Crystal ball into 2026

Issue 145 l Eka’s Weekly Roundup (12 December 2025)

Dec 12, 2025

It’s hard to believe we are already in mid-December. At Eka, we’ve been thinking about how 2026 might unfold around our themes of Sustainable Consumption and Consumer Health: How will developments in GLP-1s impact wellbeing? Can AI really solve the chaos problems in weather prediction? And are our democracies ready for the next wave of synthetic media? Here are our core bets and questions for 2026.

Ideas for 2026 🗞️

Idea 1: More human in the loop for LLMs and therapy.

In 2025, we saw a strong backlash against the wild west of unregulated AI boyfriends (like Replika or Character.AI). One of my favourite subreddits here is r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, with almost 80k members.

Some posts include…

There have been numerous controversies, including Reuters publishing on Meta’s AI rules in August ‘25, or the widely publicised impacts on teenage mental health and self harm.

In late 2025, the UK Youth Endowment Fund revealed that 1 in 4 UK teenagers were already secretly using AI chatbots for mental health support, despite NHS warnings.

However, a Harvard Business School report from 2024 found that interacting with an AI companion reduced loneliness just as effectively as interacting with another person, and significantly more than passive consumption (like YouTube).

Two bets on 2026:

We will see the random control trial (N=1k+) proving that an AI combined with human oversight will be statistically more effective at reducing mental health risk than human therapy alone due to 24/7 availability.
We will continue to see more pushback against unregulated general LLMs used for therapeutic effects.

Idea 2: Weather/risk modelling gets a LOT better in SoTA

In late 2023, Google DeepMind’s GraphCast effectively “solved” the 10-day forecast, outperforming the gold-standard ECMWF physics model on 90% of targets.

They also compared performance against HRES, which is produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF referenced above).

Traditional physics-based models hit typically hit a chaos wall at roughly 10-14 days because they are computationally too expensive to run enough variations.

A paper published in 2025 focussed on Sudden Stratospheric Warnings (SSW) events suggests AI could already detect these signals 20 days in advance, giving grids a massive head start. We could see this innovation move beyond SSWs into 2026 for >20 day predictions.

Question on 2026:

Will see the first forward looking 20 day prediction of an SSW?

Idea 3: Deepfakes degrade trust in 3+ elections?

The Romanian election in 2024/25 saw scammers exploit Facebook to spread false political advertisements.

This led to an election recount in late 2024/early 2025 as the supreme court found evidence that TikTok gave preferential treatment to the winner Calin Georgescu who was associated with the far-right. In the US, the 2024 election saw fake robocalls impersonating Biden.

In 2026, there will be a number of elections including the US midterms, Israel legislatives, Hungary parliamentary, or Sweden with their general election.

Will 3+ or more have their results annulled because of deepfakes? How will software solutions step up to resolve this?

P.S. we’ve linked this in the top articles for the week, but this piece in Nature on AI manipulation in elections is fascinating. TLDR is that chatbots are more effective than political ads at persuading people.

Idea 4: Developments in GLP-1s change the penetration & efficacy game

There are going to be quite a few updates to GLP-1s in 2026:

Oral GLP-1s like orforglipron are hitting the market. This seemingly small shift represents millions of new users who were previously “needle-phobic” or priced out.
Eli Lilly’s latest results for retatrutide looked very positive (published earlier this week), and suggested patients could lose as much as 29% of their body weight in trials. Some patients dropped out of the trial because they were losing too much weight.

In late 2025, KFF data showed 12% of US adults were currently on GLP-1s, with 18% reporting that they have ever taken a GLP-1 agonist.