(BNS) Top Tech Stories Of 2025 With The Newsworthy

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Podcast: Tech Brew Ride Home
Host: Erica Mandy (The Newsworthy), Guest: Brian McCollough
Episode: (BNS) Top Tech Stories Of 2025 With The Newsworthy
Date: December 25, 2025

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Overview

In this special year-end episode, Erica Mandy from The Newsworthy sits down with Brian McCollough, host of Tech Brew Ride Home, to break down and reflect on the top 10 tech stories of 2025. Their discussion covers industry breakthroughs, shifting economic tides, big surprises, missed expectations, and the overarching theme of AI’s dominance in the tech landscape. The episode blends analytical insight with accessible commentary, making sense of a frenetic year in Silicon Valley and beyond.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

The State of Tech in 2025

• Tech’s Big Rebound:
  Brian summarises the year as a massive rebound for tech, noting highs in stock markets (Nvidia, Bitcoin), renewed IPO activity, and a widespread sense of optimism—albeit with "storm clouds on the horizon" for 2026.

  • “Tech is back. It rebounded…” (02:33 – Brian)

• Criteria for Top Stories:
  Brian focused on breakthroughs and events likely to be seen historically as pivotal, with AI naturally threading through half the list.

  • “Things that I think we’ll look back historically as this was the year this broke through or that happened.” (03:01 – Brian)

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The Top 10 Tech Stories of 2025

10. Smart Glasses as a Viable Consumer Product

• AI enabled a new wave of smart glasses that became both affordable and functional.
• Meta’s Ray-Bans reportedly sold in the tens of millions, marking a shift from niche to mainstream.
• “This is a product category that is enabled by AI…” (03:24 – Brian)
• "I do not use one on a daily basis… A lot have been sold, but I don’t see them on the subway." (04:32 – Brian)

9. Quantum Computing Gets Practical

• 2025 saw the first real-world applications, especially via hybrid AI-quantum systems, impacting materials science and drug discovery.
• No "ChatGPT moment" yet, but clear viability established.
• “This is the year where [quantum computing] became viable…” (04:45 – Brian)
• “Not going to try” [to explain quantum computing], “but… it can do things our classical models would take tens of thousands of years to compute.” (05:28 – Brian)

8. Self-Driving Cars Hit Scale

• Expansion from pilot cities to a dozen or more; 15–20% of ride-hailing trips in places like Austin and San Francisco are now fully autonomous.
• Public comfort growing despite controversies, with safety data now favoring autonomous vehicles.
• “If a year from now it’s 30 cities, then 150… 20 to 30% of ride hailing is going to be done by self-driving.” (07:15 – Brian)
• “I actually don’t think [your 4-year-old] will ever need to learn how to drive.” (08:05 – Brian)

7. ‘AI Slop’ Floods the Internet

• Explosion of low-quality or synthetic AI-generated content, especially video, dominates social and creative platforms.
• Backlash versus embrace as users wrestle with authenticity and quality.
• “Slop. AI slop is the word of the year because of the AI revolution…” (08:40 – Brian)
• “People are just going to use it… It’s inevitable.” (10:56 – Brian)

6. Agentic AI… Didn’t Happen

• Despite major buzz, truly autonomous AI agents that manage complex tasks are not widely adopted.
• Technology is available, but user adoption and reliable workflows are lagging.
• “This is something that didn’t happen this year. Agentic AI kind of didn’t happen.” (12:11 – Brian)
• “I just know that it’s not being adopted.” (12:57 – Brian)

5. The AI Arms Race: DeepSeek and Open Source Acceleration

• US dominance shaken by Chinese model DeepSeek, which outperformed top Western models at a fraction of the cost.
• Open source and cheap, “good enough” AI models are democratizing access, threatening incumbent giants.
• “The assumption of American hegemony in AI was shaken…” (13:29 – Brian)
• “If it’s cheaper to use and it’s good enough, it’s going to win out.” (14:19 – Brian)

4. Nvidia Becomes a $5 Trillion Company

• Demand for AI chips (GPUs) leads to historic investment; tech giants’ AI spend may be propping up the whole US economy.
• Bubble fears debated: is this sustainable or reminiscent of dot-com excess?
• “Nvidia was the big story of the year by the fact that they make the chips for the AI…” (15:23 – Brian)
• “Without this AI spend… we probably would already be in a recession.” (16:55 – Brian)

