Journal of Smart Computing ISSN 2979-8752 · Biannual
Research Article · Vol. 1, No. 1 (2025)

Future Trends of Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Review of Emerging Technologies, Applications, and Societal Implications

Jian Wang* , Ameer El-Sayed

College of Science, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao 266580, China · Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, Zagazig 44511, Egypt

* Corresponding author: wangjiannl@upc.edu.cn

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved from a niche academic discipline into one of the most transformative forces shaping modern civilization. Over the past five years, the field has witnessed unprecedented advances driven by the development of large language models, multimodal generative systems, and domain-specific foundation models. This review paper synthesizes findings from 20 peer-reviewed, highly cited studies published between 2019 and 2024 to provide a comprehensive analysis of current AI trends and their projected trajectories. The paper examines key thematic areas, including scaling laws and emergent capabilities, multimodal AI architectures, applications in healthcare and life sciences, AI for climate action and sustainability, ethical governance frameworks, and sector-specific adoptions in finance and construction. Expert survey data from nearly 2,800 AI researchers indicate that machines may achieve human-level performance across all tasks within two decades. The paper concludes by identifying critical limitations, managerial insights for organizations adopting AI, and directions for future research.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Large language models, Foundation models, AI ethics, Future trends

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.22853843
Pages
27-38
Published
14 Sep 2025
Download PDF

To cite this article: Wang, J., & El-Sayed, A. (2025). Future Trends of Artificial Intelligence: A Comprehensive Review of Emerging Technologies, Applications, and Societal Implications. Journal of Smart Computing , 1(1) , 27-38. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22853843

References

  1. Abioye, S. O., Oyedele, L. O., Akanbi, L., Ajayi, A., Delgado, J. M. D., Bilal, M., Akinade, O. O., & Ahmed, A. (2021). Artificial intelligence in the construction industry: A review of present status, opportunities, and future challenges. Journal of Building Engineering, 44, Article 103299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2021.103299
  2. Ahmed, S., Alshater, M. M., El Ammari, A., & Hammami, H. (2022). Artificial intelligence and machine learning in finance: A bibliometric review. Research in International Business and Finance, 61, Article 101646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2022.101646
  3. Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., Bernstein, M. S., Bohg, J., Bosselut, A., Brunskill, E., Brynjolfsson, E., Buch, S., Card, D., Castellon, R., Chatterji, N., Chen, A., Creel, K., Davis, J. Q., Demszky, D., & Liang, P. (2021). On the opportunities and risks of foundation models. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2108.07258
  4. Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., Agarwal, S., Herbert-Voss, A., Krueger, G., Henighan, T., Child, R., Ramesh, A., Ziegler, D. M., Wu, J., Winter, C., & Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877–1901. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.14165
  5. Bubeck, S., Chandrasekaran, V., Eldan, R., Gehrke, J., Horvitz, E., Kamar, E., Lee, P., Lee, Y. T., Li, Y., Lundberg, S., Nori, H., Palangi, H., Ribeiro, M. T., & Zhang, Y. (2023). Sparks of artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.12712
  6. Cowls, J., Tsamados, A., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2021). A definition, benchmark, and database of AI for social good initiatives. Nature Machine Intelligence, 3(2), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00296-0
  7. Dwivedi, Y. K., Sharma, A., Rana, N. P., Giannakis, M., Goel, P., & Dutot, V. (2023). Evolution of artificial intelligence research in Technological Forecasting and Social Change: Research topics, trends, and future directions. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 192, Article 122579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122579
  8. Grace, K., Stewart, H., Sandkühler, J. F., Thomas, S., Weinstein-Raun, B., & Brauner, J. (2024). Thousands of AI authors on the future of AI. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.02843
  9. Jobin, A., Ienca, M., & Vayena, E. (2019). The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(9), 389–399. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0088-2
  10. Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., Green, T., Figurnov, M., Ronneberger, O., Tunyasuvunakool, K., Bates, R., Žídek, A., Potapenko, A., Bridgland, A., Meyer, C., Kohl, S. A. A., Ballard, A. J., Cowie, A., Romera-Paredes, B., Nikolov, S., Jain, R., Adler, J., & Hassabis, D. (2021). Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature, 596(7873), 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2
  11. Kaplan, J., McCandlish, S., Henighan, T., Brown, T. B., Chess, B., Child, R., Gray, S., Radford, A., Wu, J., & Amodei, D. (2020). Scaling laws for neural language models. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2001.08361
  12. Moor, M., Banerjee, O., Abad, Z. S. H., Krumholz, H. M., Leskovec, J., Topol, E. J., & Rajpurkar, P. (2023). Foundation models for generalist medical artificial intelligence. Nature, 616(7956), 259–265. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05881-4
  13. Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., Mishkin, P., Zhang, C., Agarwal, S., Slama, K., Ray, A., Schulman, J., Hilton, J., Kelton, F., Miller, L., Simens, M., Askell, A., Welinder, P., Christiano, P., Leike, J., & Lowe, R. (2022). Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35, 27730–27744. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.02155
  14. Radford, A., Kim, J. W., Hallacy, C., Ramesh, A., Goh, G., Agarwal, S., Sastry, G., Askell, A., Mishkin, P., Clark, J., Krueger, G., & Sutskever, I. (2021). Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2021), 139, 8748–8763. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2103.00020
  15. Ramesh, A., Dhariwal, P., Nichol, A., Chu, C., & Chen, M. (2022). Hierarchical text-conditional image generation with CLIP latents. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.06125
  16. Rolnick, D., Donti, P. L., Kaack, L. H., Kochanski, K., Lacoste, A., Sankaran, K., Ross, A. S., Milojevic-Dupont, N., Jaques, N., Waldman-Brown, A., Luccioni, A. S., Maharaj, T., Sherwin, E. D., Mukkavilli, S. K., Kording, K. P., Gomes, C. P., Ng, A. Y., Hassabis, D., Platt, J. C., & Bengio, Y. (2022). Tackling climate change with machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys, 55(2), Article 42. https://doi.org/10.1145/3485128
  17. Topol, E. J. (2019). High-performance medicine: The convergence of human and artificial intelligence. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0300-7
  18. Vinuesa, R., Azizpour, H., Leite, I., Balaam, M., Dignum, V., Domisch, S., Felländer, A., Langhans, S. D., Tegmark, M., & Fuso Nerini, F. (2020). The role of artificial intelligence in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Communications, 11, Article 233. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-14108-y
  19. Wei, J., Tay, Y., Bommasani, R., Raffel, C., Zoph, B., Borgeaud, S., Yogatama, D., Bosma, M., Zhou, D., Metzler, D., Chi, E. H., Hashimoto, T., Vinyals, O., Liang, P., Dean, J., & Fedus, W. (2022). Emergent abilities of large language models. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.07682
  20. Yu, D., & Xiang, B. (2023). Discovering topics and trends in the field of artificial intelligence: Using LDA topic modeling. Expert Systems with Applications, 225, Article 120114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120114
CC BY Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Read the full CC BY 4.0 license →