The state of AI in 2025: Reasoning, regulation, and rethinking scale

Intercom's Chief AI Officer Fergal Reid and VP of Design Emmet Connolly sit down to chart the current state of AI – why scaling pre-training hit limits, how reasoning models and reinforcement learning surged, and what the “DeepSeek moment” revealed about costs and competitiveness. They dig into massive CapEx and data centers, the shrinking gap between frontier and open-weight models, and why value is shifting up the stack from models to the AI layer and product UX. The conversation explores world models and representational convergence, where real breakthroughs may show up, evolving regulation and copyright, and practical implications for builders in a post-training-first world.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8ISy0PswHvE?si=TBooKTEXH191DfIg

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