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

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
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 policymakers. Chat GPT 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 en masse, 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. Ilya 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 a separate bin.
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 going to 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 Elad. Okay, Elad, it's been a year.

**Elad Gil** (1:31)
I know, I had the guys. 26, baby.

**Sarah Guo** (1:34)
Are you feeling the AGI? Are you feeling AI winter in a good way?

**Elad Gil** (1:39)
I think I'm actually just feeling microplastics. I think I'm now 80% microplastics. I'm just increasing my microplastic consumptions. I found out I might actually launch a new water brand that has their microplastics by the way. It's called Luton. It's got glass bottles and also the cap that's in that plastic.

**Sarah Guo** (1:53)
Does it come with continual testing? No, that's a good idea.

**Elad Gil** (1:57)
They did actually try to take out all the microplastics. I guess bottled water and actual bottles have more microplastics than plastic bottles because of the cap.

**Sarah Guo** (2:06)
Okay, we'll check back in with you in 27 to see if you feel.

**Elad Gil** (2:10)
I'm just completely ossified at the plastic. I'm actually really worried about microglastics. What about all the little glass particles? Aren't you worried about that? People talk about microplastics, but not microglastics. I'm much more concerned about that.

**Sarah Guo** (2:22)
I don't think those particles end up imbedded for you permanently.

**Elad Gil** (2:26)
Silicon? You're not worried about silicons. I go to the beach, I'm like, oh no, microglastics everywhere.

**Sarah Guo** (2:33)
I'm actually very willing to insert silicon in my body eventually.

**Elad Gil** (2:39)
Wow, that was, yeah, I'm not going to say anything. We can keep going.

**Sarah Guo** (2:43)
What's happening in AI, Elad? Where are we and what are you most excited about?

**Elad Gil** (2:47)
Yeah, I guess for 26 years about this stuff, I think will be interesting that's coming. I think we will, I think there's probably four or five things. One is I think people will proclaim yet again that AI is not doing much and it's overhyped, like that MIT report that people are quoting that I thought really didn't matter. The reality of the technology ways take like 10 years to propagate and people are getting enormous value out of AI already, and they're going to get way more out of it in the future.
Undoubtedly, next year, there will be these overstated bubble claims, as well as, hey, AI actually isn't working that well kind of claims, and that happens over a technology cycle, and we'll just hear it again. Next year, there will be pundits and discussions and just a bunch of waste of time on it. So I think that will happen. I think another prediction for 26 is the next set of verticals will hit massive scale. I think this year, we saw consolidation of coding into a handful of players and medical scribing into a handful of players, legal into a handful of players, like RV and others. And so I think we'll see that next set of consolidated verticals happening. So I think I'll be interesting. I can keep going with it. I like a bunch of these. Do you want to go next? We can alternate. I just did two. Why don't you do two?

**Sarah Guo** (3:51)
Maybe I'll react.
I'll react and then I'll give you two predictions. I have to think of my predictions while I'm reacting. So I'm glad I have at least two threads. Yes. I think that the overall sentiment on AI in the investing landscape is a lot of people getting stressed about the amount of capital they have at work and then just a level of uncertainty around the adoption cycle and technical bets that people are making that they don't have full first principles confidence on coming to risk. So I think like any number of exogenous factors plus noise about the speed of adoption, which by the way, seems like blinding overall. We can talk about what the constraints are.