2025-12-19 01:52:12
11 predictions for 2026
摘要如下:
1. TikTok的销售终于有了明确的时间表,预计于2026年1月22日完成。美国投资者财团将接管TikTok在美国的运营,特朗普政府支持这一交易。
2. Meta正在测试限制某些用户在Facebook上发布的链接数量,试图鼓励创作者在其平台上发布内容而不是通过链接引导流量。
3. Trump Media与一家名为TAE Technologies的聚变能源公司达成合并协议。OpenAI正寻求筹集高达830亿美元的资金,并已向约35所公立大学出售了超过70万份ChatGPT许可证。
4. 中国PDD Holdings因员工和监管机构之间的斗殴事件解雇了一个政府关系团队,这反映了中美科技竞争的紧张局势。
5. OpenAI、微软和谷歌等多家公司加入美国“创世纪使命”,以促进美国技术竞争力。此外,Meta正开发一个新的图像和视频导向的人工智能模型。
6. 苹果在日本调整了其App Store政策以遵守新的法律要求,并计划在搜索结果中添加更多广告。
7. 亚马逊AI负责人Rohit Prasad离职,被云基础设施高管Peter DeSantis取代。Alexa网站现在变得有用,可用于查找与语音助手相关的信息。
8. 美国联邦贸易委员会正在调查Instacart的人工智能定价工具;YouTube因Billboard排名公式改变而停止提供数据,并宣布将从2029年开始直播奥斯卡颁奖典礼。
9. 元宇宙平台Meta正推出新的年龄验证系统,但暂停了第三方Horizon OS耳机开发项目。
以上内容包括最新的科技和社交媒体动态、政策变化及行业趋势分析。
As 2024 came to a close,
I noted here
that two big stories were beginning to crowd out everything else in tech: the rapid development and diffusion of artificial intelligence, and the shifting policies of tech giants as they prepared for life under a re-elected President Trump.
Twelve months later, those stories did indeed define the year here at
Platformer
. On the product side, this year saw the
first consumer agents
,
deep research
,
Googleâs AI mode
,
OpenAIâs hardware ambitions
,
Sora
, and the
Atlas browser
, among other key developments.Â
Meanwhile, AI policy got both looser and more restrictive. Frontier AI labs eagerly made deals with the US military,
reversing long-held policies against building weapons of war
, and began leaning into adult content, from
erotica in ChatGPT
to
Grokâs sexbot companion
. On the other hand, amid rising evidence that chatbots were fueling
a new mental health crisis
, AI companies placed
new restrictions on teen use
and
added parental controls
.
All that took place against the backdrop of the new Trump administration, whose impact on the tech world was felt almost immediately. The year began with Metaâs
surrender to the right
on speech issues, a move that included changing its policies to
allow for more dehumanizing speech
against minority groups. It also
killed its DEI program
, a move followed by many of its peers, and
shut down systems
that once prevented the spread of misinformation.
With DOGE, Elon Musk ran the same playbook for cost-cutting in the federal government that he had done previously at Twitter, to devastating effect. The new administrationâs embrace of the tech right showed up quickly in its policy proposals, including most notably in its
accelerationist position toward AI
.
By mid-year,
Musk and Trump split
. But the broader relationship between Trump and Silicon Valley remained mostly positive â
 particularly for Meta
â despite the fact that the government continued to pursue and antitrust cases against both
that company
and
Google
. (Meta won its case; Google lost.)
I spent much of the year feeling increasingly disillusioned by the platformsâ cynical embrace of Trump and how little it seemed to cost them in users or revenue. (Even Tesla stock, which plunged in the wake of DOGEâs outrages, is now up almost 10 percent year over year.) I noted in particular
the disquieting silence from trust and safety executives
, who once spoke up proudly for human rights but
understandably went quiet
amid death threats, job insecurity, and threats to their immigration status.
Platformer
âs traditional focus on issues related to content moderation came to feel somewhat quaint in a world where principled leaders had been largely replaced by Trump appeasers.
