👋 Dear Dancing Queens and Super Troupers,
Christmas is that magical time of year when everything slows down. The tree blinks, emails almost stop, meals last too long, and somewhere, someone still unwraps a completely useless gadget.
While some are opening ugly sweaters and others are trying to explain AI to their skeptical uncle, 2025 is coming to an end. And let’s be honest: it hasn’t exactly been easy on our brains.
Because while we were counting Advent calendar chocolates, artificial intelligence never took a break.
It grew. It settled in. And above all, it started reshuffling the deck.
This year, Google regained the upper hand in the AI race against OpenAI, Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company by selling silicon brains, and China began flexing its muscles in robotics and physical AI in a very serious way.
And while giants were fighting over the future, AI quietly slipped into a place we didn’t necessarily expect: our headphones.
A country song generated by AI smashed the charts, proving that artificial creation is no longer a lab gimmick but a full-blown cultural phenomenon. The kind of moment when you put down your mug of mulled wine and think: okay… so this is where we are now.
This Christmas newsletter isn’t here to list models or benchmarks. It’s here to tell the story of the year AI became an adult, sometimes a bit too fast, and when 2026 already started to loom with even bolder promises: more autonomous AIs, more present humanoid robots… and a future that doesn’t wait for us to finish the turkey.
Make yourself comfortable. Let’s wrap up 2025 together :
👉 Gemini 3 Changes the Game: Google Takes Back the Crown 🧠
👉 Historic Success or Giant Bubble? Nvidia on Top of the World 📈
👉AI, Robots, Humanoids: China Moves Faster Than Expected 🤖
👉 The Day AI Entered Our Playlists 🎧
👉 After 2025, What Will AI Really Look Like in 2026? 🔮
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⚡ If you have 1 minute
In 2025, Google pulled off what many thought was impossible: taking back control of the AI race from OpenAI. With Gemini 3, Google isn’t just winning on performance, but on massive distribution. AI is embedded everywhere, all the time, to the point of becoming almost invisible. The battle is no longer about models, but about ecosystems.
Riding the AI boom, Nvidia climbed to the top of global market capitalization. Every model, every data center, every AI agent relies on its chips.
But this dominance raises a fundamental question: are we witnessing a lasting revolution, or a massive GPU-fueled bubble? The power is real… the balance more fragile.
While the West debates, China moves. Fast. Smoother humanoid robots, spectacular demos, aggressive pricing. This year marks a turning point: China is no longer catching up, it’s setting its own pace in physical AI and robotics. The technological future is clearly becoming multipolar.
Out of nowhere, an AI-generated country song blew up the charts. Not a meme. Not a parody. A real hit. It’s the cultural signal of the year: AI music leaves the novelty phase and enters mass culture. The question is no longer “is it possible?” but “what does this change for creativity?”
And what’s next? If 2025 was the year of tipping points, 2026 looks like the year of execution. More autonomous AIs, agents capable of acting on their own for longer, and humanoid robots that are less flashy but more present in the real world. Here’s what to expect.
🔥 If you have 15 minutes
1️⃣ Gemini 3 Changes the Game: Google Takes Back the Crown
The summary : In 2025, Google pulled off a comeback many no longer expected. With Gemini 3, the web giant didn’t just improve its AI models. It seized the initiative from OpenAI by pushing a more integrated, more coherent, and above all more massive vision of artificial intelligence.
AI is no longer a standalone product. It becomes an invisible layer of everyday digital life.
Details :
From catching up to overtaking : Gemini 3 doesn’t stand out only for raw performance, but for its versatility and stability across a wide range of use cases.
The ultimate weapon: distribution : Search, Gmail, Docs, Android… Google injects AI everywhere, frictionlessly, at a scale OpenAI cannot match on its own.
Less spectacle, more consistency : fewer isolated “wow” moments, but a continuous presence that reshapes how billions of users interact with digital tools.
A shift in perception : in 2025, Google’s AI stops being seen as “behind” and becomes the obvious choice again.
