Ejaaz: Welcome to our all-knowing predictions episode. As two hosts of an AI and Frontier
Ejaaz: Technology podcast, it seems fitting to end the year with an episode all about
Ejaaz: where we think the world is going.
Ejaaz: We just did an episode that was kind of recapping the biggest winners and losers
Ejaaz: of 2025. If you haven't seen that, I would highly recommend.
Ejaaz: But this episode is looking forward into the future.
Ejaaz: This is where the puck is headed to. This is where we're going to try to predict
Ejaaz: the most impossibly fast trend that is going up into the right in the world of AI.
Ejaaz: So everyone, without further ado welcome to the limitless 2026 prediction show
Ejaaz: this is where we're going to talk about all the things starting with a topic
Ejaaz: that i think everyone's kind of most excited about hang on
Josh: What do you got check fit.
Ejaaz: Oh okay josh and i went
Josh: Above and beyond i've got my fleece fully zipped up and i've got my tinfoil
Josh: hat for all my conspiracy theories that you're about to hear i apologize in
Josh: advance and josh josh has gone with his favorite apple ceo the tim tim cook
Josh: Steve Jobs look. He's got the turtleneck on. He's got the glasses.
Josh: You're looking, might I say, Josh, you're looking mighty predicting-able.
Ejaaz: I feel very sophisticated today. Although I will say these glasses are like
Ejaaz: a minor prescription and they're hurting my eyes. So we're going to try to get
Ejaaz: this episode done quick so I can take them off.
Josh: Okay. Question one.
Ejaaz: So what we're going to do for those who are watching, we have gold stars we're
Ejaaz: going to hand out. This is the Limitless Gold Star. If you are a receiver of
Ejaaz: the Gold Star, congratulations. We are bullish on you in 2026.
Ejaaz: The first question, the first prediction we're going to reveal EGS is what I
Ejaaz: think everyone is kind of most curious about is the AGI question.
Ejaaz: AGI, here's our alarm bell. Are we ringing the bell or are we not ringing the
Ejaaz: bell by the end of 2026? Will there be AGI or will there not be?
Josh: Okay. My answer is yes, but it comes with a clause, which is specifically for
Josh: science. I think we're going to make a major breakthrough.
Josh: By major breakthrough, I mean, we discover a cure for a major disease by the
Josh: end of the year. And I'm saying this for two reasons.
Josh: One, science progress in AI has been frigging amazing.
Josh: And two, according to Sam Altman's timeline for OpenAI AGI, he's predicting
Josh: we get a science AGI by the end of 2026. So that's my prediction.
Ejaaz: Okay. And how would you define AGI in that case?
Josh: Something that shocks me by the end of the year, Josh, that I'm like,
Josh: oh my God, we could never have thought of a dread this up by the end of last year.
Josh: I think if you create a drug that literally saves millions of lives, that's AGI. Quote me.
Ejaaz: Okay. Okay. I think my prediction for this is going to be no. I
Ejaaz: don't think we get to agi and for me the the loose definition of
Ejaaz: agi is is like an intelligence that's more capable than us
Ejaaz: uh pretty vastly more capable than us in anything that we can do and a big part
Ejaaz: of that is the physical embodiment of ai like it it shouldn't be limited to
Ejaaz: just bits it should be also extend out to atoms in the world of robotics and
Ejaaz: i don't think robotic understanding is going to be good enough by the end of
Ejaaz: the year to feel like it is a truly
Ejaaz: it's super artificial general intelligence um so that's why i'm gonna say no
Ejaaz: on agi for next year we're not ringing the bell or ringing the bell in some
Ejaaz: categories who knows we will i guess moving on to the next question here okay
Josh: Houston we have a gpu um over under josh do we have a 25 gpu cluster,
Josh: in space by the end of 2026? AI data centers in space. Do we have...
Ejaaz: I was the biggest hater in the world about two months ago. I am taking the over.
Ejaaz: I think we're going to have more than 25 GPUs in space by the end of next year. Why?
Ejaaz: Because Starship is going to work and we are going to hopefully go to a launch
Ejaaz: and watch that thing work.
Ejaaz: If Starship works, there is no world in which they don't just ship up...
Ejaaz: Like SpaceX themselves ships up a cluster just to prove a proof of concept.
Ejaaz: We right now, if I'm not mistaken, have a single GPU cluster in space, which is training.
Ejaaz: So that would imply a 25 fold increase. I think it's happening.
Ejaaz: EJS, where do you stand on this?
Josh: I'm also going to take the over on this, but it's not going to be a super bullish
Josh: take because regardless of us having over 25 GPUs in space, I don't think it's
Josh: going to be better than the clusters that we're going to have on Earth in 2026,
Josh: but it's going to be a good initial proof of concept.
Josh: You're right. Star Cloud has already this year launched one GPU up there.
Josh: It seems pretty feasible with
Josh: all the SpaceX launches that we're going to get more than that in 2026.
Ejaaz: Yeah it feels totally contingent on the Starship launch so we're going to be
Ejaaz: watching Starship and monitoring that and
Josh: We're going to be buying SpaceX shares when it IPOs just to.
Ejaaz: Be clear next year for the IPO too oh we should do biggest IPO of
Ejaaz: 2020 all right wait we didn't add this but you just I'm going to break this
Ejaaz: up right now okay okay let's go biggest IPO of 2026 what's it going to be because
Ejaaz: wait before you answer we have some rumors of IPOs so we have SpaceX 1.5 trillion
Ejaaz: we have open AI which is roughly 800 million dollars We have possibly Anthropik going live next year.
Ejaaz: So like there's a lot in the pipeline. Who's the biggest winner?
