Happy New Year! A 2025 Tech Recap & How You Can Take Advantage of It

It’s honestly quite unbelievable how much has unfolded in the tech world in a single year – extraordinary AI leaps, incredibly fast smartphones, and more. That’s why in this article, I would like to do a brief overview on my personal 2025 favorites, as well as answer an important question: how can these tech advancements help ordinary individuals like you and me?

Category 1: Artificial Intelligence

Tech headlines have been mainly dominated by the AI hype in the past year. Similar to how gaming gave rise to innovations such as portable consoles, AI has drove companies to push the limits of what they previously thought possible.

In 2022, the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT completely redefined how humans interact with AI – any individual could access these powerful models through a chat-like interface just by opening their browser. But the functionality of these chatbots were largely limited to prompt-based conversations; you had to ask specifically for what you wanted so that the AI can understand.

However, something has fundamentally changed in the AI sector this year that has helped surpass the limitations of past generations – the widespread popularization of ‘agentic AI’. New breakthroughs have enabled AIs to move beyond the role of traditional assistants, and can now autonomously plan and execute complex, multi-step tasks with minimal human guidance or intervention.

Agentic AI

A prominent example of agentic AI are ‘Agentic Integration Development Environments (IDEs)’, which are a newer generation of code editors that not only combine everything needed to write, run, and debug code, but also have deeply integrated autonomous AI to aid code development. A couple of years ago, building a website or application would have required a team of developers months to build. Now, a single developer can produce a decent website within hours with the help of these IDEs, without even having to write all the code themselves. For freelance developers, agentic AI can help streamline their existing workflows. For beginners who have always wanted to try out coding for themselves, agentic IDEs offer a relatively easy way to get started on their first project. To be honest, I’m a big fan of these agentic IDEs myself, and have used them to accelerate my progress on my various side-projects. If you’ve always wanted to build a personalized blog website or something, I strongly suggest you try out these agentic IDEs, especially newer ones such as Google’s Antigravity (released on November 18th, 2025) or Amazon’s Kiro (released on July 14th, 2025).

What About Non-agentic AI?

If you think that agentic AI just isn’t for you, then there are still many other AI services announced in 2025 that I suggest you try out.

For students, Google’s Gemini 3 (released on November 18th, 2025) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5 (released on August 7th, 2025) are perfect, not in the sense that you should use them to cheat, but that they can be great study tools no matter what you’re studying. Personally, I don’t care that much about benchmarks or their record-breaking performances in the lab. What I want from AI chatbots is quite simple: understand what I’m saying, and make me understand what you’re saying. Honestly, my past experience with AI chatbots was not ideal – I commonly found myself spending more time telling it what I wanted instead of it explaining to me. But thanks to the broader knowledge bases and better understanding that these newer models have, coupled together with their profound reasoning capabilities, intuitive thinking, and humanized interaction, I finally feel like I’m having productive conversations with AI in 2025. For example, when I riddle Gemini with my questions from learning biology, it can actually explain to me the concepts in an engaging way, instead of producing boring paragraphs of text that I wouldn’t finish reading. So if you ever come across concepts that are hard to grasp, or maybe you just want to strengthen your understanding, I suggest you give these chatbots a try, and perhaps you’ll get the answer you were looking for much faster than browsing explainer videos.

For people who are interested in video and image generation, I strongly suggest playing around with models like Google’s Veo 3 (released in May of 2025) and OpenAI’s Sora 2 (released on September 30th, 2025). I still remember a few years back when AI-generated images were pure slop and AI-generated videos were beyond my wildest dreams. Frankly, I don’t know what has changed in recent years that has enabled such a massive leap in AI-generation technology. But as end-users, the possibilities are basically endless. With some cleverly engineered prompts, you could create short movies with Veo 3, with accompanying audio added as well, in similar fashion to what the WSJ did in one of their videos.

Category 2: Portable Electronics

I can totally understand how some people aren’t particularly interested in annual tech updates. However, I do believe that portable electronics is an important cog that is driving the entire technology sector forward, which is why I’m going to do a brief recap on my personal interests.

Phones

Packing a battery, a capable next-generation chip, main cameras and selfie cameras, speakers, high-definition screens, and everything else that makes a smartphone work into an incredibly thin form factor such as the iPhone Air (released on September 19th, 2025) or Galaxy Z Fold 7 (released on July 9th, 2025) is truly a remarkable feat. It seems like every year, phone companies manage to squeeze more performance into an even smaller package, and the year of 2025 definitely didn’t fail to disappoint.

Phone cameras are truly unbelievable at this point as well. Packing a powerful zoom lens and hundreds of megapixels into a portable, light device that easily fits in any pocket? There seems to be more and more videos online of content creators replacing their professional cameras with a smartphone instead, and I can certainly understand why people are making this change.

Smart Glasses

Although this industry is still in its development phase, I personally believe that they’re the future of portable and wearable tech. Take the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses (released on September 17th, 2025) for example. Their design combines a pair of classical sunglasses with modern-day tech such as a built-in 3K camera, voice-activated AI, speakers, and more. I definitely wouldn’t be going out and buying a pair myself anytime soon, but if these smart glasses could one day have VR headset-level heads-up displays, powerful and fast on-device AI agents and assistants, perhaps a 4K camera, and be able to replace basically all the important functions of my smartphone, then I’m going to be all in.

Conclusion

2025 was certainly a year of important technological advancement. However, many people have pointed out that the same is said for virtually every year. What do you think?

If you learned something new in this article, please consider leaving a like and subscribe. Thank you for reading, and I wish you and your family a happy New Year!