And so I found fun where I could: an
unusual and revealing dinner with Sam Altman
; a speculative preview of
how Substack might change
to live up to its lofty new valuation; and some
hard-won lessons about productivity
.Â
And I found myself relieved that, at long last, more countries had begun to take child safety on platforms more seriously. Australiaâs
move to ban
children under 16 from having social media accounts, despite the real harms to free expression, still strikes me as inevitable given platformsâ inability to protect their users from
child predators
, AI
suicide coaches
,
sextortion
, and other catastrophes.
Through it all, you all have kept me going with kind emails, thoughtful comments, and the occasional angry (but welcome) direct message on Signal. Thanks to all of you for reading
Platformer
over the past year, especially the paying subscribers who allow me to do this for a living and to employ our small but mighty team. (Consider
becoming one of them
, if you havenât already?)Â
This year weâve made some changes to our format that you all have responded very positively to. Next year weâll begin a new experiment in audio.
Five years
into this experiment, I remain more grateful than ever that I get to wake up and help make
Platformer
for you. And as bleak as the news cycle often seems, I remain excited to see what 2026 will bring.Â
See you here on January 5.
As always, in the name of pundit accountability, I begin by checking in on my 2025 predictions.Â
What I got right
The AI culture war begins.
From executive orders banning â
woke AI
â to one attorney generalâs suggestion that
it should be illegal for ChatGPT to criticize President Trump
, this one played out exactly as I imagined it would.Â
The child safety fight comes to chatbots as well
. âWith more teens using chatbots â and some of them having tragic outcomes â look for there to be more pressure on AI labs to add restrictions, warning labels, and safety features for their under-18 users,â I wrote. And
they did
.
Google, Apple, or both will begin to offer age verification at the device level
. Google did,
at least in some states
.
Apple did, too
.
The big AI companies remain competitive with each other
. âExpect regular changes at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard,â I wrote. And there were â although some of that was because
Meta was cheating
.
Meta has a Llama scandal
. Did I mention that
Meta was cheating
?
Everyone copies Meta Ray-Bans
. Google and Samsung announced Android XR glasses; Apple and Snap also reportedly have glasses of their own on their way or in development.
The flop of âApple Intelligenceâ results in the company scrapping its existing strategy
.
Yup
and
yup
.
âRemarkable Alexaâ underwhelms
.
Yup
.
Google loses its ad tech antitrust trial
.
Yup
.
Mixed results
The TikTok ban goes into effect.
It did go into effect ⦠for about a day. I successfully predicted that the Supreme Court would side with Congress. I did not predict that Trump would ignore both other branches of government and extend the ban indefinitely. (News of a sale agreement
was reported today
, nearly a year after the original deadline.)Â
AI will show continuous incremental improvement, but no exponential leaps
. Depends on how you define âexponential,â really. In my own work, I found large language models to be significantly more capable than they were a year ago. Their ability to draft research briefs, write thoughtful interview questions, fact-check and copyedit dramatically increased over the past year. Software engineers reported seeing
even larger productivity gains
. For most people, though, AI still hasnât changed their job all that much.Â
The first year of "the agentic era" mostly disappoints
. Certainly it underperformed relative to the hype. Consumer agents from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google struck me as something closer to a party trick than a useful tool â and the party trick typically took 20 to 30 minutes to complete. That said, enterprise agents did have some notable successes â witness the
$100 million
in annual recurring revenue for the B2B agent company Sierra, for example, or Claude Code hitting
$1 billion
in ARR after just six months of existence. (See my
ethics disclosure
!)
Bluesky and Threads remain in a productive rivalry
. For the most part, Iâm not sure either platform really even thinks of the other as a rival. Each has developed into its own thing, neither of which has the heat or relevance of Twitter in its heyday. (Nor does X, for that matter, no matter what the dead-enders there still insist.)
What I got wrong
An activist investor group demands changes at Snap.