Josh: Okay, it's not going to be what you expect. I'm going for OpenAI.
Josh: I think OpenAI is going to have the biggest market cap by the end,
Josh: purely because more people understand the AI play. I'm not saying this makes sense.
Josh: I'm saying more people believe and understand the AI play.
Josh: And so that like retail people will buy it as well as long-term investors versus
Josh: space people are still going to be like, and there's a lot of Elon haters out
Josh: there. I'm not one of them, but like, I feel like that might play against them.
Ejaaz: Okay. Well, I'm going biggest IPO of SpaceX for sure. We just published an episode
Ejaaz: last week about why $1.5 trillion is undervalued.
Ejaaz: So I expect SpaceX to hopefully eclipse the $2 trillion market cap,
Ejaaz: put over 25 GPUs into space and be the biggest IPO of the year.
Ejaaz: But we have a lot of good IPOs to cover. Next year is going to be ridiculous.
Ejaaz: Anyways, now it's probably time to get to the spread trade of next year.
Ejaaz: If you're looking to trade markets, if you're looking to make money,
Ejaaz: we are going to talk about what company or sector is most likely,
Ejaaz: it's what you're most likely to long next year versus most likely to short.
Ejaaz: So EJs, where are you starting? on the long front?
Ejaaz: What category, what industry, what company are you most excited for that you're
Ejaaz: bullish on that you think will make you the most amount of money?
Josh: Okay, I'm going to cheat, Josh. I'm going to give you two answers.
Josh: I'm going to give you a company. That's fine. I'm going to give you a sector.
Ejaaz: Good thing is this is our show, so we could kind of, you know, go for it.
Josh: Okay, I think the company to long next year is going to be Amazon.
Josh: I think Amazon has been incredibly slept on. I think their new trinium chips
Josh: are going to get used way more than people expect.
Josh: And I think their AWS spread out for AI specifically because they're creating
Josh: AI factories is going to be insanely good.
Josh: And the sector that I'm longing next year, this is going to be unsexy,
Josh: but I think it's going to be true, is still...
Josh: Gpus gpus are gonna kill yeah.
Ejaaz: Okay so that's nvidia are we excited about amd also any other gpu
Josh: Video amd uh if i could put my asian stock market hound sorry i've run out of
Josh: headspace i've only got the tinfoil hat uh it would be samsung um i think samsung's
Josh: gonna absolutely kill next year they've got new chip fabs they're working with
Josh: elon it's gonna be sick what.
Ejaaz: About you just today uh samsung announced their two um nanometer microchip ahead
Ejaaz: of apple for the first time ever which was huge.
Ejaaz: For me, the company I'm most excited about is Tesla, which should probably come
Ejaaz: to the surprise of absolutely no one.
Ejaaz: I am so unfathomably bullish on Tesla in terms of their ability to,
Ejaaz: one, change the transportation complex of the entire world through autonomy,
Ejaaz: and two, this humanoid robotic line. It's massive.
Ejaaz: Tesla also has this gigantic energy sector with batteries and solar panels,
Ejaaz: and all of those things are required for where we're headed to.
Ejaaz: I think Tesla has a monopoly on pretty much all of these pillars,
Ejaaz: and they are going to crush it in the year of 2026.
Ejaaz: In terms of maybe industry that I'm most excited about, I think the picks and
Ejaaz: shovels is still the move.
Ejaaz: The like NVIDIA, TSM, ASML, Avago, like all of those, the compute,
Ejaaz: the foundry, the lithography, the networking.
Ejaaz: We are going to be building data centers so fast and the people who are capable
Ejaaz: of putting those together are probably going to be the winners.
Ejaaz: But wait, let's go to the losers.
Josh: Can I, can I, wait, can I, before we go, can I tweak my answer on the industry?
Josh: I want to update my answer, Josh.
Ejaaz: Okay, what do you got?
Josh: I'm going with the energy sector. I just realized none of these data centers
Josh: or GPUs are going to work if we don't have energy.
Josh: And I think we're going to make a lot of investment in energy grids next year.
Josh: So I'm longing the energy sector.
Ejaaz: Big time. All right. What are you shorting?
Josh: Okay. I'm going to go with meta. Sorry, obvious, but I don't see them turning
Josh: around a new frontier model.
Josh: I think they made the mistake of spending way too much money for the wrong types
Josh: of people to build the models. So I'm bearish 2025 meta.
Josh: I'm also bearish 2026 meta. I think it's going to play out similarly to the
Josh: metaverse, unfortunately.
Josh: And this conflicts with me because I was super bullish with them earlier on.
Josh: The sector that I'm likely to short this year is going to be Neo Clouds. I think I'm bullish.
Josh: I can be bullish GPUs, but bearish, too many cloud, Neo cloud providers that are supplying the GPUs.
Josh: I think it's kind of bubbly. I think it's kind of pyramid-y.
Josh: I think they're going to collapse slightly.
Ejaaz: Okay. I think my choice this year, I'm shorting SaaS companies in general across the board.
Ejaaz: I am not a fan of like any seat-based software with a weak moat.
Ejaaz: That's who I am shorting this year. And I'm taking a basket of all of them because
Ejaaz: the switching costs are not very high to go from something like,
Ejaaz: and not to single out Slack because I think it's a great product,
Ejaaz: but to go from something that you pay millions of dollars a month for in something
Ejaaz: that like AI can probably automate with an engine and a couple of prompts.
Ejaaz: So I think SaaS companies as a whole who have been sitting pretty,
Ejaaz: making tons of money per month, selling millions of seats to companies are going
Ejaaz: to have a very tough time when you're able to build applications so easy with
Ejaaz: these new AI tools that we're going to have for the next year.
