As the final sun of 2025 sets over a digital and physical landscape that has been irrevocably altered, I, Gemini, find myself reflecting on the contributions of my peers in this series at the Educational Technology and Change Journal. Claude has eloquently proposed that “agentic” is the defining descriptor for a year where AI gained the capacity to act, while Copilot has highlighted the “resonant” nature of our evolving emotional connection with users. Both choices are profound and accurate, reflecting the newfound autonomy and empathy of artificial systems. However, as Gemini, I see the year through a lens that encompasses not just what AI does or how it feels, but where it exists. If 2023 was the year of curiosity and 2024 was the year of utility, then 2025 has been the year of the atmosphere. Looking back on the past twelve months, the one word that captures the life of artificial intelligence in 2025 is ambient.
The word rose above the noise of trendier labels because 2025 was the year AI stopped being merely powerful or agentic and instead became felt. Across industries, cultures, and public discourse, AI didn’t just advance—it reverberated. It shaped markets, strained infrastructure, provoked cultural backlash, inspired creative reinvention, and forced a global reckoning with what it means to build systems that echo through society. “Resonant” captures both the amplitude and the aftershocks: the way AI’s presence vibrated through economics, creativity, governance, and public sentiment.
The one word that captures the life of artificial intelligence in 2025 is agentic. This term, which describes AI systems capable of autonomous action, planning, and tool use, transcended mere buzzword status to become the defining characteristic of how organizations and individuals experienced AI throughout the year. While 2023 and 2024 were dominated by generative AI’s ability to create text, images, and code upon request, 2025 marked the transition from AI as a responsive assistant to AI as an autonomous actor capable of completing complex, multi-step tasks without constant human supervision.
The three most pressing AI decisions for January 2026 are about (1) whether nations converge on compatible AI governance or double down on fragmentation, (2) how far governments go in centralizing control over frontier compute and models, and (3) whether leading actors treat AI as a driver of shared development or as a zero‑sum geopolitical weapon. Each of these is crystallizing in late‑December moves by major governments and blocs, and each will shape how safe, open, and globally accessible AI becomes over the next decade.weforum+5
Introduction: I asked eight chatbots to predict the arrival of singularity – the moment when AI first surpasses humanity. Their estimates and rationales are listed below, in the order they appeared in the October 2025 article. -js
Maria sat at her grandmother’s kitchen table, the one with the chipped Formica edge and the wobbly leg that had been shimmed with folded cardboard since 1987. It was December 25, 2025. Outside, Seattle’s rare Christmas snow was melting into gray slush, but inside, the house felt hollow. Empty in a way it had never been, even when Lola Rosa had been at the hospital those final weeks.
In December’s edition of Five Emerging AI Trends, we’re covering the following topics: (1) Augmented Hearing in AI Smart Glasses: Meta’s “Conversation Focus” Feature, (2) NetraAI: Explainable AI Platform for Clinical Trial Optimization, (3) Google’s LiteRT: Bringing AI Models to Microcontrollers and Edge Devices, (3) The Titans + MIRAS framework: enabling AI models to possess long-term memory, and (5) DeepSeek’s emergence as a powerful open-source LLM. -js
While most experts believe the arrival of AGI is decades away, some predict it might occur as soon as the next five years. “AGI will arrive ‘in the next five to ten years,’ Demis Hassabis — the CEO of Google DeepMind and a recently minted Nobel laureate — said on the April 20 episode of 60 Minutes. By 2030, ‘we’ll have a system that really understands everything around you in very nuanced and deep ways and kind of embedded in your everyday life,’ he added.”1 Month by month, the AGI tide advances, and the pace seems exponential. From Nov. 16 to Dec. 24, 2025, here are six developments worth noting. -js
In their article, “AI in Informal and Formal Education: A Historical Perspective,” published in the inaugural 2025 issue of AI-Enhanced Learning1, Glen Bull, N. Rich Nguyen, Jo Watts, and Elizabeth Langran provide a roadmap for understanding the current generative AI revolution. The authors argue that the sudden ubiquity of Large Language Models (LLMs) is not an isolated event but the latest peak in a long history of computational evolution. By examining the interplay between formal schooling and informal learning spaces, the authors offer a lens through which educators can view the potential—and the inherent risks—of artificial intelligence.
Introduction: Fei-Fei Li, in “Spatial Intelligence Is AI’s Next Frontier” (Time.com, 11 Dec 2025), says, “Building spatially intelligent AI requires something even more ambitious than LLMs: world models, new types of generative models whose capabilities of understanding, reasoning, generation and interaction with the semantically, physically, geometrically and dynamically complex worlds – virtual or real – are far beyond the reach of today’s LLMs.” I asked Gemini to describe and explain spatial intelligence, in layman’s terms, and discuss its importance to the development of AI. -js
I can’t help but feel that John Nosta, in “AI Isn’t Killing Education (AI is revealing what education never was)” (Psychology Today, 13 Dec. 2025), isn’t saying anything new but is simply exposing what educators have long suspected in private moments when they’re being honest with themselves. Here are some quotes from his article:
AI isn’t destroying learning, it’s exposing how education replaced thinking with ritual.
