From prophet to product: How AI came back down to earth in 2025
So, here's something that caught my attention — after years of wild hype, 2025 feels like the year AI finally started to come back down to earth. According to Benj Edwards writing in Ars Technica, the buzz around AI's potential — especially claims about reaching superintelligence — has cooled a bit. Instead, companies are focusing on practical solutions, even though big players like OpenAI still talk about AGI. Now, here's where it gets interesting: while Nvidia's valuation hit over $5 trillion, Wall Street and banks are warning that the AI bubble might burst just like the dotcom crash. It's a game of contrasts — on one hand, massive investments and lofty promises; on the other, a recognition that today’s AI is useful but imperfect. Edwards points out that even OpenAI’s CEO admits that some of the claims about building superintelligence are more marketing than reality. So what does this mean for you? Expect a shift toward more reliable, real-world AI tools — less hype, more pragmatism. And honestly, that might be a good thing.
Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI models as future threats to human civilization or the seedlings of future gods, it's starting to look like hype is giving way to pragmatism: Today's AI can be very useful, but it's also clearly imperfect and prone to mistakes.
That view isn't universal, of course. There's a lot of money (and rhetoric) betting on a stratospheric, world-rocking trajectory for AI. But the "when" keeps getting pushed back, and that's because nearly everyone agrees that more significant technical breakthroughs are required. The original, lofty claims that we're on the verge of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence (ASI) have not disappeared. Still, there's a growing awareness that such proclaimations are perhaps best viewed as venture capital marketing. And every commercial foundational model builder out there has to grapple with the reality that, if they're going to make money now, they have to sell practical AI-powered solutions that perform as reliable tools.
This has made 2025 a year of wild juxtapositions. For example, in January, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, claimed that the company knew how to build AGI, but by November, he was publicly celebrating that GPT-5.1 finally learned to use em dashes correctly when instructed (but not always). Nvidia soared past a $5 trillion valuation, with Wall Street still projecting high price targets for that company's stock while some banks warned of the potential for an AI bubble that might rival the 2000s dotcom crash.