The great AI hype correction of 2025

Here are four ways to think about the state of AI at the end of 2025: The start of a much-needed hype correction.

1. LLMs are not everything: In some ways, it is the hype around large language models, not AI as a whole, that needs correcting. It has become obvious that LLMs are not the doorway to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a hypothetical technology that some insist will one day be able to do any (cognitive) task a human can.
2. AI is not a quick fix to all your problems: In July, researchers at MIT published a study that became a tentpole talking point in the disillusionment camp. The headline result was that a whopping 95% of businesses that had tried using AI had found zero value in it.  
3. Are we in a bubble?: If AI is a bubble, is it like the subprime mortgage bubble of 2008 or the internet bubble of 2000? Because there’s a big difference. The subprime bubble wiped out a big part of the economy, because when it burst it left nothing behind except debt and overvalued real estate. The dot-com bubble wiped out a lot of companies, which sent ripples across the world, but it left behind the infant internet—an international network of cables and a handful of startups, like Google and Amazon, that became the tech giants of today.   Then again, maybe we’re in a bubble unlike either of those. After all, there’s no real business model for LLMs right now. We don’t yet know what the killer app will be, or if there will even be one. 
4. ChatGPT was not the beginning, and it won’t be the end: ChatGPT was the culmination of a decade’s worth of progress in deep learning, the technology that underpins all of modern AI. The seeds of deep learning itself were planted in the 1980s. The field as a whole goes back at least to the 1950s. If progress is measured against that backdrop, generative AI has barely got going.