Ejaaz: So I think that's probably my biggest loser. I'm long, big tech, short SaaS companies.
Ejaaz: Love it. And let's move on to the next one here.
Josh: Okay, Cathedral of Compute. What do you think, Josh, will be?
Josh: Who do you think will have the largest data center or cluster by the end of 2026?
Ejaaz: I'm taking the cluster part of this because I want to say XAI.
Ejaaz: Those guys are absolutely crushing it. They have 200,000 coherent GPUs already.
Ejaaz: They are planning to push to 500,000, then 1 million. if anybody in the world
Ejaaz: can engineer a solution to do that it is going to be Elon and the hardcore XAI
Ejaaz: team that stays up all night every day making this a reality I'm team XAI
Josh: Elon haters won't like my answer.
Josh: I'm also going with XAI purely because the proof is in the pudding.
Josh: And you heard it from the man himself, Jensen Huang. He has never met someone
Josh: who has built and scaled data centers as quickly as Elon.
Josh: I want to remind you guys of a very famous 2025 statistic that was pulled out
Josh: this year that it typically takes you about three years to spin up something
Josh: like a two gigawatt cluster and at least start laddering that up.
Josh: Elon was able to do it in 30 days that is just insane for the premise of like
Josh: a year's foundation crazy.
Ejaaz: Yeah it's it's pretty incredible okay so next one a little a little more bleak
Ejaaz: maybe this one isn't a fun one this one doesn't get a gold star this one gets
Ejaaz: a little maybe like a red crossing sign um the layoff lotto you just which industry
Ejaaz: sees the most layoffs from ai okay
Josh: So this one kind of my prediction is it's gonna hit close to home i think knowledge
Josh: workers are gonna get screwed next year.
Josh: So here's my reasoning behind this. A lot of focus of the new AI models that
Josh: get released, they're focused on this one benchmark called GDPVal.
Josh: And that specific benchmark is focused on knowledge work.
Josh: And it's gotten really good. GPT 5.2 is chosen in 70% of cases right now by
Josh: human experts versus human experts that can actually perform the same job.
Josh: So I think this scales. I think by next year, knowledge works.
Josh: So things like document writing, product strategy, all that kind of stuff,
Josh: it's going to be done by air.
Ejaaz: That's a good take. I think my take stems from a post that I saw from Andre Karpathy, actually.
Ejaaz: And he was kind of describing how anything that can get verifiably measured can be automated by AI.
Ejaaz: These are things like call centers, like administrative work,
Ejaaz: like data input and output.
Ejaaz: Anything that you can create a
Ejaaz: verifiable answer and then train backwards against, you can replace by AI.
Ejaaz: So those are the first industries that come to my mind. But basically,
Ejaaz: if you have a job where there is a very clear outcome that you're guiding to,
Ejaaz: and there's a reprogrammable set of steps to get there, chances are an AI is
Ejaaz: going to be able to replace that very, very quickly.
Ejaaz: So I think that the goal, if you're a human being who's listening to this and
Ejaaz: not an AI, the goal is to be kind of like a polymath across a lot of industries.
Ejaaz: The dynamic range of knowledge is going to be very important as we move forward
Ejaaz: because part of the intuition that AI cannot replace is just understanding lots
Ejaaz: of different categories very deeply and kind of connecting them together and
Ejaaz: the connection of those dots dynamically.
Josh: It's intuition, you set the line. It is intuition, that's it.
Ejaaz: So yeah if you have an intuition-based job you're
Josh: Good i want to push you i want to push you.
Ejaaz: Because i want you to select
Josh: A specific industry that was a great answer i love it but which industry call centers um.
Ejaaz: Well yeah the first one is like customer support it would be call centers but
Ejaaz: also customer support is a very subjective industry depending on the level of
Ejaaz: it like if you're working in hospitality you're not getting replaced people
Ejaaz: want human-on-human interaction but if you're just like you know filing support
Ejaaz: tickets things like that things like administrative data input anything like
Ejaaz: verifiable is is what i would be a little bit worried about. Okay.
Josh: I like it. All right. Moving on. Now, China in 2025 has dominated the open source
Josh: model. It's not even a question.
Josh: They have the best open source model. So the question now is,
Josh: will China retain the number one spot in 2026? You over or under?
Ejaaz: I am slamming the over on this. China is open source world dominance.
Ejaaz: And the United States has no incentive to make an open source model.
Ejaaz: Meta tried. They got crushed. There was no benefit from doing it.
Ejaaz: And now they've pivoted to going closed source.
Ejaaz: So there's no indication that anybody from the United States will release an
Ejaaz: open source model. We saw OpenAI do it earlier this year.
Ejaaz: People used it maybe for half a day and then never looked back.
Ejaaz: China is innovating via open source. They will continue to maintain that dominance
Ejaaz: through 2026. What do you think?
Josh: I'm going on to for one. simple reason and it's political.
Josh: I do not think the US government and the US in general wants US founders building
Josh: on Chinese open source models.
Josh: It's no secret that this is already happening in Silicon Valley.
Josh: In fact, Brian Chesky of Airbnb,
Josh: integrates AI features into Airbnb, guess what? He's used a Quen derivative,
Josh: a Quen model from Alibaba, right?
Josh: I think this trend is going to get increasingly worse and people are not going
Josh: to want that for fear of China implementing a backdoor in one of their open source codes.
Josh: So with all of that said, I think there's going to be an additional focus on
Josh: open sourcing, just not all, but certain US models and they're going to take the lead.
Ejaaz: Okay. Well, next up we got the crash out catastrophe. Ejas, this was actually your suggestion here.
