University of Kwazulu-Natal

What Does 2026 Have In Store For Ai We Asked Chatgpt Gemini And

Bonisiwe Shabane
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what does 2026 have in store for ai we asked chatgpt gemini and

The future of AI, according to AI itself When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. In the final stretch of 2025, it became increasingly clear that artificial intelligence had become invisible yet influential infrastructure, as much a novelty toy as a novelty. People are using it like spreadsheets or plumbing, to move things around, combine and analyze information, and clean things up. But what do some of the most popular AI models think will happen next?

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, three of the best-known and widely used AI chatbots, to predict what everyday life with AI might look like in 2026. I tried to get them to stick to more realistic opportunities. I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, three of the best-known and widely used AI chatbots, to predict what everyday life with AI might look like in 2026. and not predictions of the singularity, utopian fantasies, or alien encounters mediated by AI diplomats, just plausible extrapolations. Each model had their own ideas, with some unsurprising overlap. But the sometimes overt, and sometimes subtle consequences of AI described made it clear that, as far as the AI chatbot models are concerned, they aren't going to fade away any time soon.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. We live in an era where AI models can generate art, code software and even predict protein structures. But can they predict cultural trends? As we hurtle toward the mid-2020s, predicting what comes next feels more challenging than ever. Technology evolves at breakneck speed; cultural shifts happen overnight on social media; and entire industries reinvent themselves annually.

So I decided to turn to the experts — or at least the artificial ones. I posed the same question to ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Predict the biggest trends we'll see in 2026 across technology, culture, fashion, and entertainment. What's going to be in, what's going out, and why? Their responses were fascinating, surprisingly different, and revealed just how uniquely each AI approaches predictions. Here's what they told me. As we look to 2026 we see so many trend reports out in the wild claiming so much for the next year.

So, we asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini explore unexpected 2026 trends – what will we find? ChatGPT 5.2 is obvious, tech-focused and not that creative. Claude Opus 4.1 is aspirational and a little dystopian. Gemini 3 explores culture a little deeper. LLM results are always derivative however a useful prompt can help us look beyond the obvious. Reach out to Nikolas Badminton to explore realities of AI beyond the hype and find out what’s needed to create cognitive and organizational advantage – click here.

Just when you think you’ve wrapped your mind around computers that can put your dog in front of the Eiffel Tower or chatbots that act like your best friend (or lover), the AI behemoths... I’ve worked in the AI space for 15 years. I served as an early beta tester for OpenAI in 2020, when I predicted that a little model called GPT-3 had world-changing potential. It was later released as something called “ChatGPT”–perhaps you’ve heard of it? I’ve also called several big AI trends correctly, including the rise of video generators and the “AI Wars” between Google and OpenAI. Based on my experience, here are my six AI predictions for 2026 and beyond.

This article was featured in the Think newsletter. Get it in your inbox. A year in tech can feel like a decade anywhere else. Think about it: a year ago, we were discussing how ChatGPT wasn’t able to count the number of “r”s in “strawberry.” Reasoning models from Chinese frontier labs (like DeepSeek-R1) hadn’t taken the world by... Claude’s dedicated coding agent didn’t exist yet. IBM’s Granite 3.0 had only just arrived.

And the agent conversation was only beginning: MCP had just gained traction in the spring, with a notable endorsement from Sam Altman. Meanwhile, in the world of infrastructure, chips and compute resources were becoming scarce, giving new territories a competitive advantage. Two quick notes before we get to today’s article: There’s one week left to apply for a Tarbell Fellowship and potentially become the next Kai Williams! It’s is a fellowship program for people who want to become journalists covering AI. Understanding AI is participating again in 2026, along with media outlets like NBC News, The Guardian, Bloomberg, and the Verge.

Click here to apply—the deadline is January 7. Thanks to everyone who contributed to GiveDirectly! Because my readers gave more than $20,000, my wife and I donated an additional $10,000. 2025 has been a huge year for AI: a flurry of new models, broad adoption of coding agents, and exploding corporate investment were all major themes. It’s also been a big year for self-driving cars. Waymo tripled weekly rides, began driverless operations in several new cities, and started offering freeway service.

Tesla launched robotaxi services in Austin and San Francisco. What will 2026 bring? We asked eight friends of Understanding AI to contribute predictions, and threw another nine in ourselves. We give a confidence score for each prediction; a prediction with 90% confidence should be right nine times out of ten.

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