AI Trends and The Internet’s Future in 15 Minutes
Ethan B. Holland
October 16, 2025�Reynolds Journalism Institute
About Me
30 Years Transforming Legacy
Companies -> Digital
Burpee Seed Catalog
Print catalog -> eCommerce
Jewelry Television
Home Shopping -> eCommerce
American Eagle Outfitters
Brick & Mortar -> Omnnichannel
Currently VP Digital At Draper Media
Legacy TV and Radio
FAST, LiveStream, OTT, VoD
English Literature Major
No Computer Science Courses
Fun Adventures Along The Way
In My Career
Featured in the New York Times for RSS feeds with Dick Costolo (later Twitter CEO)
Product launches with Mark Zuckerberg
Keynote speaker at Adobe’s worldwide sales conference
Presented with Sam Altman (long before OpenAI)
On November 30, 2022
Chat GPT launched
Everything Changed
I decided to be the most informed person in the room when it came to AI.
Even if it meant “getting weird”
Started privately tracking the AI news each week.
Sept 2023: Presented on AI to the National Association of Broadcasters
October 2023: “Start posting publicly or it doesn’t count”
Made a commitment to share my efforts… even if I looked foolish or failed.
Launched a weekly AI news blog
Took 54 hours of work to publish one week of AI news
Information mining, clicking, opening, sorting…
Struggled to keep up.
Was six weeks behind for 10 months.
Used Claude and GPT to build:
26 Python scripts
Google Apps scripts
3 Chrome extensions
CSV automation
WordPress integration
Adobe Photoshop scripts
My blog takes the time needed to read the headlines, assign categories, and write the summaries.
Can’t shortcut the reading and I don’t want to shortcut the summarizing (it’s for me to process, not for AI to summarize)
BUT I saved over 5000 mouse clicks per week!
Every week I manually review, organize and publish 400-700 AI headlines into 56 categories.
98 weeks later I’ve organized 36,100 links
I’m taking my first break in 98 weeks. Restarting next week.
Reading 36,000 links has given me a “Spidey Sense” of where things are going.
Any time we discuss AI, I recommend three guiding principles:
1) THE SUM is greater than the parts.
Think about how things we see today will connect in the future.
2008: iPhone 3G adds GPS to apps
2025: Uber = $200 billion market cap
2) When discussing AI align your timetable with your audience:
Short term
Mid term
Long term
Otherwise, it’s not the same conversation.
3) If possible, use the tool name or technology, not simply “AI”
GPT-5, Gemini, Nano Banana, Opus 4.1, Kimi, Grok 4, Llama, Mistral, ElevenLabs, HeyGen, Flux, MidJourney, Mistral, Qwen, Sora, Deepseek, Runway, Kling, Viggle, NeRFs, LivePortrait, Gaussian Splats, Diffusion…
Four Themes For Today
Term One: Basic Generative AI
“Grounded diffusion”
Term TWO: Multimodality
Interacting with AI using audio, imagery, or video instead of chatting
Multimodal AI is most familiar for it’s ability to:
Truly multimodal AI understands the sound waves of my voice as audio and does not need convert them into text. That’s what most people don’t realize…just as you hear and understand sound, AI understands sound.
Actual interaction with Google DeepMind’s multimodal model “Flamingo
APRIL 2022 (3.5 YEARS AGO)
Context Understanding
Term THREE: Agency
AI taking actions on your behalf
Language is an instructions interface
Like multimodality, agency helps us break away from thinking of AI as simply “chat bots”…or writing tools.
2019: 3 seconds
2025: 57 minutes
“This is the worst it will ever be”
Let’s do a six-month recap of multimodal and agentic AI�
Mid-February to mid-August (when I took a break - it’s plenty)
For efficiency… I’m only reading the Mizzou Gold highlights.
#FDB719 REPRESENT
Multimodality
Multimodality
�
“This picture was taken in West Ocean City, Maryland, looking east toward the Ocean City Inlet.
Agents
Agents
Multimodality + Agents = Future of the Internet
“The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” – Marshall McLuhan 1964
Each new medium both contains and can emulate the mediums it replaces. The internet contains and emulates film, radio, television, publishing, and retail.
AI will include and emulate… the entire Internet.
Browsers, SEO and Publishing
Bonus News From September
ByteDance opensourced a desktop automation Agent.
This agent can use any desktop app, open files, and browse websites using vision models running locally. 100% Free, Opensource, and Local.
Perplexity is serving over 300M user queries every week. 3x growth in approx 9 months from the time we hit 100m weekly queries.
Open-source, self-hostable browser automation library for AI agents; build agents to navigate sites, fill forms, click, and extract info, 90.4% on Web Voyager
Kernel lauched Crazy Fast Browser Infrastructure. Kernel’s API allows developers to launch browsers in the cloud so agents can use the internet as background services.
We've spent recent months connecting Claude to your calendar, documents, and software. The next logical step is letting Claude work directly in your browser.
We view browser-using AI as inevitable: so much work happens in browsers that giving Claude the ability to see what you're looking at, click buttons, and fill forms will make it substantially more useful.
Browser-using agents powered by frontier models are already emerging, making this work especially urgent.
An open-source agent can autonomously curate news briefings, extract facts, and summarize content with integrated human feedback and dynamic tool selection.
Gemini’s API can visit webpages, PDF's, images, and more when you provide the direct URL
That means no opening a browser and it’s from Google.
Florent is head of journalism at HuggingFace
It’s a new era of ergonomics.
The primary audience of your thing (product, service, library, …) is now an LLM, not a human.
There is no playbook.
It can feel daunting, but…
You can participate in this future.
Print catalogs and brick and mortar couldn’t stop e-commerce.
Broadcast couldn’t stop YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix.
This is the most pivotal moment to be in school since 1993.
This is what you are here for!
I’m excited to talk with all of you.
Will share these slides as well as additional resources.
Let’s connect!
Thank You!