Why it's important : This shift marks a major strategic turning point. The AI race is no longer just a competition between ever-more-powerful models, but a war of ecosystems. Google reminds everyone of a fundamental truth: the best AI isn’t necessarily the one that dazzles the most, but the one that embeds itself so deeply you stop noticing it.
By regaining the upper hand, Google turns AI into core infrastructure of the modern web… and rewrites the rules for everyone else.
2️⃣ Historic Success or Giant Bubble? Nvidia on Top of the World
The summary : In 2025, Nvidia achieved a historic feat: becoming the world’s largest company by market capitalization, driven almost entirely by the explosion of artificial intelligence. Behind every model, every agent, every generated video, and every futuristic promise lies one very tangible constant: Nvidia GPUs running day and night. AI may have a software brain, but it also has a physical body… and Nvidia supplies it.
Details :
The global AI pipeline : model training, inference, data centers, robotics… everything flows through Nvidia chips.
Runaway demand : cloud giants, startups, and governments are fighting to secure compute capacity, sometimes years in advance.
Staggering numbers : explosive growth, exceptional margins, and valuations that shatter historical tech benchmarks.
A new balance of power : Nvidia is no longer just a supplier, but a strategic player at the heart of the digital economy.
Why it's important : Nvidia’s coronation highlights a truth often forgotten: AI is not immaterial. It consumes energy, silicon, space, and capital. By becoming the keystone of this ecosystem, Nvidia concentrates unprecedented power… and exposes the market to an uncomfortable question: what happens if demand slows, or if a credible alternative emerges?
2025 is both the year of Nvidia’s triumph and the moment when fears of an AI bubble start to seriously enter the conversation. A mix of euphoria and vertigo, typical of major technological revolutions.
3️⃣ AI, Robots, Humanoids: China Moves Faster Than Expected
The summary : In 2025, China stopped being the “ambitious outsider” of global AI. It became a central player, impossible to ignore. Generative AI, humanoid robotics, spectacular physical demonstrations, industrial scale-up: the Chinese ecosystem is moving fast, forcefully, and without hesitation. While the West is still debating frameworks and safeguards, China builds, tests, iterates… and shows.
Details :
A visible acceleration in humanoid robotics : credible demos, fluid movements, aggressive pricing. Chinese robots aren’t perfect, but they’re already here.
Tight integration between AI and industry : research, production, and deployment advance together, without the usual silos.
Less regulatory friction, more execution : where others hesitate, China experiments at scale.
A signal sent to the world : viral videos aren’t marketing stunts. They exist to prove capability.
Why it's important : This shift redraws the geography of the technological future. The AI race is no longer a US–Europe duel with China lagging behind. It is becoming multipolar, with radically different trajectories.
In 2025, China shows it isn’t just trying to match Western leaders, but to set the pace, especially in physical AI and robotics. And in that race, speed of execution sometimes matters more than perfection.
4️⃣ The Day AI Entered Our Playlists
The summary : In 2025, an AI-generated country song did what many still thought impossible: it topped the sales charts. Walk My Walk, performed by Breaking Rust, reached number one on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart. Not a passing buzz. Not a marketing stunt. A genuine commercial success in a highly codified genre.
Details :
An artist that doesn’t exist : Breaking Rust is a fully artificial music project, with no human singer behind the microphone.
A deeply conservative genre : country music relies on strong codes, a distinct cultural identity, and an audience not known for embracing technological experimentation.
A measurable success : paid downloads, official rankings, media visibility. This isn’t a viral meme, but a real market signal.
A “normal” reception : many listeners heard the song without immediately knowing it was AI-generated… and that didn’t stop them from liking it.
Why it's important : This moment marks a major cultural turning point. AI-generated music no longer just imitates or parodies. It works within traditional commercial circuits, alongside human artists, on mainstream platforms.
The shock isn’t artistic.
It’s symbolic.
If a song created by an AI can resonate with such a broad audience, in a genre as tightly defined as country, then the question is no longer “can AI make music?” The real question becomes: how will we coexist with artists who don’t exist?
In 2025, Walk My Walk didn’t kill human music.
