CEO of a $4.5 billion AI company reveals his 6 predictions for the industry next year, including China leading the US

Clement Delangue, CEO of AI startup Hugging Face, revealed his 2025 predictions for the industry.

While people are preparing their New Year’s resolutions, one AI company CEO has a different habit: locking in his predictions for what will happen in the industry in 2025.

Clement Delangue, CEO of the $4.5 billion startup Hugging Face, laid out six predictions for AI in the new year. He also scored himself on his last batch of predictions, which you can check out on LinkedIn.

This time around, Delangue expects major public backlash over artificial intelligence, sizable orders of personal AI robots, and China overtaking the US in the AI race.

You can take a look at his six predictions below.

The first major public protest against AI

While companies may be scrambling to incorporate AI innovations, not everyone is as eager for the AI era — and Delangue predicts they will be a lot more vocal next year.

“There will be the first major public protest related to AI,” Delangue said in his post.

From professors struggling to combat rising plagiarism to AI-generated art controversies, artificial intelligence has led to frustrations and the uncertainty of change, which often leads to backlash.

AI will cut a big company’s value in half

Describing what would basically be a CEO’s nightmare scenario, Delangue also said that a large company could “see its market cap divided by two or more because of AI.”

AI advancements could cause a major company’s core technology or corporate value to become defunct, like how streaming impacted the DVD market.

In a reply to Delangue’s post, one LinkedIn user pointed out Teleperformance as a possible example. The call center company sank to a seven-year low in February, with shares dropping as much as 29%, due to concerns over AI disruption. A day earlier, Klarna had announced that its AI assistant could account for two-thirds of its customer service chats.

Personal AI robots

With companies including Tesla and Jeff Bezos-backed Physical Intelligence already developing AI robots, Delangue predicts that these robot assistants will soon be available in the mass market.

“At least 100,000 personal AI robots will be pre-ordered,” he said.

Elon Musk, who has admitted he tends to be optimistic about timelines, has said Optimus robot has a “good chance” of some units being shipped out in 2025, he said in a Tesla earnings call. At an estimated cost of $20,000 to $30,000, the robots would likely remain a luxury item until the cost could be brought down.

In November, Agility Robotics was able to “employ” its robot Digit at GXO Logistics’ Spanx womenswear factories. CEO Peggy Johnson previously told B-17 that having robots perform tasks at home, like folding laundry, may take longer to develop.

“A household is a very chaotic environment: At any given moment, a child’s ball runs across the room, and dogs run by,” she said. “There’s things that are in the way.”

China will lead the AI race

With the US and China battling it out for AI dominance, Delangue predicts that “China will start to lead the AI race.”

The Hugging Face CEO said that China’s ascendance will be a “consequence of leading the open-source AI race.”

Although Chinese competitors like ByteDance and Baidu have developed closed-source models, a few startups like 01.AI and Alibaba’s Qwen2 have decided to make their models open-source.

In Hugging Face’s June LLM Leaderboard, which compares the performance of major open-sourced LLMs, Alibaba’s Qwen2 topped the ranking ahead of Meta’s Llama 3 and Microsoft’s Phi-3.

Breakthroughs in biology and chemistry

While AI is quickly percolating many industries, Delangue predicted biology and chemistry are two fields that will see “big breakthroughs.”

In October, Google’s DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and director John Jumper received a Nobel Prize in chemistry for their use of AI to predict protein structures with the DeepMind tool AlphaFold.

Earlier this year, Hassabis predicted AI-designed prescription drugs could enter clinical trials in the coming years.

“I would say we’re a couple of years away from having the first truly AI-designed drugs for a major disease, cardiovascular, cancer,” he said.

Economic and employment growth from AI

Delangue’s final prediction is that the “economic and employment growth potential of AI” will begin to show itself in 2025.

For Hugging Face, in particular, he predicted that 15 million AI builders would be seen on the platform.

Despite the company failing to reach last year’s prediction of 10 million, instead landing at 7 million, Delangue remains optimistic that AI builders will continue to grow.