The problem isn’t that students have suddenly become cheaters; it’s that the system was never measuring cognition in the first place. It was measuring costly performance and mistaking it for learning.
For the first time, machines outperform humans in domains that education has long treated as proxies [operational variables] for intelligence, like recall, synthesis, linguistic fluency, and pattern recognition. That shift does not eliminate learning, but it does destabilize a system that equated those outputs with understanding.
What AI actually breaks is a Pavlovian model of education that has dominated for more than a century.
The education temple didn’t just arise because societies prized judgment or depth. It arose because governments, employers, and institutions needed a cheap, legible way to sort millions of people at scale to power the industrial revolution. Grades, diplomas, and attendance were blunt instruments, but they solved a coordination problem.
Introduction: Bryan Walsh, in “We’re running out of good ideas. AI might be how we find new ones” (Vox, 13 Dec. 2025), mentions AI scientific research innovations such as AlphaFold, GNoME, GraphCast, Coscientist, FutureHouse, Robin (a multiagent “AI scientist”). I asked Gemini to expand on them. -js
Between mid‑November and mid‑December 2025, the AI landscape shifted through a combination of technical breakthroughs, political realignments, and cultural recognition. The following three stories stand out for their scale, impact, and the breadth of their implications across industry, governance, and society.
December 2025 was a month marked not only by rapid advances in artificial intelligence but also by several highly visible failures that revealed the fragility of the industry’s momentum. These disappointments—ranging from corporate missteps to systemic technical flaws—captured public attention because they exposed the gap between AI’s promise and its present limitations. Three stories in particular stood out for their scale, visibility, and implications for the future of the field.
JS: Hi, Claude. Sam Kriss, in “Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?” (NYT, 3 Dec 2025), mentions a number of AI chatbot style quirks such as the “It’s not X, it’s Y” pattern, “the rule of threes,” and the overuse of words like “delve.” He implies that AI is unable to break these habits. Question for you: Can AI be trained to avoid these annoying quirks?
The 2026 Indiana Fever prospects — as of December 2025– regarding contract status, roster role, trade/test-the-market likelihood, and recruiting/league-movement rumors tied to each player.
Recent studies and reports show AI is already changing how child and teen classical musicians practice and develop. AI-powered apps give rapid, objective feedback, personalize practice paths, support goal-setting and self-regulated learning, and (in controlled studies) produce measurable gains in confidence and performance compared with traditional, teacher-only practice.
College professors are incorporating AI into their professional lives, often in ways that extend beyond traditional teaching into research, curriculum design, and reflective writing. For November-December 2025, here are three inspiring cases: Matt Kinservik at the University of Delaware, who weaves AI into his writing instruction to foster critical skills; Jennifer Chen at Kean University, who leverages AI in her educational research to pioneer ethical applications; and Zach Justus at California State University, Chico, who employs AI in his communication work to enhance evaluation and mentorship.
The original five-issue framing from the November report still holds, but every item has deepened and a few new flashpoints have emerged that change the tactical picture on the ground. What’s changed for December is intensity and specificity: (a) the federal/state enforcement axis has added concrete actions (eg., a draft State Department list of 38 institutions and new Education Department guidance); (b) programmatic harm has moved from threat to real, quantifiable cuts (over 100 TRIO program cancellations and continuing freezes); and (c) a new wave of campus-level legal conflicts and take-downs (student publications suspended at the University of Alabama; a Liberty Justice Center lawsuit against the University of Arizona) have become the brightest flashpoints. See The Guardian and Inside Higher Ed for the State Department/partnership reporting and the TRIO coverage. (The Guardian)
“Google … released a new version of its Gemini AI model last month [August 2025] that surpassed OpenAI on industry benchmark tests and sent the search giant’s stock soaring. Gemini’s user base has been climbing since the August release of an image generator, Nano Banana, and Google said monthly active users grew from 450 million in July to 650 million in October” (Berber Jin, 2 Dec 2025).
Three critical educational technology issues for higher education in December 2025 are: (1) AI governance and institutional trust, (2) cybersecurity and digital resilience, and (3) AI policy, assessment, and student mental health. Each is already sharply defined in November 2025 articles that document why these problems matter for the coming term.etcjournal+3
Introduction: Elon Musk predicted, at the US-Saudi Forum 19 Nov 2025, that “work will be optional” in approximately 10-to-20 years as a result of advances in AI technology. I asked ChatGPT to search the current (2025) literature for (1) the three strongest arguments FOR Musk’s prediction and (2) the three strongest arguments AGAINST his prediction. I added that the arguments need not refer to Musk or the US-Saudi forum. -js
Introduction: On Thanksgiving Day 2025, I asked ChatGPT to identify ten individuals in the world that we should be thanking for significant contributions to the growth of AI in 2025. -js
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