Vibe Check: A Brave New World

You can sum up 2025 in two words: vibe coding. There. Timeline 2025 finished.

But wait. That’s not all. The concept captures more than at first glance: the rise of AI agents, Opus 4.5, AI autonomy, new directions in art, new directions for humanity. It’s an examination of how deep learning AI technologies continue to impact our lives, culture and art on practically a turn-by-turn basis. It also raises questions about autonomy, AGI, ethics, consciousness and what is even possible with computation now that we—anyone, you, me—can mold it like never before.

We’ve all been given Pandora’s black box. For the creative potential alone, that’s at least exciting.

[[Le Random asked twelve trusted artists, curators and collectors to choose the single artwork that mattered most to them in 2025.] ](lerandom.art)

Another major development of the year is how AI agents are pointing to the most exciting future direction in art: worlds, living protocols and symbients. I’ll explain.

Last year and bleeding into the beginning of 2025, we saw protocol art come into prominence as a coherent, articulated idea, even though the term has been around for decades. This idea was exemplified by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s The Call from late 2024 as well as World Computer Sculpture Garden curated by Oxfff.

Early 2025 then brought PXL DEX by Kim Asendorf, Cycles by Material Protocol Arts and Infinite Garden by Leander Herzog. A more precise label for much of this work—while it still sits within protocol art—might be smart contract art: systems where code, markets and communities co-produce the artwork over time.

As the year progressed the idea of worlds became more prominent. It became clear that smart contract art was a step (certainly not the final one) in an evolutionary process of increasing complexification in technology in art. Smart contracts were systems and celebrated as such. But they could also be parts of larger systems, cybernetic systems within systems. Smart contract protocols—like those from the end of ‘24 and beginning of ‘25—could now be combined. They sat at the confluence of autonomous deep learning tools, other protocols and autonomous agents, all of which pointed to the development of dynamic, living protocol stacks: worlds.

Worlds are exciting because they tie together so many things, from decades-old artistic inquiries like simulation to the most advanced frontier AI research. Demis Hassabis calls worlds and simulation the thing that interests him most. Other titans obsessed with worlds and AI include Dr. Fei Li (the queen mother herself), Yann LeCun and many others. World Models are the frontier of AI research that emerged in 2025 but are still making their way to public awareness at the start of 2026.

Why are world models so important in AI? Demis Hassabis describes them as a key building block for true AGI. If AI can generate realistic worlds, it likely understands their mechanics. So that’s a thing. Worlds, too, according to Dr. Li, may also be the key to robotics.

So worlds may be the key to AGI and robotics. The implications of those two things in combination have the potential to determine, well, the future of all other intelligences as we know it. So, uh, there’s that. A certain fearlessness is required of the artists most intimately exploring these superpowers.

But before those systems combine to overthrow humanity—or until or instead—worlds are also increasingly essential to understanding contemporary art. Easily some of the most exciting artistic voices are deeply concerned with worlds, from Ayoung Kim and Lu Yang to Ian Cheng, Lawrence Lek, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Primavera De Filippi, Cezar Mocan, dmstfctn, Wendi Yan, terra0 and many more.

What exactly do I mean by “worlds” in this art context? Cheng, in his Emissaries Guide to Worlding, describes them as ”a future you can believe in: one that promises to survive its creator and continue generating drama."

In other words, this is all connected: vibe coding, Opus 4.5, worlds, symbients, the future of art, AGI, robotics, VR/AR, simulation.

Soon anyone can vibe code entire worlds of fantastic weirdness.

Speaking of worlds, in many ways, 2025 was a reality check for the art world, writ large. It was tough for digital and non-digital, blockchain-based and not. But amidst IRL galleries and digital platforms closing left and right, there were signs that the big picture was still intact even if the present was fuzzy. After all, signs of long-term health were just as prevalent: Zero 10, Sasha Stiles at MoMA, Toledo Museum of Art’s Infinite Images and a revitalized digital gallery scene (Yeche Lange, nguyenwahed, HEFT, Offline and more)

Beyond that, 2025 saw a spate of new private digital art spaces funded by some of the field’s most consequential names: Canyon (Robert Rosenkranz), NODE (Micky Malka and Becky Kleiner) and SOLO CSV (Ana Gervás and David Cantolla).

Billionaires are collecting, institutions are here and the art is genuinely as exciting as ever, entering new places as mind-bending as ever.

What were the vibes in 2025? It was a brave new world. And the ones fortunate and curious enough to stay around were handsomely rewarded.