They simply did not.Â
The bro-ligarchy collapses, as Trump comes to resent being seen as a tool of Silicon Valley
. The thing I got the most wrong this year. On one hand, yes, Trump and Musk had their predictable blow-up. Aside from that one relationship, though, the tech right and Trump are still painfully close. Just this month, the Andreessen Horowitz wing of the Republican party pushed through an executive order that seeks to ban states from passing most laws seeking to regulate AI. This is despite the fact that the ban is hugely unpopular with scores of elected Republicans. Perhaps Trump will resent being seen as a tool of Silicon Valley someday, but it did not happen in 2025.
Predictions for 2026
With that out of the way, here are some predictions for next year.
The AI bubble wonât burst.
The
bubble talk
that dominated tech discourse in 2025 will continue all year long. We shouldnât be surprised if there are some spectacular flameouts next year, particularly if models from the frontier labs improve enough that businesses can deploy them directly and not pay $50 per user per seat per month for some AI startupâs product. And some public companies will undoubtedly lose tens of billions of dollars trying to catch up to the leaders. (The odds of Meta catching up are long, and growing longer.) But I predict that 2026 ends more or less as 2025 did, with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and
mayyyyybe
xAI jockeying for prime position. As the analyst Benedict Evans
recently wrote
: âThe fact that AI is working really, really well, and has no signs of hitting a wall, and will change the world⦠Does NOT mean that there cannot also be a bubble in AI. In fact, thatâs generally the kind of thing that *causes* bubbles.â If you want to prepare yourself for 2026, internalize that point.
AI will have a dramatic impact on software engineering in 2026, and a much less dramatic impact on other jobs
. At current rates of improvement, benchmarks that measure the ability of LLMs to write code should be almost entirely saturated by the end of 2026. That should lead to reduced hiring rates for software engineers, rapidly changing job descriptions for those who remain, and perhaps even the beginnings of large-scale layoffs. Outside of coding, though, expect another year full of Nano Banana-scale improvements: moments where the technology becomes obviously more powerful than its predecessor, opening up new possibilities for work and entertainment, but in ways that augment what humans can do rather than replace it.
AI talk
wonât
dominate the midterms
. Some pundits predict that a massive anti-AI movement will coalesce by November, delivering huge gains to whichever party more convincingly adopts a tech-hostile posture. I predict AI concerns will take a backseat to the economy and a backlash to Trumpâs authoritarianism. That said, I do think weâll see the
beginnings
of an anti-AI movement â and perhaps a bipartisan one. Look for at least three Democrats to win House seats promising to stop the construction of data centers in their districts, or creating new protections for people who lose their jobs to automation.
AI companions will become a cultural flashpoint
. In 2026, more Americans will turn to AI companions for companionship, sex, and love â and exit the traditional dating market altogether. Platforms will become more skilled at extracting money and attention from this cohort, leading to a societal schism that results in warnings from religious leaders, Congressional hearings, and several painful essays in
The Atlantic
.Â
An LLM-powered cyberattack brings AI safety fears to the forefront
. Leading frontier models already show significant promise in finding exploits, and only the labsâ guardrails prevent them from being used for crime. In 2026, look for a nation-state or group of cybercriminals to weaponize an LLM to cause significant damage, and give AI safety advocates the concrete evidence theyâve been looking for to push for stronger regulations on AI development.Â
Metaâs AI reboot gets rebooted
. About half a year into Metaâs organizational reset, stories are already leaking out about
frustrations between executives
and challenges in competing with the top labs. By the end of 2026, expect Metaâs models to still fall short of state-of-the-art â and Mark Zuckerberg to shuffle his executive lineup again in response.
OpenAI retires Sora
. A year from now, I suspect that we will look back on Sora as a moment when OpenAI was at its most unfocused. At a time when Google and Anthropic were wowing customers with advancements in AI code, OpenAI was launching a TikTok-like social network that immediately came under fire for its lack of copyright guardrails and vulgar embrace of brainrot. While it was a hit on release, Sora usage has tapered off sharply since then. Assuming Sam Altman is serious about diverting more resources to ChatGPT, heâll wind down Sora development early next year and bring those creative tools and social features to the place where heâs already winning: ChatGPT.
Social media bans for children under 16 will become the norm.