3. Crypto Hits New Highs, Then Faces Hangover

• Bitcoin, Ethereum, and altcoins surge as the Trump administration takes a crypto-friendly stance, but recent “hangover” pullbacks foreshadow volatility.
• Business treasuries and prediction markets get swept up before the cooling trend.
• “Crypto took over, hit all-time highs…all this stuff… And in the last two or three months a lot of that is starting to evaporate.” (17:23–18:18 – Brian)

2. The Disappointment of GPT-5

• Expectation for a step-change leap after GPT-4 led to underwhelming response for GPT-5.
• Growth continues, but the revolutionary pace is moderating.
• “It was not the step change that people were expecting.” (19:13 – Brian)
• “If the next one isn’t moving just as fast, it’s surprising.” (19:26 – Erica)

1. The AI Race Upended: Google Overtakes OpenAI

• Google’s Gemini 3 is widely seen as superior to GPT-5.
• OpenAI faces existential questions amid internal restructuring and “code red” efforts to catch up.
• If Google’s model and in-house chips (TPUs) beat Nvidia’s GPUs, both OpenAI and Nvidia’s dominance are at risk.
• “Is OpenAI in trouble? Is Nvidia in trouble? Is Google suddenly now the leader in AI?” (19:34 – Brian)
• “Why is OpenAI behind?...they just announced a code red…” (20:49 – Brian)

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Other Notable Discussion Threads

• Enterprise AI and Safe AI (Anthropic):

  • Enterprises may prefer trusted, “safe” platforms like Google and Anthropic over experimental models.
  • “Anthropic is like we’re gonna make this safe, we’re gonna make this reliable…” (22:44 – Brian)

• AI Companions:

  • AI companions for kids and adults are being scaled back due to lawsuits and misuse; adoption remains tentative.
  • “They’ve had to scale it back incredibly. …that is something that I think is going to continue to be iffy.” (23:31 – Brian)

• Tariffs & Regulation:

  • Tariffs led to higher costs and instability, but tech firms absorbed these changes without systemic impact.
  • “…But in the end, it’s just been something that people have navigated but it hasn’t really blown anything up.” (23:59 – Brian)

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Personal Picks & 2026 Watchlist

• Brian’s Most Exciting Trend:

  • Consumer home robotics, powered by AI, may finally hit the mainstream at CES 2026.
  • “My prediction is that this is the year that robotics is the big story coming out of CES.” (24:45 – Brian)

• What to Watch Next Year:

  • An AI bubble burst could have deep economic and industry consequences—but timing uncertain, much like the dot-com boom and bust.
  • “If the AI bubble bursts…that’ll be the biggest story of the year…” (25:50 – Brian)

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Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “Tech is back. It rebounded. All sorts of things hit all time highs…” (02:33 – Brian)
• “Slop. AI slop is the word of the year…” (08:40 – Brian)
• “If a year from now it’s thirty cities, then a hundred and fifty…that’s going to be something that everyone’s going to experience quite soon.” (07:15 – Brian)
• “It’s AI all the way down.” (13:06 – Brian)
• “Without this AI spend…we probably would already be in a recession.” (16:55 – Brian)
• “Is OpenAI in trouble? Is Nvidia in trouble? Is Google suddenly now the leader in AI?” (19:34 – Brian)
• “This was the most fun year to cover tech in a long, long time, because again, so much is up in the air and I get excited about that.” (26:47 – Brian)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:33] Tech’s rebound and big picture
• [03:24] #10: Smart glasses go mainstream
• [04:45] #9: Quantum computing milestones
• [06:04] #8: Self-driving at scale
• [08:40] #7: AI slop overtakes content
• [12:11] #6: Agentic AI stalls
• [13:29] #5: The global AI arms race
• [15:23] #4: Nvidia’s rise and the AI bubble
• [17:23] #3: Crypto boom to hangover
• [18:19] #2: GPT-5’s underwhelming debut
• [19:34] #1: Google topples OpenAI in the AI race
• [24:45] Robotics as Brian’s pick for 2026
• [25:50] AI bubble risk in 2026
• [26:47] Reflections on the year in tech

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Closing Thoughts

Brian McCollough paints 2025 as a dynamic, tumultuous, and AI-dominated year for tech—one where expectations remained sky-high but not all innovations met the moment, and the competitive landscape shifted dramatically. The episode closes with words of excitement for what’s next, a readiness for volatility, and a sense of possibility for both new consumer technologies and the broader economic impact of tech’s latest transformations.

