The importance of humans: AI expectations for 2025 and key NeurIPS learnings

A month after NeurIPS 2024, the conference's insights continue to shape expectations for AI trends in 2025, emphasizing the crucial role of human intelligence in AI development. Key trends for the upcoming year include human alignment, domain-specific model competition, agentic alignment, and supervised synthetic data, all highlighting the need for human expertise in enhancing AI systems. The conference underscored the importance of integrating human preferences and nuanced evaluations, as demonstrated by the PRISM Alignment Dataset and discussions on preference modeling, which stress the value of diverse and representative feedback. The emphasis on human input and robust evaluation frameworks suggests that the next breakthroughs in AI will be driven by human-centric approaches to model refinement and evaluation. As AI applications diversify, benchmarks and performance metrics must evolve to ensure meaningful assessments, with human preferences playing a central role in these advancements.