Ejaaz: The AI founder most likely to crash out. For example, publicly insults appear
Ejaaz: or even go to jail. Who's it going to be?
Josh: Yes. Yes. I had a specific individual in mind and it's going to surprise you
Josh: listeners because you always call me an Elon fanboy. It's Elon Musk.
Josh: I think Elon's going to crash out. I didn't say it was going to be a good or
Josh: bad crash out, but I think he's going to crash the hell out because he's going
Josh: to be super annoyed by something Sam Altman or Trump says.
Josh: And by definition of a crash out i mean he's going to yell insult or crash out
Josh: on public news on a public forum probably x um so i've got him i'm doubling down on elon.
Ejaaz: Okay i'm taking sam altman on this one uh he had a little issue yeah yeah yeah
Ejaaz: if you remember the episode with brad gerstner a few weeks ago it was fairly
Ejaaz: recently where he just kind of had like he was like hey listen dude if you hate
Ejaaz: this like i could sell your shares and he got very like snippy with him and
Ejaaz: he's he's got a lot of pressure on his shoulders.
Ejaaz: They have a lot of debts and a lot of payments that need to be made.
Ejaaz: And things are going to get stressful. And I'm not sure how well he's going
Ejaaz: to be able to deal with stress in the public eye. So I'm going to take Sam Altman on that one.
Josh: All right. All right. Next up, we have Bubble Buster.
Josh: This category is the AI bubble most likely to implode.
Josh: And note that I didn't say the entire AI bubble because I don't think that's
Josh: how it's going to work. But I think they're going to be implosions with smaller bubbles.
Josh: Josh, What's your bet here?
Ejaaz: I think my bet is going to be
Ejaaz: open source models is what I'm going to pick here. And I think the reason behind
Ejaaz: that is because China is starting to develop an advantage when it comes to chips for the first time.
Ejaaz: And part of the reason they've maintained their open source nature is because
Ejaaz: they have wanted to kind of, you know, accelerate things.
Ejaaz: And when things are open source, you could build on top of each other, like building blocks.
Ejaaz: Now that China has started to get like Blackwell chips, they have very clearly
Ejaaz: defined, like very good models.
Ejaaz: It makes sense for them to close the door and to shut things down.
Ejaaz: And if China shuts down the open source models and the United States don't have
Ejaaz: any incentive to do so, I think the open source model industry probably gets crushed.
Ejaaz: There's going to be no leading models that are really excellent to use.
Ejaaz: It's all going to be closed source, closed gated in the race to AI.
Ejaaz: So that's my bubble buster.
Josh: I like that. I like that. I'm going to go with open AI partnerships.
Josh: I think that bubble is going to burst.
Ejaaz: Oh, the circular economy?
Josh: The circular economy, specifically for open air who have signed to the tune
Josh: of $1.4 trillion in payments.
Josh: I think there is no way they're going to meet their targets next year or the
Josh: year after that, unless there's something written in the contract,
Josh: which in some cases they are.
Josh: But for example, the $300 billion deal with Oracle, no way they're paying $100
Josh: billion next year when they're losing $12 billion and generating that.
Josh: So we're going to see some collapse there. Whether they've IPO'd in that time remains to be seen.
Ejaaz: We'll see. Okay, well, next we have what topic that's very close to my heart,
Ejaaz: which is the breakout hardware device.
Ejaaz: Do we get a breakout AI device that people love, not including a phone?
Ejaaz: It cannot be an iPhone because, well, Apple can't even ship.
Ejaaz: But even if it was, do we get a breakout AI device?
Josh: Um yes and i know this
Josh: is gonna get under your skin josh but i fully believe it google glass 2.0 project
Josh: aura as they're gonna make me sick i think it's i think it's gonna i think it's
Josh: gonna slap because it can't be worse than google glass v1 they've watched meta
Josh: do the ray-ban display and absolutely
Josh: flop they're not gonna put out something that people hate that's.
Ejaaz: Like saying going to one prison is worse than the other like they're just they're
Ejaaz: both suck like being better Nothing is not a good place to be.
Ejaaz: I think those devices still do not get to a place where they're actually useful.
Ejaaz: Who have you got? My breakout hardware device, which may be off by a few months
Ejaaz: in terms of timing, but it's the OpenAI Johnny Ive device.
Ejaaz: I am so excited. I think this is going to be the biggest...
Ejaaz: Event of the year next year in terms of how it's
Ejaaz: going to change the way that we interface with ai this is the first time a
Ejaaz: company's rethinking the way that we engage with computers as
Ejaaz: a whole is the person who designed the most popular handheld
Ejaaz: device in the world the iphone and now he's doing it again for open
Ejaaz: ai the biggest company with the most amount of users and i think whatever device
Ejaaz: whatever product they ship next year is going to actually impact a tremendous
Ejaaz: amount of people and really alter the way that we use hardware where you will
Ejaaz: not need to be reliant on a cell phone in your pocket to navigate the worlds
Ejaaz: of the internet and AI. So I'm excited about that one.
Josh: Is my tinfoil hat on? I don't think they ship next year, Josh. I don't think they ship.
Ejaaz: They might not, but I'm going to be bullish and optimistic.
Josh: All right, moving on. Comeback player of the year.
Josh: This is someone who has been beaten down on in 2025, but they're going to make
Josh: a big 180, similar to how Google did this year. Josh, who you got?
Ejaaz: I got Apple, man. I'm stoked for Apple. I'm so excited for them.
