AI in 2025: From Agents to Factories - Ep. 282

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Today, we're looking back on the year in AI 2025. But before we begin, if you're enjoying the AI podcast, please take a moment to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Thanks. Our year began with NVIDIA's Mingyu Liu talking about the importance of world foundation models to advancing physical AI in episode two forty. Forty conversations later, Jacob Lieberman introduced us to the future of enterprise storage, AI data platforms in episode two eighty one. Along the way were advances in AI models and the infrastructure that they run on, like the rise of AgenTek AI and the AI Factory. We heard firsthand from pioneers in health care, higher education, life sciences, marketing, and other industries about how they're using AI to advance their fields and make work better for the people doing it. And we talked to everyone from researchers to roboticists about the dawn of physical AI, where intelligence moves from our screens into the robots building our cars, assisting our surgeons, and walking among us. 2025 was quite the ride. Let's dive in. This year in AI began as last year ended with lots of talk about agents and Agintec AI. So what exactly is an AI agent? An evolution in the way people use generative AI, Agentec AI is a move away from simple call and response style chatbots towards systems that have true agency. Chris Covert from inworld AI breaks this evolution down into phases in episode two forty three, moving from simple conversation to an adaptive partner and finally, full autonomy. We have this, you know first, again, is that conversational AI phase, and I'll use a gaming analogy. Right? This the conversational AI phase gives avatars, gives agents, I'll use them interchangeably today, extremely little agency in doing anything other than speaking. Right? It may be able to respond to my input if I ask it to do something, but but it's not gonna physically change the state of something other than the dialogue it's gonna tell me back. It is an adaptive partner phase where the AI is observing and responding to changes on its own. It's not micromanaging every decision, but it feels like you're collaborating with an agent or a unit that has just enough context to make smart decisions on its own. Like Right. An evolution of a recommendation engine being driven by, you know, a cognition engine here. So it's not just learning, but it feels like it's learning what we need even before we ask it. Again, I think that's phase three. I think there's still a phase four, and I think that's a fully autonomous agent. And that stage, you know, again, continuing our analogy, is a player two. Right? Where player three is it's adapting to us, stage four is, hey. This thing is an agent all on its own. It feels like I'm playing against another human. …