Jon Krohn: 00:00 This is episode number 954, recapping 2025 and wishing you a wonderful 2026. Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast. I’m your host, Jon Krohn, and welcome to 2026. During my holiday greeting episode a year ago, I remarked on the major generative AI advances and how they could pave the way for a year of agentic AI in 2025. This past year did indeed shape up that way. Indeed, many folks have remarked how tired they are of hearing the term agentic. It is over-hyped for sure, but it is also tremendously powerful. We now stand at a point where leading proprietary LLMs can replace humans on two-hour long software development or ML engineering tasks with 50% accuracy. With that task duration doubling every seven months, now is the time to get moving on preparing our data, our security measures and our governance structures so that we can capitalize on the increasingly autonomous capabilities of machines in 2026 and beyond.
01:04 For more on all of this, in the very next episode, Sadie St. Lawrence will return to the show for the fifth year in a row to recap the past year in detail and predict the most important data science and AI trends for 2026. It’s a fun episode. And like last year, we again decided on four awards, wow moment of the year, biggest disappointment, biggest comeback, and overall winner. Stay tuned for that on Tuesday. I hope you enjoyed listening to the show over the past year. We had exceptional episodes with the likes of Azim Azar, Andre Berkoff, and Carl Benedict Frey. My personal episode highlight was flying to New Zealand to film an episode with Orelian Geron, the all- time bestselling author of machine learning books. We did that in front of a live audience at the University of Auckland. It was a surreal experience. I’ve got a link to that episode as well as the other episodes that I just mentioned in the show notes.
01:53 Aurelian Jerome, though, he rarely speaks publicly. He hadn’t done a podcast episode in a decade, and it is indeed a rare treat to hear his deeply intelligent mind discuss a broad range of topics from the state of AI tooling today to his well-informed ideas around AGI and the future of society. In terms of the podcast itself, 2025 was a thrilling year for us. Shout out to everyone on the Super Data Science podcast team. We spent the first half of the year focused on overhauling our operations to become a podcast that people can enjoy on video platforms like YouTube as much as they can on audio only podcast platforms, which was historically our bread and butter. Those video changes worked far better than we could have ever hoped for. We implemented them in August and merely two months later. Our total YouTube watchtime per day had increased 10 times over.
02:40 And our number of subscribers on YouTube shot up from 25,000 a year ago to over 140,000 today. Of course, this past year hasn’t been all roses. AI has impacted some people’s job security. Wars continue to lead to unimaginable suffering, and many of us will have lost loved ones for any number of reasons, including the most benign reasons like old age. Hopefully the holiday season has provided you with the peace and space to appreciate your loved ones and the impermanence of everything. With so many options out there for listening to updates on data science and AI, I’m personally deeply grateful that you continue to allocate some of your invaluable time to choose to listen to our podcast. Thanks to our rapid growth in the past few months, we’ll be building on that in 2026 to make the show better than ever. And I’m going to have to think of something extra special for episode number 1000, which will be coming up in June.
03:40 As ever, if you have thoughts on what you’d like us to cover, change or improve about the show going forward, don’t hesitate to tag me in a LinkedIn post. If you do that, I will see it. I will take your feedback to heart and I will reply. In the meantime, from all of us here at the SuperDataScience Podcast, have a wonderful new year. We wish you all the best in 2026. That’s it for today’s episode. Until next time, keep on rocking it out there and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the Super DataSciencePodcast with you very soon.
