Where AI Models Are Heading

Learning Objectives Understand the major trends shaping AI model development in the next 2 to 3 years Know what multimodal, agentic, and reasoning models mean in practical terms Anticipate how these changes will affect AI tools and your workflow The Trends That Matter AI models are evolving along several clear trajectories. Some of these trends will change how you use AI within the next year. Others are slower-burning but equally important. Here is what to watch. Trend 1: Multimodal — Beyond Text The biggest shift in AI models is the move from text-only to multimodal — models that natively understand and generate text, images, audio, video, and code in a single system. What this means in practice: Upload a photo of a whiteboard and get a clean document Describe a chart and have the model create it visually Have a voice conversation with AI that can see your screen Ask AI to edit a video based on text instructions Generate presentations with text, images, and speaker notes in one prompt Where we are in 2026: Multimodal input (understanding images, audio, video) is mature. Multimodal output (generating high-quality images, video, audio) is improving rapidly but still uneven. Text and image generation are strong. Video generation is impressive for short clips but inconsistent for longer content. Trend 2: Reasoning Models — Thinking Before Answering Traditional language models generate responses token by token, essentially "thinking out loud." Reasoning models (like OpenAI's o-series and Anthropic's extended thinking) take a different approach: they spend more…