But it proved that artificial creation has officially entered popular culture.
5️⃣ After 2025, What Will AI Really Look Like in 2026?
The summary : If 2025 was the year of tipping points, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of consequences. The signals are already there: more autonomous AIs, less spectacular but more effective, and humanoid robotics slowly moving away from demos toward everyday use. The future is no longer making promises. It’s starting to settle in.
Details :
AIs that act on their own for longer : agents capable of planning, executing, and correcting without constant supervision. Less “assistant,” more real delegation.
An increasingly invisible AI : embedded into tools, platforms, and workflows. What works best is often what you stop noticing.
Humanoids that are less “wow,” more present : fewer flashy videos, more concrete use cases. Logistics, assistance, semi-structured environments
Rising tension around reality itself : convincing video deepfakes, indistinguishable voices, large-scale generated content. Seeing, hearing, and reading are no longer proof.
Why it's important : 2026 will probably not be the year of shocking announcements. It may be even more unsettling. Because it will turn impressive demonstrations into mundane habits.
After 2025, one thing is clear: AI is no longer a future to imagine, but an environment we will have to live with. At work, in creation, in information… and in our relationship with reality.
This isn’t an end-of-year moment.
It’s a point of no return.
❤️ Tool of the Year : Google Veo 3, the Video AI That Finally Breaks the Silence
In 2025, Google didn’t just improve AI video generation. With Veo 3.1, it pushed moving images past a psychological threshold many feared without fully anticipating.
Until now, AI video impressed… but almost always betrayed its nature. Strange movements, inconsistencies, awkward silence, or audio stitched on afterward. The brain could tell something was off. With Veo 3.1, that reflex begins to fade.
For the first time, image, motion, and sound are generated together, natively. Voices, ambience, sound effects: everything arrives synchronized, coherent, believable. Not perfect. But accurate enough for doubt to creep in. And that’s exactly where everything changes.
Because a credible video with credible sound is no longer just a creative feat. It’s a change in status. Video is no longer automatically a trace of reality. It becomes a plausible construction, even when it is entirely artificial.
This is where the deepfake issue changes nature. Veo 3.1 is not a deepfake tool in the classic sense.
It is regulated, watermarked, tagged with SynthID. But it demonstrates that technical barriers are falling one by one. Audio synchronization, long the Achilles’ heel of convincing fakes, is no longer a major obstacle.
From that point on, the problem is no longer “is this video fake?” The real question becomes: who produced it, in what context, and with what intent?
In 2025, moving images lose their innocence. Seeing is no longer enough. Hearing is no longer enough. Trust shifts from content to source, from perception to traceability. Veo 3.1 doesn’t make lying automatic. It makes doubt rational.
And a society where doubt becomes the logical response to a perfectly credible video is not a minor evolution.
It’s a change of world.
💙 Video of the Year: Unitree’s Humanoid Robot Masters Kung Fu
There were a lot of robot videos in 2025.
Robots carrying boxes.
Robots walking in straight lines.
Robots designed to please investors.
And then there was this one.
A humanoid robot from Unitree chaining kung fu movements with unsettling precision. Balance, coordination, spatial awareness, muscle memory. Nothing useful. Nothing productive. And that’s precisely why the video hit so hard.
Kung fu is not an industrial task.
It’s a human bodily art, loaded with culture, rhythm, and discipline. Watching a machine perform it without rails, without visible cables, without deceptive editing triggered a diffuse discomfort. Not amazement. A recalibration.
This video doesn’t say “robots will replace humans.”
It says something more disturbing: robots are starting to master our gestures, not just our tools.
And context matters. This demonstration comes from China. Fast, direct, unapologetic. Not a conference promise, but a signal sent to the rest of the world: humanoid robotics is no longer confined to Western labs or ultra-expensive prototypes.
In 2025, this video made one thing clear: humanoids are no longer judged only by what they do, but by how they move.
And when a machine starts sharing our movements, our arts, and our relationship with the body, this is no longer just robotics.
It’s a question of coexistence.
Which AI news story impacted you the most in 2025?