Transcript

[Erica Mandy]

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Natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025, Agave Loco Brands, Pojoaquee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. As 2025 comes to a close, we're looking back at one of the biggest drivers of change this year. Tech and counting down the top 10 tech stories. @ least according to our guest. He's Brian McCollough, host of the daily podcast Tech Brew Ride Home, covering all of Silicon Valley's News. In a 15 minute daily roundup, he's sharing what broke through, what disappointed, what, what shocked the industry, and what all of it could mean for.

[Brian McCollough]

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[Erica Mandy]

Ridehome. Let's get into the top tech stories of 2025 from number 10 to the biggest tech story of welcome welcome to the Newsworthy Special Edition Saturday when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in 10 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy. It's now time for today's special edition Saturday. Brian McCollo, thank you so much for joining us here on the Newsworthy.

[Brian McCollough]

Again. Yeah, thanks for having me back. This is a great annual tradition we're doing.

[Erica Mandy]

Here. I know. I'm loving it. Well, let's just start before we get into the top 10. But let's start big picture in just a couple of sentences. How would you describe tech in the year.

[Brian McCollough]

2025? Back tech is back. It rebounded. All sorts of things hit all time highs from Nvidia stock to Bitcoin to things like IPOs starting to happen again. So tech had a very good year. As the year is ending, there are lots of storm clouds on the horizon, but I think we'll get to.

[Erica Mandy]

That. Yes, we will. Before we get into it, what were you thinking about as you were creating your list? Like what was the criteria for something to make the.

[Brian McCollough]

List? Things that I think will look back historically as this was the year this broke through or that happened. It's hard not to have made it all about AI. But you'll see AI kind of weaves its way through half the things we're going to talk.

[Erica Mandy]

About. Yeah, let's go through the top 10 biggest tech stories of the year and if we can, I'd love to start with number 10 and work our way up to number one. So let's give us number.

[Brian McCollough]

10. Number 10 would be smart glasses as a new sort of consumer hardware product category. But again, here's AI weaving its way in already because what's happened is this is a product category that is enabled by AI. If suddenly you can, you know, add a camera to glasses, but then also have a connection to your phone and so you can talk to it and then the AI can like talk back to you in your glasses, but then eventually overlay things in your vision in the real world. Multimodal AI is a thing. It has become hit consumer products moving from like a niche to things like Meta's, Ray Bans selling, we think tens of millions of units at this.

[Erica Mandy]

Point. Yeah, because we've heard of smart glasses a lot in the past, but you think this year it's actually getting sold and there's new features. That's what's really making it stand.

[Brian McCollough]

Out this year it's being cheap by just adding the AI stuff like the Apple Vision Quest. This is different from, you know, full VR stuff. This is just we'll do the best we can now and make it affordable. But adding the AI added enough of a gloss to it that has made it an actual viable consumer product, I.

[Erica Mandy]

Think. Have you seen them out in the.

[Brian McCollough]

Wild? Out in the wild? No, I mean, I've tried a bunch of them on and I do not use one on a daily basis. So that's an interesting thing. A lot have been sold, we're told, but you're right. I don't see them on the.

[Erica Mandy]

Subway. All right, let's go to story number.

[Brian McCollough]

Nine. This is one of those where I think we'll look back on this year as the year quantum computing got practical. It's sort of like AI, you know, years and years of hype and then we had the ChatGPT moment. I think for quantum computing, this is the year where it became viable. Real world milestones were hit through hybrid computing, mixing classical supercomputers with quantum processors and researchers successfully applying the tech to actual problems in like materials science and drug discovery. So we're proving this year in 2025 that it's not theoretical anymore, even if we haven't hit the ChatGPT moment for quantum computing.

[Erica Mandy]

Yet. And how do you attempt to explain what quantum computing is to the average.

[Brian McCollough]

Person? Not going to try that. I'm just going to say that it can do things that are classical computer models would take them tens of thousands of years to compute. When we crack this quantum computing, it can happen in seconds. So it could do things like break cryptography or I don't know, not only cure cancer, but maybe allow us to do cold fusion and stuff like that. Imagine layering AI on top of computing that is orders and orders of magnitude faster. And you can see why people are excited about.

