Another year is done and, once again, artificial intelligence was the dominant story. From large language models and agents to robotics and massive data centers, it was nearly impossible to cover the relentless pace of the tech world and not write something related to AI.
The topic of AI covers a lot of ground, as seen through the many interviews on theCUBE, News Media’s video studio, and News’s ongoing news coverage of major tech events. Here are a few of the more memorable quotes from one reporter’s notebook in 2025:
Michael Dell spoke about AI during a session with theCUBE earlier this year.
“The last thing you want to do is install the thing that doesn’t work with the thing the customer wants, that the end user wants to do in the future. And what is that thing they want to do in the future? It’s AI.” – Michael Dell, founder, chairman and chief executive of Dell Technologies Inc., speaking with theCUBE earlier this year during a session in New York.
“We’re not building chips anymore, those were the good old days. We are an AI factory now. A factory helps customers make money.” – Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., during an appearance at his company’s GTC Conference in March.
“The big question is to what extent are we in a bubble versus to what extent is this going to be a big thing soon. Even if it is a bubble and it takes a bit longer to build out, that’s not necessarily the end of the world, although it will be expensive.” — Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., during an on-stage conversation at Stripe Sessions in May.
“We believe the ability to generate and interact with 3D worlds, real or virtual, is fundamental for intelligent agents. AI is real. It really is genuinely the new computing.” – Fei-Fei Li, former chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud, during an interview at the Cisco AI Summit in January.
“This is the moment where technology innovation is outstripping customer adoption. This is architectural change. This is running their businesses. This isn’t just deploying ChatGPT on my phone.” – Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce Inc., in a meeting with the media covering Dreamforce in October.
“Talk to Claude. It figures out intent much better.” – Mike Krieger, responding to a question about speculation that Anthropic Inc. would move its Claude AI assistant to other platforms such as Apple’s Siri. Anthropic’s chief product officer spoke at the inaugural HumanX conference in March.
“You hear people that talk about how their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, that’s happening. We’ll start to see agents that can discover new knowledge. The models over the next year to two years are really going to be quite breathtaking.” – Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, speaking at the Snowflake Summit in June.
“I like big competitors because it validates the space. If we’ve learned anything … it’s how big this market is. All of this is based on data and moving your legacy data and getting it ready for AI. I think there’s a massive opportunity here.” – Robert Herjavec, star of TV’s Shark Tank and executive director of global strategy for data lakehouse company Zetaris Pty Ltd., during an interview with theCUBE in March.
“I’m sick of all this talk about AGI when I don’t have a robot that can clean my house. The huge advancement that we’re making in robotics right now is in the area of general robotics. It’s good enough.” – Ed Chi, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, speaking at the Bay Area Machine Learning Symposium in October.
“It’s actually really hard still to succeed with data and AI. It’s a complexity nightmare of high costs and proprietary lock-in. It’s slowing down the organizations. We think this is the biggest problem.” – Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., during his keynote remarks at the company’s Data+AI Summit in June.
“It’s a data center love fest here. Four years ago, it was just the basic chips were coming out. That was the beginning of the large-scale clusters. Now, all the top hyperscalers, neoclouds and anyone who’s got serious data center chops [are] loving life. It’s definitely an AI tsunami on the infrastructure.” – John Furrier, executive analyst with theCUBE Research, during the keynote analysis at SC25 in November.
“AI is kicking our butts and teaching us that we know nothing about infrastructure.” – Yee Jiun Song, vice president of engineering at Meta, during a presentation at the AI Infra Summit in September.
Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, talked about AI’s impact on jobs during AWS re:Invent in December.
“Will AI take my job? Maybe. Will AI make me obsolete? Absolutely not… if you evolve. We evolve as developers and so must our tools.” – Werner Vogels, Amazon.com Inc.’s chief technology officer, speaking at AWS re:Invent in December.
“We don’t yet know AI’s limits. Maybe it’s not the job disruption itself that makes us nervous, but the speed at which it’s happening. We really don’t know if we’re building a super assistant or an apex predator.” – Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets Inc., during an appearance at TED AI in October.
“Who’s feeling like they really understand what’s going on? Nobody. It’s because we have a lot of change occurring at the same time. We don’t fully know what AI will disrupt yet.” – Jeff Moss, president of DEF CON Communications Inc. and founder of the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, during his opening keynote remarks in August.
“AI is the hardest challenge that this industry has seen. The AI architecture is going to be completely different. We’ve inserted the model layer. It’s nondeterministic, it’s unpredictable. This opens up a whole new class of risks that we haven’t seen before.” – Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer at Cisco Systems Inc., during his keynote address at RSAC Conference in April.
“We started off with people saying last year, ‘Oh agents? OK, well that’s interesting,’ to this year being like, ‘I’m so sick of agents, but I still don’t know how to use them.’” – Matt McLarty, CTO of Boomi Inc., during an interview with theCUBE at Boomi World in May.
“Agents are touching the same cyber infrastructure that we’ve been trying to protect for decades. Make sure you are exposing this technology only to assets and data you are willing to live without.” – Apostol Vassilev, research team supervisor at NIST, in a presentation during Black Hat in August.
“Agentic AI has exploded at Blue Origin. Everyone at Blue is expected to build and collaborate with AI agents. We believe in a world where we can agentically design an entire rocket.” – William Brennan, vice president of enterprise technology at Blue Origin LLC, during an appearance at AWS re:Invent in December.
“These platforms know everything essentially about us, so we can be targeted. It’s become this highly manipulated technology. If I can target you with an ad for something I know you want to buy, I can target you with a piece of news I know you will want to digest.” – Tech entrepreneur Frank McCourt, speaking at MIT EmTech in November.
“The cloud brought us to a point where we thought hardware was just a commodity. We’re at this interesting point where hardware matters again.” – Bill Briggs, CTO at Deloitte LLP, during a panel session at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, talked about quantum computing during GTC in March.
“This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong. We care deeply about this ecosystem. This whole event is going to be like a therapy session for me.” – Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, at the start of a full day of presentations on quantum computing during GTC in March. The session was organized after Nvidia’s CEO said in January that it would take 15 to 30 years for quantum to become useful, triggering a selloff in quantum stocks on Wall Street.
“If you’re proposing a moonshot and it sounds reasonable, we’re not interested.” – Astro Teller, CEO of Alphabet’s X experimental tech division, during an appearance at News Disrupt in October.
“The future is being built right now in these massive, refrigerated warehouses filled with chips. Let’s make sure this is a future we want to live in.” – Janet Egan, deputy director of the Center for a New American Security, in a presentation during TED AI in October.
“My main concern is this is happening so fast. How do we get ahead of this and embrace the technology, but how do we use it well? We as humans struggle with these exponential changes. I don’t think there’s an AI expert anymore. We’re all students.” – Scott Penberthy, senior director of Applied AI at Google Cloud, during a conversation at MIT EmTech in November.
“As we enter this age of AI, I’m weirdly optimistic. We’ve got this.” – Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.io, speaking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in April.
Image: News/ChatGPT
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