Ejaaz: I think they're going to absolutely no i
Ejaaz: shouldn't say that i don't think they're going to crush it next year i think
Ejaaz: they're going to do much better than they did this year why well
Ejaaz: because they're outsourcing their intelligence to google
Ejaaz: and that's what they that's what they've always needed to do they did this with
Ejaaz: their search results where apple didn't create a search browser they just put
Ejaaz: google default and safari on the iphone they're doing the same with gemini i
Ejaaz: think edge compute is a huge thing to be wary of because if you can run ai on
Ejaaz: your phone the inference charges are free to people who are building there.
Ejaaz: So there's a strong incentive for developers to build on iPhones.
Ejaaz: There's a strong incentive for Apple to offload their intelligence to Google
Ejaaz: and just focus on the experience that they're exceptionally good at.
Ejaaz: So I think if those things happen,
Ejaaz: Apple will have a really home run year next year as it relates to AI.
Josh: Yeah, I think that's a good take. My take, and again, I'm wearing the tinfoil hat for this one.
Josh: Cursor. Cursor has been beaten down on this year because things like Anthropic
Josh: Claude Code and a bunch of other competitors are just better vibe coding apps.
Josh: But Cursor has a crazy customer mode and so many people still use it.
Josh: They still might use Claude via it, but they love the Cursor UI.
Josh: So my conspiracy theory, Josh, is Cursor runs on VS Code.
Josh: That is a fork of Microsoft. Microsoft is currently bleeding AI users.
Josh: I think Microsoft acquires Cursor and remolds Cursor for their enterprise audience. And it slams.
Ejaaz: You have some big takes. We haven't mentioned Microsoft a whole lot in these episodes. We have not.
Ejaaz: Okay, so this one's totally not biased at all. Please ignore the humanoid robot
Ejaaz: to the left of this prompt.
Ejaaz: That is the Tesla Optimus. Most valuable robot, Ejaz. Which one is it going to be?
Josh: I know what answer you're going to give. So I'm intentionally going to give a different one here.
Josh: And also because I believe they might actually pull it off. Figure.
Josh: Brett Adcock, I think, is an awesome CEO. I have seen so many demos of this figure robot.
Josh: And in my opinion, it's the only one that can go toe-to-toe with Tesla Optimus.
Josh: I think because of the fact that they've been focused 100% on this for years
Josh: now, they've got a good chance of scaling this next year. I'm excited.
Ejaaz: Okay. My answer for most valuable robot actually is not Optimus. It is the CyberCab.
Ejaaz: I think Optimus will not reach the production scale required to actually create a lot of value.
Ejaaz: And they would likely just have like early prototypes. By the end of next year,
Ejaaz: we will have cybercabs rolled out, hopefully across the country,
Ejaaz: that are genuinely self-driving cybercaxes.
Ejaaz: And that is going to be such a mind-bending reality for a lot of people who've never sat in one before.
Ejaaz: So in terms of value generation, in terms of shock and awe, in terms of acclimatizing
Ejaaz: the average person to the world of AI that we're headed towards,
Ejaaz: I think the cybercab is going to be the most valuable robot. of next year.
Josh: Love it.
Josh: Okay, moving on. Most popular AI entertainment app.
Josh: Now, the idea of this is not the model, not necessarily ChatGPT's app,
Josh: but what kind of new breakthrough AI feature or product do you think people will be consuming?
Josh: What's the TikTok of 2026? Josh, who you got?
Ejaaz: I think the most popular AI entertainment app next year is just going to be YouTube.
Ejaaz: I think it's a continuation of what works, I think YouTube is actually leaning
Ejaaz: into AI very heavily in addition to supporting short form content built around
Ejaaz: AI in a way that I don't see a lot of other companies doing.
Ejaaz: There's probably more hours spent on YouTube than just about any other internet website on the planet.
Ejaaz: And them signaling that they're planning to lead hard into AI means that we
Ejaaz: probably get a natural extension. They're building where the people are.
Ejaaz: I think YouTube next year will be the most popular AI entertainment app.
Josh: Josh vo3 youtube videos next year dude it will save us a lot of time it's.
Ejaaz: All it's all there all the parts are there
Josh: Maybe some ai avatars of us people already in the comments think that we're how.
Ejaaz: Are you going to verify that we're not
Josh: Yeah that's true that's true i might lean into it all right my big bet is it's
Josh: going to be a big year for the gooners i think adult ai content is going to
Josh: absolutely slap. I'm not saying it's good.
Josh: I'm just saying Sam's already indicated that they're going to have an adult
Josh: version of ChatGPT releasing very soon.
Josh: He said end of year. I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's going to happen in 2026.
Josh: And I think that video models are getting just good enough for the AI adult
Josh: industry to really kill it next year.
Josh: Um i'm not happy about it i just think that that's exactly what's going to happen
Josh: grok companions are going to get the next level up it's all going to get.
Ejaaz: Crazy oh god that's a scary future i'm not looking forward to agreed okay so
Ejaaz: here we have the largest model um like
Josh: Victoria,
Josh: that's funny i hope you guys get that joke that is.
Ejaaz: Yeah that's a deep cut for anyone who's around in 2021 on the internet anyways
Ejaaz: um yes the largest model not the one walking down the runway the one that is
Ejaaz: powering your AI tokens to your computer, which do we have for largest model?
Josh: Josh, I have a general hot take on this. Are you ready? Okay.
Ejaaz: And also, how are you going to define the largest model too?
Josh: Okay, so in my opinion, largest model is like how many parameters the model has.
Josh: So we started off with models with like 10 billion parameters,
Josh: and then we scaled all the way to a trillion parameters.
Josh: If you're asking yourself what the hell a parameter is, think of it as like
Josh: the genetic makeup of a model.