[Erica Mandy]

It. All right, number.

[Brian McCollough]

Eight. Number eight is another things coalescing. And this is sort of like the breakthrough year. Self driving cars. I think we'll look back on this is the year that self driving cars hit scale. Things like Waymo, but also Uber, et cetera. We knew that once they cracked it in one city then it's just like a franchise model in like restaurants or something. You just open up in another city and another city. And we're seeing that there are close to a dozen cities now that have self driving cars in them. There's close to half a dozen that have. You can actually pick up your phone and instead of calling for an Uber driver, you get a self driving car to come pick you up. And in fact we've seen data that in cities like Austin, Texas, in San Francisco, where these self driving ride hailing apps are available already, as much as 15 to 20% of the ride hailing are now being driven by cars that have no human driver in them. So extrapolate that out. If a year from now it's 30 cities, then 150 and as much as 20 to 30% of the ride hailing is going to be done by self driving. You can see that this is going to Be something that everyone's going to experience quite.

[Erica Mandy]

Soon. Despite some controversial stories that have come out, a couple have hit some pets or animals, but that's not necessarily slowing it.

[Brian McCollough]

Down. It's not slowing it down because once people get comfortable with it, it's theoretically cheaper, it's easier. And listen, there is data that came out in the last month that proved over millions of miles driven that it was Waymo data that proved that Waymo cars are safer than humans. There was a New York Times op ed that a neurosurgeon said we need to implement this soon as possible as a public health revolution. If we could eliminate the 50,000 people that die in car accidents a year or eliminate or even scale it down by a third or whatever, like it's something that would be a public health.

[Erica Mandy]

Miracle. Do you think my 4 year old will have to learn how to drive.

[Brian McCollough]

Ever? I actually don't think.

[Erica Mandy]

So. That's what my husband and I have talked about before. Like he may never actually learn how to drive. We'll see what.

[Brian McCollough]

Happens. It's going to be something that a decade from now you'll be like, I can't believe we used to do that. And that's really the scale that I think, the timeline that I think we're hitting. A decade from now it'll be.

[Erica Mandy]

Common. And I mean once it scales, there are going to be stories of problems because there's just, you look at.

[Brian McCollough]

The numbers for every bodega cat that gets hit. You haven't heard the story of the, what, a thousand people that were in car accidents today.

[Erica Mandy]

Right? Okay, number seven.

[Brian McCollough]

Slop. AI slop is the word of the year because of the AI revolution, because of things like Sora and all these tools that make it so easy to create not only AI pictures, but now AI videos. First the social media corner of the Internet. But now gradually all corners of the Internet are being taken over by a deluge of again, what some people would call low quality AI generated content to, I don't know, just content in general. And it's been interesting as it's taking over. On the one hand, a lot of users and people are actively revolting against this sort of synthetic slop. But then at the same time, why are places like meta and OpenAI creating essentially social networks for this AI content? It's because they can see in their own data and you can see by the view counts that people like watching this stuff. If you do it right, everyone's using AI agents to automate tasks, manage workflows, and even make a decision or two. But here's the problem. AI agents can mess up and make mistakes. They delete the wrong files, make changes you didn't want, or just go completely off script. Then you're left to clean up the mess. Unless you've got Rubrik Agent Cloud. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern and rewind AI agent actions. One platform to help you unleash more agents faster without the risk. If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern, and rewind their actions. Right now, listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent cloud. Head to rubrik.com that's R U B R-I.

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[Erica Mandy]

Thirst. Ya. What do you think the impact of quote unquote AI slop is now and or.

[Brian McCollough]

Next? I am not in favor of this. I take no position on this, but I think it's inevitable that it will essentially maybe not take over social media, but subsume it. I just think because it's so easy to do, I think it's an inevitability and we're only in like inning one or two of how easy it is to do so. If you're a creator with 10 million followers or something, if you can create the best video in the world of you standing in front of the Grand Canyon and you can do it in 30 seconds, it's still your content and your ideas. But why won't you do.

[Erica Mandy]

That? But when it comes, you know, coming from news, how concerned do you think people need to be about understanding what is real and what is.

