(BNS) Top Tech Stories Of 2025 With The Newsworthy
Episode
32 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Investing, Fundraising & VC, Leadership
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Smart Glasses Adoption: Meta Ray-Bans sold tens of millions of units in 2025 by combining affordable hardware with multimodal AI capabilities, transforming smart glasses from niche product to viable consumer category through voice interaction and visual overlay features.
- ✓Self-Driving Scale: Autonomous vehicles reached 15-20% of ride-hailing market share in cities like Austin and San Francisco, with Waymo data proving self-driving cars safer than human drivers over millions of miles, potentially preventing thousands of annual traffic deaths.
- ✓AI Infrastructure Spending: Major tech companies spend hundreds of billions quarterly building AI data centers, effectively functioning as economic stimulus that may be preventing recession, though return on investment remains unproven and bubble concerns persist for 2026.
- ✓Google's AI Leadership: Google's Gemini 3 model surpassed OpenAI's GPT-5, threatening both OpenAI's market position and NVIDIA's dominance as enterprises may shift to Google's proprietary TPU chips instead of NVIDIA GPUs for AI infrastructure.
What It Covers
Tech Meme Ride Home host Brian McCullough counts down the top 10 tech stories of 2025, from quantum computing breakthroughs to AI's dominance across industries, examining what succeeded, disappointed, and what trends will shape 2026.
Key Questions Answered
- •Smart Glasses Adoption: Meta Ray-Bans sold tens of millions of units in 2025 by combining affordable hardware with multimodal AI capabilities, transforming smart glasses from niche product to viable consumer category through voice interaction and visual overlay features.
- •Self-Driving Scale: Autonomous vehicles reached 15-20% of ride-hailing market share in cities like Austin and San Francisco, with Waymo data proving self-driving cars safer than human drivers over millions of miles, potentially preventing thousands of annual traffic deaths.
- •AI Infrastructure Spending: Major tech companies spend hundreds of billions quarterly building AI data centers, effectively functioning as economic stimulus that may be preventing recession, though return on investment remains unproven and bubble concerns persist for 2026.
- •Google's AI Leadership: Google's Gemini 3 model surpassed OpenAI's GPT-5, threatening both OpenAI's market position and NVIDIA's dominance as enterprises may shift to Google's proprietary TPU chips instead of NVIDIA GPUs for AI infrastructure.
Notable Moment
An economist argued that massive AI infrastructure spending from tech giants currently props up the entire economy, suggesting that without these hundreds of billions in quarterly investments, the country would likely already be experiencing a recession.
Episode Transcript
As 2025 comes to a close, we're looking back at one of the biggest drivers of change this year, tech, and counting down the top 10 tech stories, at least according to our guest. He's Brian McCullough, host of the daily podcast Tech Brew ride home, covering all of Silicon Valley's news in a fifteen minute daily roundup. He's sharing what broke through, what disappointed, what shocked the industry, and what all of it could mean for 2026. You may have noticed that your CRM system has become crazy with bots and agents of late. At the Tech Brew ride home, we love AI, but not when it's used to commit fraud or launch ransomware. Fortunately, Momoto, the creator of continuous verification, now offers the next generation of continuous CAPTCHA. Momoto Continuous CAPTCHA diverts only the agents and bots attempting to gain access to your CRM through registration forms. With Momoto, good agents can do what agents do best, enable your customers to have more productive experiences on your website or app while stopping bad agents from defrauding you and your customers. It's a win for everyone except the cyber criminals. Right now, our listeners can purchase a year of Memoto Continuous Captcha for $5,000, a 20% discount on their lowest price plan. To learn more, head to mimoto.ai/ridehome. That's mimoto.ai/ridehome. Let's get into the top tech stories of 2025 from number 10 to the biggest tech story of the year. Welcome, welcome to the newsworthy special edition Saturday when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in ten minutes. I'm Erica Mandy. It's now time for today's special edition Saturday. Ryan McCullough, thank you so much for joining us here on the Newsworthy again. Yeah. Thanks for having me back. This is a great annual tradition we're doing here. I know. I'm loving it. But let's just start before we get into the top 10. Let's start big picture in just a couple of sentences. How would you describe tech in the year 2025? Back. Tech is back. It rebounded. All sorts of things hit all time highs from NVIDIA stock to Bitcoin to things like IPO starting to happen again. So tech was a tech had a very good year. As the year is ending, there are lots of storm clouds on the horizon, but I think we'll get to that. Yes. We will. Before we get into it, what were you thinking about as you were creating your list? Like, what was the criteria for something to make the list? Things that I think will look back historically as this was the year this broke through or that happened. It's hard not to have made it all about AI, but you'll see AI kind of weaves its way through half the things we're gonna talk about. …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
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Tools
by Waymo
“Autonomous vehicles reached 15-20% of ride-hailing market share in cities like Austin and San Francisco, with Waymo data proving self-driving cars safer than human drivers over millions of miles.”
“Sponsor listing for Momoto Continuous CAPTCHA with URL https://mimoto.ai/ridehome”
by Google
“Google's Gemini 3 model surpassed OpenAI's GPT-5, threatening both OpenAI's market position and NVIDIA's dominance as enterprises may shift to Google's proprietary TPU chips instead of NVIDIA GPUs for AI infrastructure.”
Gear
by Meta
“Meta Ray-Bans sold tens of millions of units in 2025 by combining affordable hardware with multimodal AI capabilities, transforming smart glasses from niche product to viable consumer category through voice interaction and visual overlay features.”
Products
by Stitch Fix
“Sponsor listing for Stitch Fix with URL https://stitchfix.com/spotify”
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