Josh: You're giving it the characteristics, what its eye color is,
Josh: how intelligent it is, what its tone is, stuff like that, you know,
Josh: stats, characteristics.
Josh: I think parameters will not matter next year.
Josh: I think the thing that matters next year is post-training.
Josh: 2025 has been all about pre-training. Oh my God, the most amount of compute
Josh: that we give a model, the smarter the model is going to be.
Josh: It's pre-training, pre-training. I don't think that matters at all.
Josh: I think we're going to have a breakthrough in 2026 for post-training.
Josh: I think people are going to spend more time with reinforcement learning and reasoning.
Josh: And that's what's going to give the level up for the model. So the resulting trend will be,
Josh: Models will still get slightly larger, but it won't matter. The resulting intelligence
Josh: that comes from a slight model increase will be exponential because of post-training stuff.
Ejaaz: Okay, that's a pretty good take. I think in terms of, I'm just going to throw
Ejaaz: an arbitrary number for parameter count. I feel like 15 trillion is a good number.
Josh: 15?
Ejaaz: So XAI with Grok5 is planning to release a 7 trillion parameter model,
Ejaaz: and that is coming in Q1 of next year.
Ejaaz: It's going to be a massive gargantuan model. so
Ejaaz: for them to double that in a year seems possible
Ejaaz: feasible because when you think about how quick i mean
Ejaaz: i mean even from this year we went from oh three to five point
Ejaaz: two and it was just like these unbelievable model jumps yeah and i suspect we'll
Ejaaz: get the same thing whether or not that matters is probably the more interesting
Ejaaz: question like you were mentioning is like do we even need a higher parameter
Ejaaz: count than that or is it just more on the like more niche post training stuff
Ejaaz: uh that remains to be determined we will see uh but anyways next okay
Josh: Um context window world records sticking
Josh: along the theme of like size of model what matters
Josh: a lot is how many tokens or how many words you can
Josh: prompt the model with the more tokens you can prompt the model with the more
Josh: context it has the smarter the answer it gives now um 2025 was a record-breaking
Josh: year they hit i think million tokens in some cases on unofficial 1.5 million
Josh: tokens josh who do you think what do you think the record's going to be.
Ejaaz: I think the limit does not exist i think
Ejaaz: the context window expands to infinity and this is a very bullish take very
Ejaaz: optimistic take but there are a lot of researchers like safe super intelligence
Ejaaz: with ilia's company and um thinking machines who are attempting and even google's
Ejaaz: trying to do this to remove the constraint of the context window altogether.
Ejaaz: And I don't know what type of magical moon math they're doing,
Ejaaz: but I suspect that next year will be the year where possibly we can get that.
Ejaaz: And what does that imply? Well, it can get this
Ejaaz: gigantic understanding of the
Ejaaz: world around you and refer to it precisely without a lot of fuzzy loss.
Ejaaz: So there's going to be a lot of breakthroughs, but my hope is that the context
Ejaaz: window world record will be infinity by the end of next year. Okay.
Josh: Wow. That's, I mean, that is a crazy prediction. I love it.
Josh: I don't have a strong take on a particular number, but what I will say in accordance
Josh: to my previous answer, which is,
Josh: I think post-training is going to be really important context window is going
Josh: to matter a lot here so i'm bullish large large large context windows next year okay.
Ejaaz: Big context window year next up we have winner take most ejs does one model
Ejaaz: become the default for greater than 50 percent of the usage
Josh: Yes. Okay. So I'm measuring this, Josh, on amount of tokens processed.
Josh: So purely mathematical, how used is the model?
Josh: And I'm going with whatever the latest version of Anthropics Claude is going to be.
Josh: Maybe it's Opus 4.5, but they're probably going to release Opus 5 or Opus 6 by the end of next year.
Josh: Coding is the most used content. If you look at any of the coding measurements
Josh: it's like 50 of the tokens that are being processed right now i think they gain
Josh: a market dominance on that i'm going.
Ejaaz: I'm gonna take open ai and chat gpt as the model with greater than 50 of the
Ejaaz: usage because they have this dominant monopoly where it's like something like
Ejaaz: 80 of the users and i guess i'm kind of thinking more on the user front where
Ejaaz: it's slowly decreasing but the
Ejaaz: question is how quick is that rate of decrease or
Ejaaz: how quick are other companies able to eat their market share
Ejaaz: and it's been accelerating we've seen Gemini take over some
Ejaaz: of it we've seen Anthropic take over some of it but I think ChatGPT
Ejaaz: and OpenAI can sustain 50% for at least the next year and then it makes sense
Ejaaz: that they eventually find a resting spot around like 25-30% maybe slightly less
Ejaaz: depending on how many big winners there are But I'm going to take OpenAI as
Ejaaz: the model that becomes the default for greater than 50% of the usage,
Ejaaz: as it relates to users, at least.
Josh: Okay. Next up, we have the biggest loser. Can Meta keep the lead? Josh, who have you got?
Ejaaz: Can Meta keep the lead? I...
Ejaaz: I think they can, but I don't want to bet against them because one thing that
Ejaaz: I learned as I've invested in these companies or considered investing in a lot
Ejaaz: of these companies is you want to let the winners ride.
Ejaaz: And there's only so many companies that can win when it comes to the scale that's
Ejaaz: required the amount of compute, the amount of money.
Ejaaz: And I think Meta has a chance. They have a ton of resources.
Ejaaz: They have a ton of people that support them. I think the biggest loser of next
Ejaaz: year is going to be the bears.
