The promise of AI is waning. It’s time for tech companies to stop making big promises and produce reliable, useful products that do more than line the pockets of CEOs.
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/in-2025-ai-needs-to-put-up-or-shut-up
The promise of AI is waning. It’s time for tech companies to stop making big promises and produce reliable, useful products that do more than line the pockets of CEOs.
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/in-2025-ai-needs-to-put-up-or-shut-up
24 Comments
What do you think is going to happen with AI next year? Lots of half-baked tech, as this author puts it. After years of hype, I’m ending this year feeling like people are running out of attention for AI and next year could be worse. Tech companies may have to reposition their visions rather than just AI AI AI
I’m going devil’s advocate here just very slightly: we don’t know what this latest batch of AI tools are for. We’ve tried lots of stuff and most of it hasn’t really worked, but it’s only through a “throw it at everything” mentality that we’ve learned what it’s actually good for, and as much as the anti AI crowd likes to pretend otherwise, there are applications, such as those in signal processing, denoising, upscaling, where this modern set up AI tools are genuinely game changing. It’s finding novel applications in things like decoding the communications of whales and making huge strides in machine translation.
We figure out what this stuff is by convincing people to try it in new applications. Now, there’s cynical, and correct, view that promising the moon on AI is a ploy to lure in investors who believe it’s gonna be baked into everything, but this is a tech bubble story as old as the tech industry itself. The bubble will burst, it didn’t revolutionise every aspect of human life, but it’ll leave behind some really useful stuff.
Not going to happen. They’re incentivized quarter to quarter and that inspires short term thinking/hype. It sucks but hopefully the cream rises to the top
Won’t happen. If you had to sell it in a fraudulent way in the first place, don’t count on selling it later in a legitimate way, if that ever happens anyway lol. Unless you sell it under a new name… But AI is burned, too late, you had your chance. 🤭
I saw a meme on here apologies it’s not mine but it fits with the way it’s being monetized today
‘I want AI to do my work so I can make music and art, not to make my music and art so I can do more work.’
let the fucking market correct already and kill off all these bullshit zombie companies that do fuck all.
1950 – go to library, use dewey decimal system to find a book related to any topic you want answers to. The answers might not be correct or relevant, but you’ll find something.
2010 – go to a computer, use Google to search for a topic you want answers to. Your answers could end up being a video, a document, a news article, or a combination. The answers might not be correct or relevant, but you’ll find something.
2024 – go to a computer or phone and use an AI app or other AI tool to search for a topic you want answers to. Your answers could be any format, but now there’s no author references, and you’re not sure if what you have makes sense, but it might be relevant.
Yeah….
It’s strange, the headline claims “It’s time for tech companies to stop making big promises…”
But it doesn’t mention any big promises from these companies. In fact, they only quote this one statement:
>”We have some very good releases coming later this year! Nothing that we are going to call gpt-5, though,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during an October Reddit AMA.
…which sounds like the opposite of a big promise.
Reminds me of 2000 when reality set in and all the dot coms collapsed. That was certainly the end of the internet for us all. No more innovation after that.
>In 2025, AI Needs to Put Up or Shut Up
>The promise of AI is waning. It’s time for tech companies to stop making big promises and produce reliable, useful products that do more than line the pockets of CEOs.
You bet! I’m totally on the same page with you.
AI is doing something tangible alright… for the military and hedge funds.
They’re mentioning consumer facing GenAI, because the general public thinks ChatGPT or image generators when they hear AI.
Most aren’t aware of biology solutions for rapid drug discovery, healthcare systems, including ones that catch misdiagnosed patients and can detect missed anomalies in medical imaging, or that a couple of the COVID-19 MRNA vaccines were developed by AI in a couple of days instead of years. AlphaFold, which predicted the folding of hundreds of millions of proteins, doing the equivalent of around a billion years of human PhD level research, and is currently moving to more complex structures.There are also systems which inform farmers how to manage their crops in order to maximize their yields, materials science systems for the discovery of materials and molecules that don’t yet exist, and are ideal for a new application or product, weather prediction systems that are 100x faster, and more accurate, systems that manage transportation logistics, systems that allow programmers to code 3-10x faster and fixes their mistakes, systems that make factory robots and manufacturing more efficient, financial system AIs, cybersecurity systems that act within milliseconds of a threat arising, etc… The list goes on, and on. The AI industry goes way beyond the LLMs and media generation models that get most of the attention.
