Of course, it is difficult to imagine that this will not end in some kind of market massacre. The current winner-take-most mentality means the bets are big and bold, but the market can't support dozens of large independent AI labs or hundreds of application-level startups. This is the definition of an environmental bubble, and when it bursts, the only question is how bad it will be: a sharp correction or a collapse.
Looking to the future
This was just a brief overview of some of the major themes of 2025, but there was much more happening. We haven't even mentioned above how capable AI video synthesis models have become this year, thanks to I see 3 adding audio generation and Wan 2.2–2.5, providing open AI video models that can easily be mistaken for real cameras.
If 2023 and 2024 were defined by the artificial intelligence prophecy, that is, radical claims about imminent superintelligence and civilizational disruption, then 2025 was the year when these claims met the stubborn realities of technology, economics and human behavior. The artificial intelligence systems that have dominated headlines this year have turned out to be just tools. Sometimes powerful, sometimes fragile, these tools were often misunderstood by the people who used them, in part because of the prophecies surrounding them.
The collapse of the mystique of “reasoning,” the legal assessment of training data, the psychological costs of anthropomorphized chatbots, and bloated infrastructure requirements all point to the same conclusion: the era of institutions presenting AI as an oracle is coming to an end. What comes in its place is messier and less romantic, but much more meaningful—a stage in which these systems are judged by what they actually do, who they harm, who they benefit, and how much it costs to maintain them.
All this does not mean that progress has stopped. AI research will continue and future models will be improved in real and meaningful ways. But improvement is no longer synonymous with excellence. Success increasingly looks like reliability rather than spectacle, integration rather than disruption, and responsibility rather than awe. In this sense, 2025 may be remembered not as the year when AI changed everything, but as the year when it stopped pretending that it had already done so. The Prophet was demoted. The goods remain. What happens next will depend less on miracles and more on the people who choose how, where, and whether these tools will be used at all.