After more than a decade of parents demanding stronger platform protections and mostly disappointing results, this year Australia said âthe hell with itâ and moved to delay teensâ exposure to social media until the middle of high school. Amid rising evidence that smartphones in schools are bad for kids in general, and regular exposés documenting the way platforms have sought to
bury their own research
into child safety issues, expect other countries (and US states) to follow suit.Â
A judge rules that Google must spin out its ad exchange
. The government handily won its case that Google has
an illegal monopoly in advertising technology
. I expect the judge to take a more aggressive approach here than a separate judge took in the search case, where Google defeated an effort to force it to sell Chrome, and call for an actual structural remedy.
Trump starts a legal fight with the European Union over tech regulation
. The president and his allies have made no secret of their disdain for the EUâs efforts to regulate US tech platforms. Expect it to follow through on
a threat
to punish the bloc unless it makes some concessions.Â
Trump and Musk will become temporary allies again.
When? Why? For how long? Only the ketamine knows.
On the podcast this week:
Former iRobot CEO Colin Angle joins us to discuss Roomba's bankruptcy. Then, Kevin and I discuss our 2026 predictions.
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Following
The TikTok sale is finally happening
What happened:
The
TikTok
sale is officially
set to close
next month on Jan. 22, 2026, with a consortium of American investors, a joint venture set up as
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC
, set to take over the
US
operations of the social platform. Both TikTok and
ByteDance
agreed to the deal backed by
President Trump
, according to an internal memo sent by CEO
Shou Chew
.Â
Hereâs the ownership breakdown:
Oracle
,
Silver Lake
, and
Abu Dhabi
âs state investment firm
MGX
, will collectively own 45% of the company; 30% will be âheld by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDanceâ; nearly 20% will still be owned by ByteDance; and 5% will be owned by new investors. It is unclear whether the
Murdochs
, who Trump previously indicated could be part of the group, will have any stake.
The deal also includes âretraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,â Chew wrote. Oracle will oversee data protection.
Why weâre following:
The never-ending TikTok saga appears to finally be reaching its conclusion. And the conclusion is a unique business arrangement that
could give
the US government â and Trump â ongoing influence over one of the most popular social media apps used by millions of Americans.
What people are saying:
Trump has been open about what he thinks the new TikTok should look like. âIf I could make it 100% MAGA, I would,â he said in September. âBut itâs not going to work out that way, unfortunately. Everyoneâs going to be treated fairly â every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated very fairly.â
While many have been worried about Chinaâs influence on Americans through TikTok, some are also wondering what the new deal means for Oracle centibillionaire
Larry Ellison
, a Trump friend who has been quietly amassing a media empire, and who has backed his son
David Ellison
âs quest to bring Warner Bros under Paramountâs ownership. âA lot of people are obviously worried about what Xi Jinping might want Americans to see,â Jim Secreto, a former Treasury official under Biden,
told
Bloomberg. âBut there are also many Americans that might be worried about what Larry Ellison wants them to see.â
âLindsey Choo
Meta's link tax
What happened: Meta
is testing
a limit on the number of links that some people can post to
Facebook
.Â
Some users started noticing that they couldnât post links without upgrading their accounts over the past few days. Meta confirmed the experiment. Theyâre testing it on professional accounts and
Facebook Pages
, which can post more links if they pay for a
Meta Verified
subscription.
âThis is a limited test to understand whether the ability to publish an increased volume of posts with links adds additional value for Meta Verified subscribers,â a Meta spokesperson told
TechCrunch
.
Why weâre following:
Metaâs messaging here is quite funny, considering the current test involves subtracting value from non-Verified subscribers. There may be good reasons to force frequent posters to pay for the privilege, though we suspect $15 a month won't be enough to keep the spammers away. In the meantime, though, it's a more-than-subtle suggestion to creators that they (and Meta) are better off posting natively to Meta's platforms and not trying to regularly send people away.
Itâs the latest in a long line of platform decisions to demote or block links as they attempt to keep users inside their walled gardens. That's bad news for independent creators and the open web, which rely on traffic from social media for views and revenue. And it's more than a little ironic, given how much Meta (justly) complained when Canada attempted to
implement its own link tax
on the platform.