[Brian McCollough]

Not? Obviously we should all be extremely concerned about that. I just wonder the degree to which. Again, because there is essentially this very strong backlash against it and very strong skepticism. I don't know that it'll be like you flip a switch and everybody's fooled by everything. I think it'll be more of a sort of prolonged back and forth between people fighting it, people hating it, and then also because again, it's just cheaper and easier. That's what I think is inevitable about it. People are just going to use.

[Erica Mandy]

It. All right, number.

[Brian McCollough]

Six. Sorry, AI again, but this is something that didn't happen this year. Agentic AI kind of didn't happen. We've had chatbots and such, but what we were told at the beginning of the year was this is the year where, well, you'll have a agent on your computer that will book a flight for you. Research that slide deck that you have to make for work. Research it. But then the next step is it'll create it for you and then it'll edit for you and you'll work with these agents all day. And that kind of hasn't happened yet. We've seen a bunch of agentic stuff come out, but I haven't seen the sort of takeoff and like sort of adoption of it that everyone was.

[Erica Mandy]

Promising. Right. It was reported that it's available, but are people actually using it and is it actually capable of doing what it.

[Brian McCollough]

Says? I'm not sure yet if the problem is it's not capable. I just know that it's not being.

[Erica Mandy]

Adopted. Okay, number five, you know.

[Brian McCollough]

What? I'm looking at this. Oh, except for one thing. It's AI all the way.

[Erica Mandy]

Down. Well, I mean, that is the reality of the year. Right. As much as maybe somebody's sick of hearing about it, it's because it has been the biggest story of the.

[Brian McCollough]

Year. It is with different angles to it. So this angle would be sort of the AI arms race. So this would be Deep Seek and Chinese, I don't know if you.

[Erica Mandy]

Remember, at the beginning of the year we reported on.

[Brian McCollough]

This. Yes. So the assumption of American hegemony in AI was shaken by things like Deep Seq, which was created by a Chinese company and that outperformed some of OpenAI's top models and was apparently trained for like 1/100 of the money required to train OpenAI's top models. So on one hand this is, oh, is the US losing its lead? But the second angle to it is that these are open source models where essentially companies put these out and then anyone can adopt them and use them. And I run some of them on my laptop. So this is sort of not just, oh, are the Chinese going to win? Is American tech going to win? It's also is a closed model versus an open model going to win. And again, if it's cheaper to use and it's good enough, it's going to win out. And that's been proven time and time again in tech.

[Erica Mandy]

History. And there's been some arguments from like AI ethicists that the AI race, the arms race, is what's going to be the failure of society. Like we have the wrong incentives if we're just trying to be bigger and better versus doing it responsibly. What's your take on.

[Brian McCollough]

That? A lot of people are familiar with Moore's Law, this idea that computing gets faster every couple years and gets cheaper every couple of years. And like that's the thing that has driven, you know, the tech eating the world of the last 30 years. That is starting to play out to a certain degree in AI. Whether or not this is morally the right thing to do for, you know, the survival of the human race, I mean, that's a deeper, larger philosophical debate. I mean, there's a reason why in the Dune novels they don't use AI because they fought a war against the AI and we all remember Terminator and all that stuff. So I love.

[Erica Mandy]

It. So we'll see how that plays out in real life. Okay, number.

[Brian McCollough]

Four. Number four would be Nvidia, the first $5 trillion company. Nvidia was the big story of the year by the fact that they make the chips for the AI. People can't get enough of it. They can charge basically anything they want and people gobble up as much as they can. But that is because this idea that all of the major tech platforms are just spending like it's going out of style. Two provide you with AI. They think you're going to want it, they have to build out these huge data centers to provide it to you is AI. And this has been a debate all year long. I did a bubble. Well, is it a bubble, but is it also propping up the entire US economy? Early in the year I did a big story where I interviewed an economist that was like, without this AI spend out from Google, from Amazon, from whomever, they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars a quarter to create these AI data centers. Without that, we probably would already be in a recession. It's essentially like this huge hundreds of billions of dollars a quarter stimulus not from the government, but from private companies that you could argue is propping up the entire economy right now. We don't know if it's a bubble right now. But let's put it this way, what needs to be proven out is is there a return on investment for all of this investment? If there isn't, then this was a one time stimulus. But hey, something like that. In the dot com bubble where hundreds of billions of dollars were thrown out of new technology, no one was wrong. It did turn out that this was the technology that took over. It was just that some of it was too soon. And in any bubble, even if on the long arc of history it is the right investment. The timing of the investment is what matters for whether or not a bubble.

