Venture Capital

⚠️ The collapse of OpenAI and a “normal” Siri: what journalists think 2026 will look like December is peak season for tech forecasts, they almost never come true, but they’re useful for understanding where industry anxiety is building. The Verge, together with The Wall Street Journal, just released a podcast laying out their predictions for the tech industry in 2026. 🖱 Apple finally delivers a usable voice assistant: Journalists predict Siri will become a “normal” assistant in 2026, with a focus on empathy and more natural, heartfelt communication. The subtext is harsher: if Apple still hasn’t meaningfully figured out AI by then, its long-term dominance in consumer tech could start to erode. 🖱 OpenAI stops being the dominant AI player: The argument is that ChatGPT alone can’t justify the massive capital OpenAI has raised. Without a broader ecosystem, hardware, platforms, or tightly integrated products, the company risks losing its lead. It’s a controversial claim, but recent internal and strategic tensions suggest the current model needs rethinking. 🖱 A perception turning point for robots and autonomous transport: 2026 is framed as a psychological inflection point: either autonomy becomes quietly accepted (“it works, fine”) or public trust collapses after incidents. Still, mass adoption feels unlikely, more pilots, more demos, not everyday ubiquity. 🖱 The AI slump reaches its bottom: The hype cycle is expected to cool further, with only genuinely new recommendation systems not bigger or more expensive models capable of reviving social platforms. This is arguably the most plausible prediction.

Taken together, these forecasts suggest 2026 won’t be about breakthroughs but about which tech narratives survive contact with reality.

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