Dec 19, 2025 · 40m · no-priors
No Priors Ep. 144 | The 2026 AI Forecast with Sarah & Elad
Elad Gil · 14m spoken Sarah Guo · 13m spoken Aaron Levie · 1m spoken Bryan Johnson · 1m spoken Asher Spector · 28s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this 2026 forecasting special of No Priors, venture capitalists Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, alongside prominent tech leaders, analyze major technological, financial, and societal shifts across enterprise AI, frontier model architectures, robotics, and data center infrastructure.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 77.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.0 Guest teaching 0.4 Guest disagreement 0.9 The hosts pushing back 0.9
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 10:25 Debating the definition of a robot
Sarah directly challenges Elad's assertion that household appliances like dishwashers and elevators count as robots, arguing intelligence and task generalization are mandatory criteria.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 9:41 Rejecting generic startup vs incumbent framingElad pushes back on Sarah's framing that incumbents merely win as a numbers game, detailing distinct structural capital and supply chain requirements.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 10:40 Defining robotic intelligence boundariesSarah clarifies that robotics without adaptive generalized intelligence is merely automated appliance manufacturing rather than modern AI-driven robotics.
The host holds their own ▶ 23:45 Biological evolutionary parallels to AGIElad demonstrates deep technical domain expertise by connecting mirror neurons, directed evolution, phage display, and AlphaFold structural prediction to future AI architectures.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conversational Warm-Up on Microplastics and Silicon | 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Sarah and Elad engage in lighthearted banter about microplastics before transitioning to 2026 AI predictions. Sarah cites physician adoption data from Offcall and clinical decision tools to illustrate rapid vertical takeoff. | |
| Predicting Foundation Models for Science and Mathematics | 6 | 2 | 3 | 3 | The co-hosts debate robotics timelines, market structures favoring incumbents vs startups, and argue over the functional definition of what constitutes an intelligent robot versus an appliance. | |
| Public Markets, AI IPOs, and CapEx Buildout Risks | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Sarah outlines hedge fund dynamics where institutional managers feel forced into AI IPOs due to retail retail momentum regardless of fundamental valuation concerns. | |
| Consumer AI Agents and the Scarcity of Product Talent | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Discussion centers on why consumer AI applications have lagged enterprise tools, citing the global scarcity of exceptional consumer product talent and incumbent defensive moats. | |
| Neo Labs, Frontier Architectures, and Evolutionary Systems | 7 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Elad draws deep analogies to evolutionary biology, protein design breakthroughs, and AlphaFold to theorize how modular AI systems and automated evolution could surpass manual architecture designs. | |
| Non-AI Predictions: Defense Tech, Space, GLP-1s, and Biohacking | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Both hosts share non-AI predictions, highlighting defense tech drone adoption, Starlink's space infrastructure, and GLP-1 second-order effects expanding into peptide therapies. | |
| Guest Predictions on Reasoning, Proactive Workflows, and Agents | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Monologue guest voice clips predicting proactive enterprise AI companions, reasoning breakthroughs, and shifting UI context management away from copy-paste chat interfaces. | |
| Aaron Levie on Enterprise Agent Harnesses and Economic Evals | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Aaron Levie predicts enterprise agent harnesses and economic task evaluations, followed by a clip on American vs Chinese frontier open-weight models. | |
| AI Drug Discovery Deployment and Bryan Johnson's 'Don't Die' Philosophy | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Monologue submissions covering AI antibody drug discovery deployment, Bryan Johnson's Don't Die longevity thesis, and data center energy-per-watt efficiency. |
Statements from this episode (20)
Guo: Someone Will Make Hundreds of Millions Trading Markets With LLMs
“From a prediction standpoint, personally, I think we're going to see somebody make a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, trading markets with LLMs next year. It's inevitable.”
