AI hype is crashing into reality. Stay calm

Summary

A market correction. A wake-up call. A great digestion. Call it what you want: AI is going through it.Two things appear to be happening in tandem. Businesses are starting to finally grasp what AI can — and importantly, can't — do to boost their bottom lines. And the sky-high expectations that have been partly inflated and overhyped by AI firms over the past few years are finally coming down to Earth.In short, it's increasingly looking like both the AI doomers and boomers were both wrong. AI's trajectory is starting to look less like a time machine or space elevator and more akin computers, smartphones, televisions: The technology will get better, it will almost certainly change our lives in the fullness of time, but it will more likely do so incrementally — to the point that if AGI (artificial general intelligence) or superintelligence do in fact one day arrive, it might not seem like much of a leap at all.There's perhaps no better example of this happening than OpenAI's latest and long-anticipated model, GPT-5, which was touted with a bang and landed with a shrug. Ahead of launch, OpenAI's Sam Altman said he'd felt "useless" compared to the model's intelligence, even drawing parallels with the Manhattan Project. When it arrived, users apparently felt less intimidated. "The degree of overhyping was too significant," one person wrote. "In the absence of massive gains, all you have is hype," wrote another.But it may be a glimpse at our new reality, where the breakneck speed of AI progress is simply steadying, where progress cannot run on hype alone, and where we will neither experience an overnight white-collar job wipeout nor reach an AI abundance society overnight.Welcome to AI's "meh" era. Stay calm. We've been here before. It'll all be fine. Probably.When the internet revolution took hold in the late 1990s, companies were minting millions overnight with little more than a website and a savvy sales pitch. By the year 2000, the economic reality caught up to the hype...