The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP · Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matt Kohn | Cloud Computing & AI News

336: We Were Right (Mostly), 2026: The New Prophecies

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

AI was mentioned 596 times in 2025, averaging 12.2 times per episode.

1. The Cloud Pod Episode 336 looks back at 2025 and opens the 2026 run with prediction grading, show stats, and new AI projects. 2. Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are the hosts, and their annual review matters because they track AWS, Azure, GCP, and AI news week by week. 3. The episode asks whether the team was “mostly right” in 2025 and what “the new prophecies” should be for 2026. 4. Ryan’s call for “quick LLM models for individuals” gets checked against actual use of LLMs for validation and coding tasks. 5. Matthew’s predictions about FOCUS adoption and ISO 42001 security standards are treated as strong hits, with Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, Grafana, Snowflake, Anthropic, and the standard itself named as examples. 6. Jonathan’s prediction that a company would claim AGI is discussed through Integral AI and Sam Altman’s language around GPT-5, while the hosts debate whether “claims” counts. 7. The team says AI agents booking reservations on real-world tasks was accurate, and they point to OpenAI’s Operator as the reference example. 8. Justin’s prediction that OpenAI would no longer look like the leader by year-end is tied to Google, Anthropic, and market-share figures the hosts cite on-air. 9. The discussion also covers a partial miss on 5-day RTO predictions and the show’s own grading, with Claude scoring A-plus for Matt, A for Justin and Jonathan, and B-plus for Ryan. 10. The hosts then move into year-end statistics, saying 2025 included 1,308 stories from 15 unique sources and a cloud split of 39% AWS, 22.9% Azure, and 38.1% GCP. 11. They contrast that with 2019, when the show was 73% AWS, 16% Azure, and 11% GCP, and say the coverage has become more balanced over time. 12. The archive review says the show published 49 episodes in 2025, analyzed 42 of them, and only had six episodes with all four hosts present. 13. The hosts note that AI appeared 596 times in 2025, which averaged 12.2 mentions per episode and represented 66.4% year-over-year growth. 14. They also count 19 outages, 12 fiber and network infrastructure stories, and five major deep-sea cable announcements. 15. The show’s running jokes come up too, including 18 uses of “finally,” repeated “Oracle arriving late to the party” jokes, and the “life size 80 years rat” callback for Ryan. 16. The hosts list product and company changes such as Cloudflare buying Replicate, Atlassian buying DX, Cognition buying Windsurf, and Meta buying Scale AI. 17. The tone is conversational and self-auditing, with the hosts interrupting each other, comparing notes, and scoring their own predictions live. 18. The format mixes retrospective metrics, personal workflow discussion, and practical talk about tools like Claude Code, agents, Warp, and S3-backed vector search. 19. People who follow AWS, cloud provider strategy, and AI tooling will get the most from this episode. 20. People looking for a tight news rundown without prediction talk may skip it.

As heard by us

A skeptical cloud check-in that turns predictions into a practical discussion of AI standards.

The Cloud Pod uses its annual prediction episode to revisit 2025, sketch out 2026, and take stock of cloud and AI direction. The strongest stretch is the discussion around standards, especially agent-to-agent protocols and MCP, where the show lands on a clear point: different…

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Want cloud predictions with receipts and a little panel chat?

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