Common misunderstandings about AI in 2025

lastmansurfing
Jan 2
1 min read

OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have all released models showing substantial progress on economically valuable tasks. “Contra the popular belief that scaling is over,” the jump in performance in Google’s latest model was “as big as we’ve ever seen,” wrote Google DeepMind’s deep learning team lead, Oriol Vinyals, after Gemini 3 was released. “No walls in sight.”

There’s reason to wonder how exactly AI models will improve. In domains where getting data for training is expensive—for example in deploying AI agents as personal shoppers—progress may be slow.

“Maybe AI will keep getting better and maybe AI will keep sucking in important ways,” wrote Helen Toner, interim executive director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. But the idea that progress is stalling is hard to justify.