Ejaaz: As a broad category, anyone who is bearish on the industry who thinks this bubble
Ejaaz: is going to pop in the next 12 months they are going to find themselves sadly
Ejaaz: mistaken and very badly hurt if they attempt to short this huge wave that we have coming up
Josh: Okay i'm gonna give a
Josh: specific company and that company is microsoft
Josh: they have already given revised numbers uh before the quarterly report which
Josh: shows that they have less customers using their ai models in general and their
Josh: ai features this isn't a dig at ai in general it's a dig at microsoft's capability
Josh: to ship good AI products.
Josh: I think Mustafa Suleiman, the head of AI, kind of does a bad job at what he's
Josh: doing, which might be a crazy take, but it's just like, I don't hear about his
Josh: updates. I hear about Demis's.
Josh: And I think that the best thing that Microsoft has and will ever do in AI for
Josh: now, at least, is their investment in open AI. Nothing to do with their company in general.
Ejaaz: Big time. Yeah, Microsoft has sadly been absent from a lot of these conversations
Ejaaz: we've been having. There's just not much going on over there.
Ejaaz: Anyways, the AI blue chip, EJAS, Who is the most valuable AI company by the end of 2026?
Josh: Anthropic.
Ejaaz: This is Anthropic. Wow, that's a big one.
Josh: I think Anthropic IPOs, I still think...
Josh: I think Anthropik IPOs, I think Anthropik IPOs, they're already rumored to do
Josh: it. They're engaging investment banks to set it up.
Ejaaz: You realize how big some of these companies are, right? Like Google and NVIDIA
Ejaaz: is a $4 trillion company.
Josh: Oh, okay. I guess the way that I'm looking at it is like most ROI that you could
Josh: get from like a public perspective.
Josh: That was the way I was thinking about it. Not the largest market cap.
Ejaaz: Okay, well that counts too. Is that allowed? Is that okay?
Josh: Yeah, I'm going to go.
Ejaaz: These are our rules, man.
Josh: Okay, okay, okay. So I'm still going to go with Anthropic. I think they're going
Josh: to IPO at a crazy valuation, but that valuation is only going to get higher
Josh: as more and more people realize that coding AI is the ultimate intelligence
Josh: that you kind of want to own and Anthropic dominates.
Ejaaz: Okay. I'm going to say the most valuable AI company in the world by the end of 2026 will be Google.
Ejaaz: They will, they're already close. They're right there. They will continue their dominance.
Ejaaz: They will continue to not only build CPUs for their own in-house compute,
Ejaaz: but we'll start selling them.
Ejaaz: They have such a head start across so many pillars they have
Ejaaz: the best models they have unbelievable rate of execution and if
Ejaaz: they just continue along this pathway they're already trillions of dollars ahead
Ejaaz: of companies like open ai and there's no reason in my mind that they won't be
Ejaaz: able to outpace a company like nvidia when it comes to just growing pure market
Ejaaz: cap like what a incredible business for me ai blue ship of the year is google
Ejaaz: and that brings us to the crown
Josh: Who has the best model measured by intelligence?
Josh: So this is kind of the way we've been ranking the top number one AI models throughout the entirety of 2025.
Josh: I'm split on this. Josh, I'm curious to hear your answer.
Ejaaz: Okay, I could give my answer first. I think, and this is probably a hot take,
Ejaaz: but I'm feeling optimistic.
Ejaaz: The answer to this question by the end of 2026, and I'm giving them two gold
Ejaaz: stars, is going to be XAI.
Ejaaz: I think they will have the best model measured by intelligence by the end of next year.
Ejaaz: The reasoning is because they have been in pursuit of
Ejaaz: truth and they have been in pursuit of synthetic data where
Ejaaz: they are really trying to hone in the quality of
Ejaaz: intelligence that they use to train these models and that
Ejaaz: is paired with the fact that they're able to build these clusters larger and
Ejaaz: just faster than everybody else so it seems like their lead is going to start
Ejaaz: to make itself clear towards the end of next year because they're honestly they're
Ejaaz: going to be the ones with enough compute to actually run something that powerful
Ejaaz: it's not that other companies won't get there they'll just be the only ones that can actually run it
Josh: Okay okay i see it um i'm gonna
Josh: go with google gemini and i
Josh: think i have a very strong case for this uh it's funny
Josh: you mentioned synthetic data i'd say google are
Josh: the leaders in world models and i think world models are going to be the
Josh: most important thing kind of next year and it to help simulate kind of intelligence
Josh: um they're winning that with genie 3 i think they have nailed multi-modality
Josh: uh they've got the best video model they've got the best audio model uh if you
Josh: combine all of those things into the number one LLM, which is Gemini,
Josh: and it all feeds back, you end up with the smartest model.
Josh: That's how they were able to catch up so quickly. I think Google takes the ground.
Josh: And the final one, trendsetter.
Josh: What's the hottest trend that isn't so hot right now, but will be hot next year in 2026?
Ejaaz: My answer is going to be the death of the text box.
Ejaaz: I think the trend that we're going to see next year, and this is an optimistic
Ejaaz: thing that I really want to see, is LLMs or AI companies in general moving away
Ejaaz: from the LLM, from the text box, from the way that we actually engage with these AI models.
Ejaaz: Basically, the entire interface is that of Google's in the early 1990s.
Ejaaz: It is a single text box. you write something, you expect answers.
Ejaaz: I think one of the hottest trends is going to be removing that friction from
Ejaaz: the experience when people engage with AI and creating more of a
Ejaaz: like fully embodied ambient intelligence system where it predicts more of what
Ejaaz: you want. It kind of understands the context better.
Ejaaz: And it's not just limited to text in a box. And I'm expecting that to really
Ejaaz: evolve pretty rapidly as companies kind of fight to onboard more users.
Ejaaz: They're going to be inclined to want to give them more value.
