From Nano Banana’s rise to agentic AI misfires — here’s what defined 2025 in AI

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.

AGI was billed for 2025 by many, including Elon Musk, but it simply hasn’t materialized, although the year has still been a strong one for companies like OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google. That said, there ...