AI isn’t waning, AI is still in it’s infants phase, and it’s already breaking ground on virtually every front when it comes to medical research humans have been deadlocked in for decades.
My take is that the only ones overpromising and underdelivering are the companies that are not developing ai.
I mean most AI businesses are just wraps of openai or midjourney (yes there are a bunch of others) so they use ai models provided by companies that IMO have overdelivered.
Just with chatgpt models I have been able to make more use of the internet than in my whole life, research, learn, code, write, brainstorming etc etc, and not to mention what it is capable now with open source llms and img gen.
As i see it, the ones behind AI are not underdelivering, the general public is simply adapting and demanding for more and faster while producing cheap usecases of this tech. Imagine what the photography community felt went instagram launched and people were getting millions of views for a bad photo of their breakfast.
Sure they might be promising the keys to heaven with products we have not seen finished in all major companies like google, microsoft and openai but who can blame them for looking to get funded, and given what we already have, I really can’t complain.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”
Profit over people. That will not change. That’s why most shit breaks right after the warranty is over. And if companies could legally kill you and sell your organs, they would do it in a heartbeat without batting an eye.
>that do more than line the pockets of CEOs
What do you think the goal is? Why do you think companies pay for ai? That’s the only goal there is.
Look at Xiaomis AI driven autonomous plant. Look at all the chatbots so you don’t have to pay callcenters.
They would rather use AI to design a product which brakes after a certain time than use it to design something reliable.
Just today Google announced a state-of-the-art weather prediction model:
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gencast-predicts-weather-and-the-risks-of-extreme-conditions-with-sota-accuracy/
I’ve had a lot of conversations about AI with senior executives over the last 18 months as a regular part of my job. The mood has definitely shifted from unbridled enthusiasm to, ‘it’s a useful productivity tool to help people do what they do better’ or at best, ‘when we feed it our confidential proprietary data, it works really well at spotting issues before a human can.’
In short, it’s just the next generation of data analytics. That’s all it ever was, and that would have been good enough if it hadn’t been branded as a breakthrough in real artificial intelligence that is going to change everything.
The vast majority of use cases are to give people an answer to a question they could have come up with themselves in more time but probably with greater confidence in the accuracy. That’s it. It will give output that satisfies most users without necessarily being able to handle careful scrutiny by a subject matter expert.
Bait
Switch
Rugpull
That’s how all this works, new technology comes along full of promise to make a better world for everyone, it does, then normal is higher than it was and we want more. Moore’s law set the exponential expectations for all of this but really they’re sigmoids.
This article’s use of a standard Gartner hype cycle for AI is flawed. While AI development can be seen as a monolithic technology, it’s a lot of technologies across fields with their own hype cycles with dependencies on different hardware and feedback from other advances. Pretending that AI is like any other technology with a plateau of benefit is hard to defend. (Something a number of people have tried here in r/futurology). It really doesn’t capture the probable reality of a technological singularity, nor the timescales as such a graph should extend into the 2045-2100 range. Trying to clip a small window of AI and map it over a technology like the Internet will lead to wildly different conclusions than actually looking at the development of every AI subfield and where they’re heading individually and then as a group.
The real winners are going to be the businesses that develop highly application specific models that solve time consuming ore tedious processes – the force multipliers. 2024 Nobel is Chemistry is a perfect example of applying machine learning. Now take it a step further. I don’t need more generative slop
Welcome to the real world where huge companies keep power and money. Why should it be different this time?
Attention spans are now so short that new technological waves wane before they even begin 😂