Happy 2026!

My prize for best AI cartoon of 2025 (reprinted with permission) goes to …. Tom Fishburne!

His prescient 2023 cartoon on what I like to call The Fishburne Effect is legend:

You can follow him – and order some of his collected work — at The Marketoonist website.

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And, bonus, to help prepare you to think critically about AI 2026, in an era in which everyone is wondering whether generative AI will turn out to do be a dud, here are five essays from 2025 worth reading or rereading:

  1. Why LLMs just can’t stop hallucinating.

  2. Generalization is — and always has been — the vital question. How Apple’s reasoning paper brought that back to the fore.

  3. LLMs are not like you and me—and never will be.

  4. What world models are, and why we desperately need them.

  5. Neurosymbolic AI will displace pure LLMs over time; here’s why.

If the above analysis is correct, the dominance of LLMs may soon start to decline — and we may start seeing newer, more sound approaches start to emerge.

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