For me, 2024 was the year of Artificial Intelligence, AI.
That was the year we saw a lot of breakthrough and a lot of hype, the release of higher versions of AI models, AI taunting and scaring Google with the AI search capabilities, AI companies being established and raising billions of dollars in funding, competition getting tougher and a lot of human artists suing AI companies.
The fear of AI replacing people in the job world reached its peak. AI was the true star of 2024 until the ending part where crypto took over the fame after Donald Trump won the elections.
But of course, Crypto is not the reason why the AI hype seems to have gone down these days. Here's the actual reason though.
Last year, people really believed in the potential of AI now. I'm not talking about the potential of AI in the future because I think that's inevitable, AI will dominate in the future but I'm talking about what we expected AI to look like today.
People actually thought of AI as magic. We could see professional and well detailed blogs being generated and I took time to read some of these blogs. My God do they look human now. I formed a little habit of checking to see whether some of the news article websites use AI for their blogs, and it turns out, they do.
We also saw AI image generators get so good and look so real. But of course if you pay attention you can always tell the difference between what's real and what's not. Then came AI video and Sora hype.
When Open AI's Sora was launched, the servers got so busy I couldn't sign up an account. Everyone was anticipating it.
Well, a lot has been released in the first few months of 2025 and you would have thought that by now, the internet would have already buried human content with AI content but that's not the case.
The hype cooled off because people realized that the companies kind of overpromised. The current AI models to be honest are good but they still struggle with accuracy, they cost a lot to run and they're not replacing jobs as fast as most feared.
I think the wow factor of AI wore off. But if you're an AI enthusiast don't let this make you feel sad because the numbers are still up. A lot of people use ChatGPT and other language models for so many things.
I for one have gotten used to making my search with Chatgpt rather than Google. If I am thinking of building a project, I analyze the project with Chatgpt.
The problem with the hype going down comes from the fact that people are seeing the limitations of AI. It makes a lot of mistakes, it struggles with reasoning and it is not as independent as we expected it to be by now.
The business that were to take advantage of AI have also realized that AI is expensive and not always profitable. This caused the excitement to fade a little. A hype dies when expectations don't meet reality.
However this is glass half empty opinion, let me give you my glass half full opinion now.
So when will the hype return? It can return today or tomorrow or this week or this year. Anytime sooner or later. The moment AI makes a big breakthrough, the hype will return.
What kind of breakthrough does it need to make before the hype returns?
If it can improve reasoning to a whole new level or if it can come up with a strategy that makes it way cheaper or possibly free for all or if it can improve its accuracy and independence then the hype will return.
Like I said earlier on, AI dominating the world is inevitable, the issue is with when that would happen.