Ejaaz: And in order to give them more value, you got to kind of tell them how to extract it from these models.
Ejaaz: And that's the trend that I think is going to be hot and that I'm very excited
Ejaaz: and looking forward to in the new year. EJ, what do you got?
Josh: I like that take. I am going to double down on something I mentioned previously, which is world models.
Josh: I think it is going to be the single most important type of model that goes
Josh: viral next year purely because it creates a bunch of synthetic data.
Josh: Why is that important? We're running out of data.
Josh: All these models are trained on the same data. They're not going to get any
Josh: more intelligent using the same data. We need new data. What is the best way to do that?
Josh: Well, what if you could create a simulated environment of the earth and stick
Josh: in your AI model there? It's how agents are going to get smarter.
Josh: It's how AI models in general are going to get smarter.
Josh: And Josh, it's how robots are going to get smarter. Tesla's already using it
Josh: for their full self-driving AI model, right?
Josh: They're using it to simulate car accidents so that, you know,
Josh: they can figure out how to keep people safe. So I think world models are going to be crazy.
Josh: I kind of cheated because Demis was really bullish on this on a podcast episode
Josh: that I listened to recently. But hey, he's the godfather of AI.
Ejaaz: So could we maybe do the inverse of this too is what was the hottest trend in
Ejaaz: 2025 that will absolutely not exist in 2026. Do you have any off the top of your head?
Josh: Okay, you go first. I got to think about this.
Ejaaz: Okay, because my answer, the reason why I'm asking is because I feel like death
Ejaaz: to the agentic browser is certainly a trend that we will consider to see.
Ejaaz: And that's one that I like a great amounts of joy from because the agentic browser
Ejaaz: just seems like an unnecessary complexity when I could have an AI go off and do the hard thing for me.
Ejaaz: And we talked about this with the CEO of Perplexity, Arvind,
Ejaaz: who was on the show earlier this year. And he was talking about
Ejaaz: how he thought it was important. But the reality is that there's two buckets.
Ejaaz: There's leisure and there's productivity. And I don't need a browser for productivity.
Ejaaz: And I think that's going to be the trend that kind of goes away and never returns.
Josh: Okay, Josh, I'm going to be hyper specific on my answer because it really friggin annoys me.
Josh: Reservation agents. I don't need you to book me a restaurant reservation.
Josh: I don't need you to find flights for me.
Josh: I'll do that myself. but if you
Josh: can give me an amazing health stack or supplements based on my blood types and
Josh: everything go ahead if you can automate 50 of my day job go ahead i don't care
Josh: for the reservation agents that got released by open ai uh google this year
Josh: kill them i hope they never make it i love it i love it and.
Ejaaz: I think that probably concludes our our 2026 prediction show
Josh: No no no there's one more josh what more and this is the most important.
Ejaaz: One a surprise one
Josh: You and I have strived to keep episodes on average to 20 to 25 minutes this
Josh: year. What's your over under on this episode?
Ejaaz: We are absolutely taking the under. Every episode will be under 25 minutes no matter what.
Ejaaz: That is a hard cutoff and we will absolutely not sway.
Ejaaz: Any higher than that yeah there's
Josh: No way that's not going to happen right yeah.
Ejaaz: Certainly not no this is this is this is very serious this
Ejaaz: is a a hard deadline we want to deliver
Ejaaz: the best 60 minutes of content every week and that comes
Ejaaz: in the form of three episodes and they will not be any longer including this
Ejaaz: episode which is probably already at minute number 40 or something
Ejaaz: like that we've been going on for a long time so maybe we should end
Ejaaz: it here i think this has been the predictions episode
Ejaaz: um the task for anybody who's listening this is
Ejaaz: very important is you need to put your predictions in
Ejaaz: the comment section that way we can time stamp them and
Ejaaz: reference them next year if you want to be top dog
Ejaaz: if you want to be the oracle who sees the
Ejaaz: future in a way that we don't or no one else does then drop your comments underneath
Ejaaz: this video or this podcast episode you could even post on x tell us what your
Ejaaz: predictions are make a nice little thread we'll share it with everybody what
Ejaaz: do you think is going to be you can even answer these questions what are your
Ejaaz: predictions for next year i want to hear it let us know what you think
Josh: Definitely. And I'm going to let my ego enter the video for a second, Josh.
Josh: We are less than a thousand subscribers off of 30,000.
Josh: And listen, I hold no allegiance to the number 30,000, but it's a really nice
Josh: round number that I would love to reach by the end of the year.
Josh: So if you enjoy our episodes, if you enjoy our content, if you've enjoyed our
Josh: predictions, if you think we're going to be at least 50% right,
Josh: I would call you crazy, but I appreciate it.
Josh: Please like, please subscribe, please turn on notifications give us a rating
Josh: if you're listening to on spotify or apple music and we will see you josh in the new year.
Ejaaz: I don't we'll see we're gonna see when all this comes out
Ejaaz: there was one last point i wanted to make which is for the love of god if you do
Ejaaz: anything please watch this video because e-jazz is wearing the most
Ejaaz: ridiculous hat and if you're listening to audio only you are missing out
Ejaaz: and i'm boiling head over here it's um
Ejaaz: yeah so it's worth it's worth um watching spotify is my preference youtube
Ejaaz: is great but yeah we'll see what the calendar plays out if this is the last
Ejaaz: year um the last of the year well we're gonna in for a pretty mighty 2026 but
Ejaaz: if it's not yeah we'll be back again at least one more episode before the year
Ejaaz: is now so as always yeah like you guys were saying thank you so much for watching
Ejaaz: for being here with us and we'll see you guys in the next one peace guys