Gil: Pundits Will Overstate AI Bubble Claims in 2026
“One is I think people will proclaim yet again that AI is not doing much and it's overhyped and like that MIT report that people were quoting that I thought really didn't matter. And the reality of the technology waves take like 10 years to propagate and people…”
Gil: Next Set of Vertical AI Sectors Will Consolidate
“I think another prediction for 26 is the next set of verticals will hit massive scale. I think this year we saw consolidation of coding into a handful of players and Medical scribing into a handful of players. We go into a handful of players like RV and others…”
Gil: Historically Slow Tech Adopters Like Doctors and Lawyers Love AI
“I think this is, by the way, super under discussed that the people who tended to be the slowest adopters of technology love AI. That's physicians, that's lawyers, that's certain accounting types. It's, you know, it's actually kind of fascinating. It's complian…”
Gil: Foundation Models Will Achieve Physics and Math Breakthroughs
“I think you know, a third area is the next set of foundation models are going to come, and by that I don't mean the Neolabs and the Next Gen LLM, which of course will happen, but I mean, physics, materials, science progress by models, math progress. And I thin…”
Guo: Sentiment Will Collapse Around Small-Scale Humanoid Robotics Startups
“One is there's going to be like some collapse of sentiment around a set of robotics companies next year, not because it like actually isn't as a field going to progress, but because, you know, people are beginning to project timelines and you know, not everybo…”
Gil: Tesla and Chinese Companies Will Win the Robotics Race
“It feels to me like Optimus or some form of like Tesla robot will be one of the winners, most likely, right? High probability... The most likely global winners in robotics will be some subset of China plus Tesla plus something else, right?”
Gil: Waymo and Tesla Autonomous Driving Will Dominate 2026
“I do think that on the topic of robots, the biggest trend perhaps, or one of the biggest trends of 20, 26, 100% will be that self-driving will really begin to matter. And that'll be both in terms of your own car. It'll be in terms of Waymo and Tesla cabs.”
Gil: Major AI IPO Will Trigger Wave of Follower Tech Listings
“I think if one of the main AI companies goes out, it'll be probably do extremely well depending where they price. I mean, obviously if they're overly aggressive, it won't. But in general, I think there's so much retail appetite to actually participate in AI be…”
Guo: Upcoming Slate of Consumer AI Hardware Will Mostly Fail
“I think we are gonna see, like, a slate of consumer hardware that mostly fails, but I'm still open-minded to it”
Gil: Incumbents Can Catch Up to Startups Within Three Years
“Unless a company truly hits escape velocity and build a network effect or something else that's really defensible, usually incumbents can launch two, three years later and catch up.”
Gil: Foundation Model Landscape Will Collapse Into Handful of Players
“Ultimately, these things become capital gains for certain types of approaches or models. Because we know scale really matters, which means that eventually you have to collapse into a handful of players because capital will aggregate the things that are working…”
Guo: Alternative AI Architectures Like SSMs Will Be Tested
“And like, there's enough capital out there to test them, be they like diffusion or SSMs or whatever. And that's going to happen this next year.”
Gil: Defense Tech Startups and Drone Systems Will Accelerate
“I do think defense will accelerate in terms of startups and defense tech and the shift to autonomous or not autonomous, but to drone based systems in general.”
Guo: GLP-1 Adoption Is Inexorable and Will Drive Peptide Investments
“I think that like, I'm not the only one, but I think the like GLP one thing is just despite all of the enthusiasm, like still underrated for how much impact it has happened. Right. And so I think that the continual adoption of these is like inexorable. I actua…”
Guo: Biohacking and Longevity Practices Will Go Mainstream
“I also think like the biohacking community, as you said, it, like the set of people who were really, really early off label GLP one adopters interested in longevity, neuromodulation with ultrasound Stem cell injection, for example, like that has been like a fr…”
Levie: 2026 Enterprise AI Delivery Will Center on Domain-Specific Agents
“Twenty-twenty-six prediction would be that this is going to be certainly the continued year number two of AI agents, but in particular AI agents in the enterprise in either deep vertical or domain specific areas. I think this is going to be the main way that w…”
Levie: Agent Scaffolding Will 10x AI Model Capabilities in 2026
“It's definitely gonna be the year of age and harness and seeing how do you start to get, you know, an order of magnitude improvement on the model's capabilities by having all the right scaffolding around the model.”
Levie: 2026 Will Be the Year of Economically Useful AI Evals
“And then finally, it will be the year of economically useful evals. So really starting to figure out how these models end up doing a lot more knowledge worker tasks in the economy. And that's gonna we're gonna see a lot more of that in 2026.”