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The Rundown’s 2025 year in review

PLUS: Patients control AI and robotics with thought

Zach Mink

January 1, 2026

Happy New Year, AI enthusiasts! 2025 is in the books, and it was another wild year of technological advances, scientific breakthroughs, worldwide adoption, eye-popping investments, and reality-TV-level drama across the AI world.

To ring in 2026, we’re recapping some of the biggest stories and milestones from the past twelve months. Thanks to all our readers for coming along for the AI ride with us!

In today’s AI rundown:

The Rundown’s 2025 year-in-review
The AI moments that defined 2025
Use Claude for Chrome to book business trips
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

THE RUNDOWN

🎉 The Rundown’s 2025 year in review

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: 2025 was a monumental year for The Rundown, marked by interviews with some of the biggest names in AI, rapid growth across our community, and the expansion of both our education platform and AI, Tech, and Robotics newsletters.

Our 2025 year in review:

Hit our 1M subscriber milestone for The Rundown AI in February, with the overall community growing to over 2M+ readers across publications.
Interviews with Sam Altman (OAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Demis Hassabis (Google), & Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot).
Scaled our AI University live workshops with brands like Canva, Zapier, and Windsurf, and launched dozens of new certificate course tracks.
Expanded our coverage across industries with The Rundown Robotics and The Rundown Tech, growing to nearly 800k combined subscribers.
Launched new sections for our AI newsletter including “Community AI workflows” and Monday “Rundown Roundtable“

A look into 2026: Next year, we’re putting a big focus on driving more value through community. Expect more free live workshops, deeper integrations with social platforms, and more opportunities to connect and discuss with likeminded AI enthusiasts. We’ll also be scaling up more exclusive Q&As with AI leaders and video content!

TOGETHER WITH LIGHTFIELD

📊 The CRM that updates itself

The Rundown: Lightfield is an AI-native CRM designed for startups. It captures every email, call, and meeting automatically, so nothing stays stuck in your head. 1,000+ startups have used Lightfield to automate CRM data entry, so they can spend more time on selling and less time on admin.

Lightfield gives founders:

Automated meeting prep built from your full history with the account
Suggested post-call tasks and follow-ups after every meeting
An AI agent that researches accounts and drafts emails
A generative chat experience to answer any question about your business

Try Lightfield for free — just connect your email and calendar and watch your CRM build itself.

AI IN 2025

🗓️ The AI moments that defined 2025

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: From trillion-dollar infrastructure bets to market-shaking efficiency breakthroughs, 2025 was another year of non-stop news in the AI world. Below is our recap of some of the most impactful stories that shaped the industry over the past year.

2025’s biggest headlines included:

The “DeepSeek Moment”, Jan.: China's R1 model release shook both the AI world and U.S. financial markets, triggering a $600B single-day loss for Nvidia.
The Stargate Project, Jan.: OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle launched a $500B AI infrastructure initiative — now nearing $1.4T in total commitments.
Claude Code, Feb.: Anthropic released its agentic coding tool, which became the launch that helped set the stage for the CLI agent movement.
Meta’s talent war, June: Zuck and co.’s poaching spree was the talk of the summer, snagging elite researchers from top labs with massive pay packages.
Nano Banana, Aug.: OpenAI started the Ghibli trend with gpt-image-1, but Google’s Nano Banana marked a new era of image editing and consistency.
AI Video Breakthroughs, Sept.: OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3.1 went viral and raised major questions on the future of media.

AI TRAINING

🏨 Use Claude for Chrome to book business trips

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up Claude to control your browser and automate hours of travel research, pulling together a list of recommended hotels with up-to-date pricing and availability in a Google Sheet.

Step-by-step:

Install the "Claude in Chrome" extension from Chrome webstore, then navigate to it and type /shortcuts → "Create Shortcut" named /hotel-picker
Prompt: "When searching hotels on Booking.com: (1) Filter 'Hotels' only, (2) Apply distance/star rating filters (default 4+ stars), (3) Find top 10 based on criteria AND reviews (8.5+ Booking.com, 4+ TripAdvisor), (4) Prioritize modern properties with amenities. Return the top 10 sorted by value"
Create a Google Sheet with headers: Hotel Name, Price per Night, Rating, Distance to Downtown, Amenities, Booking Link—then copy the sheet’s URL
Test: "I'm traveling to [location] from [date]. Find hotels within 1 mile of downtown under [price per night]. Navigate to [YOUR SPREADSHEET URL] and add a row for each hotel. Sort by best value"

Pro tip: Create a Chrome profile for Claude to control which logins it has access to.

PRESENTED BY YOU.COM

💪 Start 2026 right with the AI training your team needs

The Rundown: AI implementation can go sideways due to unclear goals and a lack of skills. Ensure your team is ready to harness the full potential of your AI investment with this AI Training Checklist from You.com. Set your team—and your AI initiatives—up for success in the new year.

Get the checklist to learn:

Key steps for building successful AI Training programs
Guidance on overcoming employee resistance and fostering adoption
A structured worksheet to monitor progress and share across your organization

Get the checklist and set yourself up for success.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🖼️ Qwen Image-2512 - Alibaba’s image AI with better realism, text rendering
🖥️ Claude in Chrome - Agentic extension that brings Claude to Google Chrome
🧮 GPT 5.2 Pro - OpenAI’s most advanced frontier model
🤖 MiniMax 2.1 - Improved coding for mobile and web app development

📰 Everything else in AI today

The AI Futures Project updated its timeline model from its AI 2027 paper to now predict full AI coding automation by 2031-2032, pushing back forecasts by 3-4 years.

OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro achieved a 29% on Epoch AI’s FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark, surging a full 10% ahead of the previous record set by Gemini 3 Pro.

Alibaba’s Qwen team introduced Qwen-Image-2512, an updated text-to-image model with upgraded realism and improved text rendering.

South Korean giant Naver open-sourced HyperCLOVA X Seed Think, a reasoning model featuring strong agentic performance and topping benchmarks for the country.

OpenAI’s stock compensation hit an average of $1.5M per employee in 2025, according to the WSJ — the highest figure of any major tech startup in history.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Ryan H. in Colorado Springs, CO:

"Last year, I leased a new EV, but the battery died after 10 months. The car sat in the shop for months waiting on parts, so I asked Copilot to help get me out of my lease.

The chat quickly found emails at the manufacturer, the lease company, and the dealership, then drafted an email to formally start a buyback reinforced by CO law. Better yet, Copilot found and guided me through a niche program from the BBB to force manufacturers to respond. 10 days later, and I am in arbitration, having navigated the corporate and federal bureaucracy with only a few minutes of effort!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.