5
votes
What are your predictions for 2026?
Thought I'd post the thread this year as I haven't seen it pop up yet.
It's been an eventful 2025, and we certainly live in some interesting times. If you made predictions for this year, how did they turn out? What are your predictions for the next year?
Trump trips on the stairs leading into Air Force One.
A war experiences a major escalation involving neighboring countries.
Botswana wins a major sporting event.
A token C-list figure is arrested in connection with the Epstein files, but then Epstein returns to mostly meme status.
Elon Musk reveals he is actually a time traveler. A few days later he admits he traveled from the past, not the future. He quickly proceeds to claim he was joking about the whole thing.
Taylor Swift enters an experimental phase after she releases an all-glockenspiel album.
Major scandal involving inappropriate actions behind-the-scenes of a Netflix production.
A new social media site whose core functionality is heavily AI powered is launched by a major figure/company in a billion-dollar campaign. It fails to meet investor expectations, but finds a very devout core audience.
An animal escapes from a zoo and evades recapture shockingly long. It becomes a major news story and many claim it was a distraction from some political event.
A massive meteor hits Earth and we all die.
...Some of these might be long-shots.
I predict some sort of market correction to AI companies. I have my doubts it will be a dotcom bubble or that all AI companies will fall apart, but I think something is gonna burst when the numbers are this bad in a nonzero interest rate environment. I suspect the bigger hit will be a lot of the silly startups that have gobbled up VC cash with dubious products. Will any big firms collapse? Maybe, OpenAI seems the most precarious, but they may have enough inertia to power through. I think companies will stop cramming AI into everything as they continue to get bad feedback and bad ROI.
A few substantial model improvements could completely knock out my prediction, but this is where my gut is at the moment.