The Vergecast 2025 year in review

When we look back on 2025, at least in tech, we’ll remember it mostly as a year about AI. We had a race between OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to build the best model for the most things. Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world, data centers started to spring up everywhere, and every app and device and company and human you can think of found itself thinking of an AI strategy. AI wasn’t all that happened this year, but it was a lot of what happened this year. On this episode of The Vergecast, we take a look back at the year as it comes to a close. Nilay and David are joined by Joanna Stern, senior tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to go over a few of their predictions from last year, before digging into all the best and worst and biggest stories of 2025. Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Casts | More Some of the categories we picked this year wound up being pretty easy, like the surprising success story of the year and the worst new buzzword. Others were more complicated, and offered lots of answers: what was the gadget of the year? And, far more important, which Big Tech CEO would actually make the best podcast host? The gang doesn’t always agree, but we’re always full of thoughts. We also want to hear from you, on all the superlative categories we discussed. What would you have picked for Best AI Thing? Which product that died this year makes you the most sad? Tell us everything: drop a comment here, call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, or send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com. And stay tuned for next week, when we launch our spiciest predictions for 2026. Ignore that we got most of our 2025 predictions wrong — we’re going to nail it this year.