[Erica Mandy]

Pops. So lots to watch moving forward. But this is the era though. I think we've seen the most investment for.

[Brian McCollough]

Sure. Even adjusted for inflation. It's the most investment in technology since the late.

[Erica Mandy]

90S. I think we're down to the top three. Give us number.

[Brian McCollough]

Three. All right, one that's not AI, but this is kind of tied into tech's good, strong, healthy year. Crypto took over, hit all time highs. You know, you had the Trump administration come in and be crypto friendly and essentially betting on even the smallest coins or things like the prediction markets which are built on top of the blockchain chain or whatever. Everything took off, everything came back. Bitcoin hit all time highs. Ethereum hit all time highs. All of this stuff you had companies that they became, I think the term for it is crypto. Treasury companies, where companies would just say, hey, we're going to invest all of our money in buying up this token or that thing now hit those highs and in the last two or three months a lot of that is starting to evaporate. Crypto is sort of having a hangover moment right.

[Erica Mandy]

Now. Number.

[Brian McCollough]

Two. Number two is going to roll right into number one, which is what I would call the disappointment of GPT5. So OpenAI being the leader for the last several years in AI, the best models, the frontier models, and you know, the move from GPT3 to GPT4 was sort of a phase change, a step change. Like GPT4 was so much better than GPT3 that there was all this hype. Well, what is GPT5 going to do? Will they be the only company we need? Because it'll be an all knowing or oracle that can solve every problem and make all the money for you, et cetera, et cetera. It was not that, and I'm not saying GPT5 was bad, but it was a sort of ho hum rollout that people were like, yeah, this is good. And more people are subscribing to ChatGPT and things like that. But it was not the step change that people were.

[Erica Mandy]

Expecting. Well, and everything with AI is moving so fast. It's almost like the expectations now are different than they ever used to be. Like we're seeing it move fast. So if the next one isn't moving just as fast, it's.

[Brian McCollough]

Surprising. Hey, guess what? That's a perfect segue into the number one.

[Erica Mandy]

Story. All right, drumroll please. Number.

[Brian McCollough]

One. Is OpenAI in trouble? Is Nvidia in trouble? Is Google suddenly now the leader in AI? And what does all of that mean? So just mentioned the sort of botched rollout of GPT5. Google released Gemini 3 and the consensus broadly is that it is superior to GPT5. So what does it mean for OpenAI if they are not the acknowledged leader in AI? Well, they have to raise money. They're a private company. Google is a public company with all the money in the world. Is this a situation to bring it historically back to the dot com era? Netscape was the first dot com company. Netscape did not even survive the.com era. Is OpenAI going to be the leader that got arrows in its back and then gets killed by better models, the greater resources of other companies? Why is OpenAI behind? They just announced a code red where they're scaling back some of their other ambitious plays and are like, we gotta get our models the best again. Okay, Now Google being ahead is potentially trouble for Nvidia. Why is that? Well, Nvidia makes GPUs. The chips that run AI are graphic processing units as opposed to CPUs. And Google has TPUs, their own specialized chips that like a decade ago they created for their own internal AI. Well, if Google's model is better, then why don't the anthropics of the world, that startup that you'll hear about tomorrow that has made AI for, I don't know, lawyers or whatever, why won't they use the Google LLMs and then the Google chips, the TPUs? So in the last month, people are suddenly questioning things that we talked about earlier on this list. Is OpenAI still the leader? Is Nvidia still the leader? Or suddenly is the whole AI horse race like completely up in the.

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[Erica Mandy]

Details. Right. And I guess if you also think about what are people going to be expected to use at work versus what they might choose to use at home and what did they become familiar with?

[Brian McCollough]

Yeah. And you know that enterprise trusts Google for lots of enterprise stuff. The other thing about Anthropic is, is that they've always been known as the Getting back to your question of should we do this safely? We're the safe AI company. You know, Sam Altman said a couple months ago that OpenAI was even going to allow you to chat dirty, do ero chats with ChatGPT. That is not what Anthropic does. Anthropic is like we're going to make this safe, we're going to make this reliable and we're going to make sure that it is safe for your enterprise to use. And maybe that was the strategic way to do it. Where if enterprise is the way to go and enterprise trusts you, then maybe the Anthropic and the Google model is the model that's going to.

