• All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2025".

• For the 2024 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.

• You can find all the markets under the tag [2025 Forbes AI predictions].

• Note that I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2025's predictions, even if I or others disagree with his decision.

• I might bet in this market, as I have no power over the resolution.

Note that the full title (which didn't fit on Manifold) of this prediction is: "8. OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier labs will begin ‘moving up the stack,’ increasingly shifting their strategic focus to building applications."

Description of this prediction from the article:
Building frontier models is a tough business to be in.

It is staggeringly capital intensive. Frontier model labs burn historic amounts of cash. OpenAI raised a record $6.5 billion in funding just a few months ago—and it will likely have to raise even more before long. Anthropic, xAI and others are in similar positions.

Switching costs and customer loyalty are low. AI applications are often built to be model-agnostic, with models from different providers frictionlessly swapped in and out based on changing cost and performance comparisons.

And with the emergence of state-of-the-art open models like Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen, the threat of technology commoditization constantly looms.

AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic cannot and will not stop investing in building cutting-edge models. But next year, in an effort to develop business lines that are higher-margin, more differentiated and stickier, expect to see the frontier labs make a big push to roll out more of their own applications and products.

Of course, one wildly successful example of an application from a frontier lab already exists: ChatGPT.

What other kinds of first-party applications might we expect to see from the AI labs in the new year?

One obvious answer is more sophisticated and feature-rich search applications. OpenAI’s SearchGPT effort is a sign of things to come here.

Coding is another obvious category. Again, initial productization efforts are already underway, with the debut of OpenAI’s canvas product in October.

Might OpenAI or Anthropic launch an enterprise search offering in 2025? Or a customer service product? How about a legal AI or a sales AI product? On the consumer side, one can imagine a “personal assistant” web agent product, or a travel planning application, or perhaps a generative music application.

One of the most fascinating dynamics to track as frontier labs move up the stack to the application layer is that this move will bring them into direct competition with many of their most important customers: in search, Perplexity; in coding, Cursor; in customer service, Sierra; in legal AI, Harvey; in sales, Clay; and on and on.