Between Bots Calling Themselves 'mecha-hitler' And 95% Of

It's gonna change the world. Once we figure out what to do with it and it stops being a Nazi. But after that for sure.

As it progressed, I increasingly came to think of 2025 as 'the year of headlines you'd normally read in newspapers in Deus Ex'. "America is now one big bet on AI," read a piece in the FT. "CoreWeave’s Staggering Fall From Market Grace Highlights AI Bubble Fears," fretted the WSJ. "Google CEO's warning about the AI bubble bursting: 'No company is going to be immune, including us'," squawks some weird mag called PC Gamer.

People have been muttering about an AI bubble since the tech first started worming its way into every device in our lives, but is it just me, or does it feel like even the imperforate auras of delusion that surround the world's tech CEOs have started to weaken lately? It's no longer just wild-eyed street prophets (I mean that with affection, Ed Zitron) foretelling doom; even the smoothest brains in the C-suite are beginning to eye one another nervously, quietly praying they're not the ones left holding the bag.

Let me put the mandatory disclaimer right here, up top: I'm not saying AI is set to vanish in a puff of smoke, never to darken our doorway again, but I am saying that 2025 felt like the year the money-mad shine came off the tech. Hell, Sam Altman went on Fallon. Nothing goes on Fallon if it's doing well.

Perhaps nothing this year gave me greater doubt about the inevitability of AI than a September report in the FT. Poring over their Rolodexes and talking to every big business cheese who'd pick up the phone, the biz journos at the FT found that, uh, no one really knew what they were doing with AI or why.

No, really. Outside of pure FOMO, barely any of the businesses the FT surveyed were able to identify why they'd implemented AI or how it was improving their day-to-day work. Most of the companies the paper spoke to implemented AI tech haphazardly, entirely out of a fear that their competitors were also implementing it and would beat them to a punch that no one could really identify.

The only ones able to point to an obvious benefit from AI were… energy companies, who were quite chuffed at the skyrocketing demand for their services driven by the AI data centres popping up like mushrooms after rain. Lip-licking energy providers aside, though, research by MIT Media Lab found that 95% of gen-AI pilots in offices and workplaces ran into a brick wall.

Call me a cynic, but this does not, to me, read as a technology th

Source: PC Gamer