[Erica Mandy]

Win. I didn't hear from you anything about AI companions, which I know for at least kids that has been a big thing. What's your take on.

[Brian McCollough]

That? They've had to scale it back incredibly. There's been all sorts of lawsuits about bad things happening to people that trust these chatbots to use them for therapy or all sorts of other reasons. That is something that I think is going to continue to be iffy. I don't expect that to take off in any major way unless it is a thing where people are sort of using it on the down.

[Erica Mandy]

Low. Has there been an impact from tariffs or the DEI pushback that's worth.

[Brian McCollough]

Mentioning? You know what, if I had to do an 11, it would be that essentially that tech has had to deal with the impact of tariffs all year long. The reason I left it off the list is because tech's not alone in that. But yes, navigating this sort of well, this month, all of a sudden it's going to cost you 30% more to import your iPhone or your GPU or whatever. And then next month that's gone away and then a month later it comes back again and now it's 15%. And it's been annoying and it has been a material thing that tech companies have to deal with. But in the end it's just been something that people have navigated but it hasn't really blown anything.

[Erica Mandy]

Up. Which story are you personally excited about? You know, not just as A tech expert and reporter, but just on your own.

[Brian McCollough]

Time. This is another thing that we've expected for years, going back to the Jetsons in the 1950s. But I'm gonna go to CES in a couple weeks, and my prediction is that this is the year that robotics is the big story coming out of ces. And this is another AI angle, because for the first time in my professional life, we are seeing AI home robots. Robots that you could buy for a couple thousand dollars, bring them into your home, and you could have them do the dishes for you. I'm not saying that they're going to be perfect. I'm not saying they're going to be adopted overnight. But this is the first time viable consumer home robotics, I think, is becoming a real thing again. It's because AI is allowing them to navigate your home, navigate the real world autonomously. If this was the year that smart glasses became a real consumer product, I think this is the year that we're going to start to see actual consumer home robotics in a meaningful.

[Erica Mandy]

Way. And that leads me into the next question, which is looking ahead, what else are you watching for in 2026.

[Brian McCollough]

If the AI bubble bursts? Because I'm going to posit that it is a bubble, it's just a matter of when it bursts and to what degree it does burst. If it happens next year, that'll be the biggest story of the year, because so much of everything is built around all of these investments, the capex spend, the hype, et cetera. We didn't even get into these sort of circular investments between OpenAI, Nvidia and all these other. If OpenAI crashes and burns, if the interest in AI wanes even a little bit, you're going to see a serious pullback that I'm sure would lead to some kind of recession. So that would be potentially the big story of next year. But the dot com era went from roughly 1995 to March of 2000, so there was a good five years there. If there is a pop, it might not be next year, it might not be the year after, it might be three years from now, who knows? But if it happens next year, that'll be the biggest story of the.

[Erica Mandy]

Year. Anything else you want to add, or just a final.

[Brian McCollough]

Thought? This was the most fun year to cover tech in a long, long time, because again, so much is up in the air and I get excited about that, even if there's negative things about it. Not knowing what's going to happen and not knowing what the next new thing is like a deep seek is. It's exciting for someone like.

[Erica Mandy]

Me. Thank you so much to our guest Brian McCollo for joining us for this year in review. Definitely. Go check out the Tech Brew Ride Home Daily podcast if you love all things tech. We will continue to cover some tech news right here on the Newsworthy's weekday roundups, but Brian always provides a whole bunch more. And by the way, he recently started a sort of hobby podcast he wants you to know about called Rad History. It's a history podcast, but only about the 80s and 90s. It's super fun. Again, it's called Rad History. We'll link to both of his shows in our episode notes on our website thenewsworthy.com just click episodes and find today's date. Thanks again for joining us today. As always, join us again during the week to catch our 10 minute daily news roundups. We use a fast, fair, fun style to keep you in the know on the latest news and headlines without getting bogged down by arguing pundits or clickbait and rabbit holes. We're back with more news on Monday. Until then, have a great rest of your.

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