It's that time. It's been a hell of a year.

At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5.

I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer's realization that there's something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not?

The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly impressive and fast. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, because progress has been incremental, and because we were reasonably expecting to often get even more than this.

The public conversation and debate, even more than before, was full of false narratives and active attempts to make the situation worse. The same goes for attempts to shape Federal policy towards AI, and OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit.

It's been, as they say, one battle after another, with many wins, many setbacks and a lot of things in between.

This includes the key developments in AI, and also other blog posts from the year that I consider memorable looking back.

This is only our corner of the world's [...]

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Outline:

(01:26 ) January

(03:50 ) February

(06:58 ) March

(08:15 ) April

(09:24 ) May

(11:06 ) June

(12:02 ) July

(13:04 ) August

(15:23 ) September

(15:50 ) October

(18:39 ) November

(20:12 ) December

(21:39 ) Questions For Next Season

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First published:

December 31st, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2hFiaDmYr3KuuWNDS/2025-year-in-review

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.