The 2026 AI Forecast: Foundation Models, IPOs, and Robotics with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil

Hi, listeners. Welcome to No Priors. How can we even begin to wrap this year up? The AI field has grown, breaking out into the mainstream and taking center stage with policy makers. ChatGPT shipped massive numbers and asked for massive dollars. Gemini and Google roared back strong. And on the application front, AI coding has shifted to agents and is eating up all of our inference capacity. Doctors are adopting clinical decision support on mass, and in law and customer support, enterprise adoption is accelerating. What's next? On the research front, the race has multiple live players with open source closing the gap too. A handful of Neo Labs, new research labs, got funded this year, and the narrative is changing. Ilia is calling it the age of research. People are trying different ideas around diffusion, self improvement, data efficiency, EQ, large scale agent collaboration, continual learning, energy transformers. It's more open than it's ever been. Finally, we had a lot of attempts to make AI reach into the real world with renewed optimism around robotics. Next year, those companies are going to start making contact with reality. From a prediction standpoint, personally, I think we're gonna see somebody make a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars trading markets with LLMs next year. It's inevitable. So we're in the second or third inning. Markets are running a little hot and a little volatile. It's hot in the hot tub. So get into it with me and Alad. Okay? Alad, it's been a year. I know. How's it going? 2026, baby. Are you feeling the AGI? Are you feeling AI AI winter in a good way? I think I'm actually just feeling microplastics. I think I'm now 80% of microplastics. I'm just increasing my microplastic consumptions. A friend of mine actually launched a new water brand that, has their microplastics, by the way. It's called Loop. It's not, like, glass bottles and also the cap that's in that plastic. Does it come with continual testing? No. That's a good idea. Continual testing for you? They they did actually try to take out all the microplastics, and so they, I guess, bottled water and actual bottles have more microplastics than plastic bottles because of the cap. Okay. We'll check back in with you in twenty seven to see if you feel Yeah. And I'm just completely ossified out of plastic. I'm actually real really worried about microplastics. What about all the little glass particles? Aren't you worried about that? People talk about microplastics, but not microplastics. I'm I'm much more concerned about that. I don't think those particles end up embedded for you permanently. Silicon? You're not worried about silicones. I go to the beach, I'm like, oh, no. Microglastics everywhere. I'm actually very willing to insert silicon in my body eventually in my Wow. That was yeah. I'm not gonna say anything. We can keep going. What's what's happening in AI, Alad? What do you where where are …