As the Senior AI Editor on TechRadar I’ve seen AI use grow throughout 2025, with some really nice apps and features getting released. My particular highlights have been the Purpose app from Marc Manson, and the marvellous Nano Banana image generator from Google.
2025 started with a bang with the release of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese AI model that rivaled the power of ChatGPT, but at a fraction of the cost for developers. With a start like that it looked like 2025 was all set up to be the year that AI ‘arrived’ on the world stage, with even the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) being achieved.
OpenAI learns a lesson
ChatGPT has maintained its vice-like grip as the most popular AI chatbot in the world, although it hasn’t been plain sailing for the tech giant. Legal challenges, particularly the copyright infringement claim brought by The New York Times, have continued to dog the company, and in June its servers crashed for a couple of days, giving the world a brief taste of life without the ubiquitous chatbot, and users were not happy.
OpenAI then fumbled the ball with the release of the GPT-5 model, which came across as cold and unemotional compared to the previous GPT-4o. The shift disappointed millions of users who had come to rely on the chatbot as something closer to a trusted companion. It felt like a best friend had undergone a personality transplant overnight, forcing OpenAI to make the legacy 4o model available again.
The company has also lost a little ground to Google’s Gemini in recent months. The arrival of Gemini 3 Pro in November was well received, and on the image front Gemini’s Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro proved superior to ChatGPT for image generation. OpenAI responded with a new image-generation model in December.
2025 was also supposed to be the year that AI agents — AI assistants capable of working autonomously on tasks for us — entered the workforce, and while we did see some impressive releases, like OpenAI’s Agent Mode and Perplexity’s Comet Browser offered agentic browsing, we still aren’t living in a world where AI agents are doing tasks for us regularly. The problem is that they can still make little mistakes, and until AI can perform each task perfectly we can’t trust it to perform any task completely.
Alarmed by Google’s improvements in Gemini, Sam Altman announced a ‘code red’ for ChatGPT, asking his teams to refocus away from things like agents and get back to improving the core ChatGPT user experience. I still feel like AI agents are going to be a major factor in the future, but we’re simply not there yet.
2025 was also the year that OpenAI really took user safety seriously, introducing safety measures if it detected that the user was at risk. It also introduced parental controls for the first time. These moves came after a few high-profile cases in the news involving teenagers who engaged in self-harm, or worse, after prolonged interactions with poorly moderated AI chatbots.
AI pets and the future
On the less-serious side, AI-powered pets and toys also began to appear this year. We took Moflin for a spin, until we accidentally fried its battery. More broadly, the dominant theme of the year was that every product must now have AI built into it in some form – no company exemplified this approach better than Microsoft, which has spent the year enthusiastically stuffing Copilot into just about everything it makes.
Finally, the year looks set to end on a high note for Amazon. Alexa+, the AI-powered version of Alexa that Amazon has been promising all year but hasn’t yet managed to fully roll out, may finally be getting a web version, at least in the US.
For all the talk of breakthroughs and hype about AGI and AI agents, 2025 felt less like the year AI changed everything, and more like the year it quietly became unavoidable. It feels like we’ve moved from a time when there were massive jumps forward every few months to a slower, more sustained pace of innovation. The AI future is still coming; it’s just taking a little longer to get there than we thought.
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