5 things this AI expert expects to see
00:00 Speaker A
Let’s go over this and start talking about these federal AI regulations from the beginning. What have you got for us there?
00:08 Speaker B
There will be a battle in AI regulations in 2026. The federal government is going to be against the states, and you saw that in Trump’s last statement. There will be a battle over whether states will be allowed to regulate and whether the federal government will cut broadband funding or go after it for constitutional violations. This will be a single war. There will be another small war between Republicans who believe in states’ rights and Republicans who believe in presidential authority. So look for this too. And finally, there will be a war between European regulators and American AI companies. and this will be a continuation of many of the struggles that large American companies have been waging against European legislation over the last five or 10 years.
00:54 Speaker A
So how does this play out among some of the biggest names we know in artificial intelligence; Will they have a stake or horse in this race, be it hyperscalers or OpenAI?
01:10 Speaker B
Yes, they are. They prefer not to be regulated. They want to have a clean slate where they can work on their own accord and want to deal with very little regulation at the state level, ideally zero. In this regard, they want to avoid complying with European regulations, or at least their burdensome part. So yes, big AI companies want to be under-regulated.
01:38 Speaker A
And your second guess is that AI will become valuable at the industrial level, and I think that reflects the trend that we have miraculous technology, but how do we use it? How will it improve our lives and fit into the business world? This is finally becoming reality.
02:00 Speaker B
It will finally come true. We have spent years with the excitement of the idea of artificial intelligence. It’s the biggest science project in the world, but it hasn’t progressed into large organizations, and 2026 will be that year. At the same time as the AI technological revolution, things look set to slow down a bit as models converge and power stabilizes. At the same time as this is happening, you’ll see some of the strongest impacts we’ve seen throughout the entire revolution being made on large organizations.
02:37 Speaker A
This is because businesses are figuring out how to leverage AI.
02:40 Speaker B
You don’t want to put him aside and do side work. You need to build it into the most important thing businesses do, which are complex processes involving hundreds of people and hundreds of steps, all working in perfect coordination. It’s hard to bring AI into this, but when you do it will be really valuable.
03:04 Speaker A
I couldn’t agree more. The question is when. I should continue from here. Guess number three and I love it. The best investments will be purpose-built models, such as small language models. And uvula models are abbreviated as slim. That’s your acronym because we talk a lot about big language models. How will the little ones mess things up?
03:26 Speaker B
I think this is the year we realized that AGI was the wrong target. We’ve been talking about this for years. We were talking about making AI as smart as humans, and I think that’s the wrong direction to invest. You see the success of open models, small models. This is the year the public realizes that we need practical AI, not experimental, theoretical AI. And so there will be less investment and less focus on creating an AI that is comparable to a person, but more focus on creating an AI that can do a particular job really well. You don’t need this to do every job. You need it to do the job in front of you. There can be much more focus than there is today on making AI a practical technology that is important in large organizations.
04:14 Speaker A
I like the idea that this would potentially cost a lot less money. I’m curious how this will impact some of the biggest players like OpenAI and then Claudemaker. You know, how is this going to affect companies that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and soon to be in the trillions?
04:41 Speaker B
I think this opens the door for other vendors to become strong winners in the AI market. You don’t need to be a creator of human-scale intelligence in AI to be a big help to businesses. You can see experts in fields as diverse as law, healthcare, transportation, tuning their own AI models and creating tremendous impact and huge value for large organizations without spending the same amount of capital investment that our largest AI companies do. This will democratize the AI market.
05:22 Speaker A
I’d love to see this. Still, spending will continue, which brings us to the fourth forecast. 2026 will focus on AGI scale, powered by power, data and processing.
05:41 Speaker B
Yes, you know, the game of scale does not stop and it is astounding how much money is being spent. I liken it to laying railroads across the country, an energy highway system, or moonlight. That’s a staggering amount of money, and it’s not going to stop because investors are still willing to write big checks. But over time, I think we’ll see that there are other great ways to get returns from AI other than creating the next moonshot. So I believe the return on that investment will be a little smaller than some expected, but the investment will continue.
06:22 Speaker A
And here’s another one that I found really interesting. Prediction number five, AI winners will have better branding and distribution. And I’m thinking about a company like Open AI. I’m not trying to single them out here but they don’t have the distribution. They’re backed by Microsoft, but Microsoft is exploring other partnerships right now, and you kind of have to have the hardware, and they don’t have to have that right now. So how does this fit into your prediction?
07:05 Speaker B
I think the balance of power is shifting towards sellers who have the customers, who have the eyeballs, and who have the brand power. I don’t think OpenAI has the same kind of top position in the world of the future. I think they have great technology, but the gap is narrowing. And if they can’t rely on having a huge technology advantage, then the battle becomes a distribution advantage and being present on the desktop becomes their biggest asset, in which case I’d expect other organizations to do even better.