What people are saying:
Some saw the move as a classic story of enshittification: âlol the big tech platforms have replaced the open web for one where you have to pay $15/month to try to make a hyperlink,â
wrote
Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Max Chafkin.
âFor creators it reinforces a pretty brutal reality that Facebook is no longer a reliable traffic engine and Meta is increasingly nudging it away from people trying to use it as one,â social media consultant Matt Navarra
told
the BBC.
âElla Markianos and Lindsey Choo
Side Quests
Trump Media and fusion power company
TAE Technologies
agreed to merge
at a valuation of more than $6 billion. To have any hope of understanding this, you must simply read
Matt Levine
.
A
look
inside
China
âs âManhattan Projectâ to build AI chips rivaling the
US
.
PDD Holdings
reportedly
fired
a government relations team after a fistfight broke out between employees and Chinese regulators (following another fistfight earlier this month!).
OpenAI
has reportedly
held talks
to raise tens of billions â
targeting
a $100 billion fundraise that could value it at as much as $830 billion. Developers can now
submit
apps to
ChatGPT
. OpenAI
has sold
more than 700,000 ChatGPT licenses to about 35 public universities.
GPT-5.2-Codex
is
released
. OpenAI,
Google
and
Perplexity
are increasingly
handing out
incentives to attract more AI users in India. How OpenAIâs organizational issues may be
hurting
ChatGPTâs performance.
The
ShinyHunters
hacking group is
extorting
PornHub
after data from Premium members was reportedly stolen.
Two dozen AI companies, including OpenAI,
Microsoft
and Google are
joining
the USâs â
Genesis Mission
,â which as far as I can tell is a series of press releases about American competitiveness. The
FTC
is reportedly
probing
Instacart
over its AI pricing tool.
FCC
chair
Brendan Carr
said
the agency is no longer independent, and the word has been removed from the agencyâs mission statement. Great.
Anthropic
is releasing
its
Agent Skills
technology as an open standard. An
experiment
in which
Claude
ran a vending machine produces an all-timer of a video from
Joanna Stern
.Â
Google
sued
a Chinese scam group
Darcula
(
sic
) alleging the group is responsible for a big wave of text scams. Googleâs vibe-coding tool
Opal
is
coming to
Gemini
. The new
Gemini 3 Flash
is
rolling out
to the Gemini app, and
will be
its default mode.
YouTube
is
pulling
its data from
Billboard
in response a change in Billboardâs ranking formula. The
Oscars
will be
broadcast
on YouTube starting in 2029. YouTube
shut down
two prominent channels that post AI-generated movie trailers.
The parents of a teen sextortion victim
sued
Meta
in the first
UK
case of its kind. Meta is
adopting
a new age-checking system. Meta
paused
its initiative to develop third-party
Horizon OS
headsets. Itâs
developing
a new image and video-focused AI model codenamed â
Mango
.â
Yann LeCun
is reportedly in early talks
to raise
â¬500 million for his new startup at a valuation of â¬3 billion. He plans to bring on a guy named
LeBrun
as chief executive, and that's beautiful to us.
Apple
changed
its
App Store
in
Japan
to comply with new laws, including the option for alternative app marketplaces. But the changes werenât enough for
Epic
CEO
Tim Sweeney
â
Fortnite
will not be on
iOS
in Japan this year, he
said
, due to Apple's âjunk fees.â Speaking of which: Apple is
adding
more ads to App Store search results.
Amazon
AI chief
Rohit Prasad
is
leaving
, and will be replaced by cloud infrastructure exec
Peter DeSantis
. Amazon
caught
a North Korean IT worker by tracking keystroke data (cool). The
Alexa.com
website is actually
useful
now.
How Hollywood is
trying to cash in
on the popularity of
Roblox
(and why
Disney
is keeping its distance). 18 entertainment industry insiders are
forming
the
Creators Coalition on AI
.
AI models are making it more possible for amateurs to recreate viruses from scratch, a new report
said
. New estimates
suggest
AI created as much pollution as
New York City
this year, and used up as much water as people consume globally in water bottles.
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