When the AI Revolution Gets Boring, What Happens?

What happens when the most hyped technology of our time becomes as ordinary as a calculator? It gets interesting.

Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

In late 2023 my teenage niece was asking ChatGPT to write her essays. By 20204 she was using it for brainstorming ideas. But as we head into late 2025, she’s back to writing her own essays. Why? Because everyones essays started sounding the same. The cadence, the grammar. We’re probably in the peak of the AI hype bubble. It will burst. How and when, we can’t know. But throughout human history, technology bubbles have always burst.

And that’s actually been a good thing, as odd as it might sound. The AI race could end up with AI (Generative AI [GenAI], like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Sora etc.) reaching some kind of plateau or just running out of investment money (more likely). The moment a transformative technology stops being “magical” and starts to become boring, as in just parts of the plumbing of our societies, is when it becomes interesting.

As for the “AGI” elephant in the room, even the creators of that narrative of “AGI in 18 months” have kicked the elephant out. It was more venture capital theatre than a technology roadmap.