infrastructure to maximize the utility of AI systems.