AI Wrapped 🎁

Welcome back and happy holidays! Before we jump into a big 2026 ahead, I’m excited to do a quick end-of-year rewind. A lot happened this year, and judging by what you clicked, watched, and shared? These were the stories, tools, and videos that stuck. Welcome to our Future Tools Rewind…and better start gearing up now for a busy, bold 2026. Let’s jump in.

📊 First, the stats

• 100 newsletters sent this year (including today’s!)

• 19.2M emails delivered in 2025 (that’s a lot of emails)

• 230K subscribers to the Future Tools newsletter

📰 Our biggest stories of the year

• Nvidia said “what bubble?” 💭 After another strong year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back on AI bubble fears, pointing to continued GPU demand across cloud providers and enterprise workloads.

• Sora went viral (fast) 💥 OpenAI’s Sora app reached 1M downloads in less than five days, surpassing ChatGPT’s original iOS debut and topping the US App Store within 72 hours. The launch also triggered renewed scrutiny of deepfakes and AI-generated video misuse.

• OpenAI’s Stargate hit turbulence 🚥 OpenAI’s ultra-ambitious Stargate data center project slowed this year, with tariffs and changing AI economics reportedly cooling investor interest. The project had been positioned as a major US push for domestic AI infrastructure. 

• Perplexity tried to replace the browser 💻️ Perplexity launched Comet, an AI-first Chromium browser that swapped its own model in to replace Google search. The move was aimed at reducing reliance on third-party browsers and increasing long-term user retention.

• Gemini 3 shook the leaderboard 🥇 Google’s Gemini 3 landed directly inside Search and rocketed to the top almost overnight. It crossed 1M users in its first 24 hours and led early benchmarks across coding, reasoning, and multimodal tasks.

I’d love to hear from you: What do you think were the biggest, most game-changing stories of the year for the AI and tech industries? Hit reply and tell me what you think.

These were the tools I shared here in the newsletter and you clicked on the most.

• Dzine.ai | All-in-one AI image and design platform with text-to-image, image editing, background removal, and more.

• PromptDC | A platform that rewrites messy coding prompts into clean instructions directly inside popular AI editors and browsers.

• URL to Any | A versatile URL conversion suite that turns any webpage into clean Markdown, PDF, text, images, QR codes, and structured reports. 

• Letterly | Speak your thoughts and instantly get structured, polished text for notes, emails, posts, or journals. 

• Vectr | Browser-based AI vector graphics editor and logo maker that lets users create scalable graphics with a minimal learning curve.

Take a stroll down memory lane with some of these Future Tools standouts—the videos you clicked on the most throughout the last year of newsletters.

• DeepSeek: The Chinese AI That Crashed the Markets | I broke down DeepSeek-V3 and R1, why they rattled markets, and what they revealed about global AI competition and compute economics.

• This will replace Photoshop… and it’s FREE | A hands-on look at the “Nano Banana” image model, testing how far free AI image generation had come and where it still fell short.

• 27 FREE Things You Can Do With Gemini | A practical walkthrough of the best things you could do with Google Gemini for free, from graphics and productivity apps to research, video, and image generation.

And if you want to end the year with a bang? I just broke down the biggest late-in-the-game AI stories breaking as 2025 winds down, including the NVIDIA/Groq $20B situation, major model updates, hardware moves, and a few headlines that got wildly misunderstood along the way. Check it out here.

That’s it for 2025. Thanks for reading, watching, sharing, and sending tips my way this year. I really appreciate all of you for being here and following along, and we’ll be back in your inbox with our regularly scheduled programming next week.

See you next year!

—Matt (FutureTools.io)