From Nano Banana’s rise to agentic AI misfires — here’s what defined 2025 in AI
Here’s the full AI story from 2025, a year in which AI has had more than its fair share of ups and downs.
(Image credit: Getty Images/Alexsl)
As the Senior AI Editor on TechRadar I’ve seen AI use grow throughout 2025, with some really nice apps and features getting released. My particular highlights have been the Purpose app from Marc Manson, and the marvellous Nano Banana image generator from Google.
2025 started with a bang with the release of DeepSeek R1, the Chinese AI model that rivaled the power of ChatGPT, but at a fraction of the cost for developers. With a start like that it looked like 2025 was all set up to be the year that AI ‘arrived’ on the world stage, with even the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) being achieved.
OpenAI learns a lesson
ChatGPT has maintained its vice-like grip as the most popular AI chatbot in the world, although it hasn’t been plain sailing for the tech giant. Legal challenges, particularly the copyright infringement claim brought by The New York Times, have continued to dog the company, and in June its servers crashed for a couple of days, giving the world a brief taste of life without the ubiquitous chatbot, and users were not happy.
OpenAI then fumbled the ball with the release of the GPT-5 model, which came across as cold and unemotional compared to the previous GPT-4o. The shift disappointed millions of users who had come to rely on the chatbot as something closer to a trusted companion. It felt like a best friend had undergone a personality transplant overnight, forcing OpenAI to make the legacy 4o model available again.
The company has also lost a little ground to Google’s Gemini in recent months. The arrival of Gemini 3 Pro in November was well received, and on the image front Gemini’s Nano Banana and proved superior to ChatGPT for image generation. OpenAI responded with a in December.
