Three years post-ChatGPT, the hysteria has officially left the building. The headlines predicting the immediate end of humanity—or the immediate end of all labor—have largely vanished, replaced by quarterly earnings calls and dull implementation strategies.

We are currently standing in the aftermath of the "Great AI Correction" of late 2024. The landscape looks vastly different than the wild west of the early boom. The easy money is gone, the tourists have left the market, and we are left with a technology that is simultaneously less magical and more ingrained in our lives than we ever expected.

Here is the reality of Generative AI as we near the end of 2025.

In retrospect, the crash of 2024 was inevitable. For two years, venture capital poured billions into startups that were essentially just "wrappers"—thin user interfaces glued on top of OpenAI or Anthropic APIs.

By early 2025, the slaughter was undeniable. When Apple and Google finally baked deep generative capabilities directly into iOS and Android, thousands of subscription-based writing assistants, note-takers, and PDF summarizers were wiped out overnight. Why pay $10 a month for a third-party app when your phone’s operating system does it for free?

Investors who threw money at anything with ".ai" in the domain lost their shirts. The herd has thinned. The valuation metrics have shifted from "how cool is the demo?" to "how much margin does this actually preserve?"

The biggest shift in 2025 hasn't been the models getting exponentially smarter (though they have improved); it’s that they stopped just talking and started doing.

2023-2024 was the era of the Chatbot. You asked a question; it gave an answer.
2025 is the era of the Agent.

We are finally seeing the promise of "agentic workflows." We aren't just using AI to write an email; we are giving it permission to access our calendar, cross-reference with a flight database, book the seat, and invoice the finance department.

The friction is disappearing. The "Blank Page" problem was solved two years ago. Now, the "Bureaucracy" problem is being attacked. Enterprise software, once clunky and menu-heavy, is becoming conversational and autonomous. You don't click buttons in Salesforce anymore; you just tell the system to "update the pipeline."

However, it’s not all productivity and profit. The cultural cost of 2025 is undeniable: the internet has become incredibly noisy.

We are living through the "Slop Era." Search engines and social feeds are choked with AI-generated filler—generic blog posts, hallucinated news articles, and bizarre, algorithmic videos designed to farm clicks. The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a conspiracy theory anymore; it feels like a Tuesday.

This has created a fascinating counter-trend: the premium on humanity. "Verified Human" is becoming the new luxury status. Substack, podcasts, and live events are booming because people are desperate for connection with an actual consciousness, not a predictive text algorithm. Trust has plummeted, and verification is the most valuable currency left.

The other reality hitting home in 2025 is physical. We spent years treating the cloud like it was ethereal. It turns out, the cloud is made of copper, water, and electricity.

The massive data center build-outs required to train GPT-5 class models have slammed into local power grids. We are seeing the bizarre reality of tech giants striking deals with nuclear power plants just to keep the servers running. The infinite scaling of AI is currently being throttled not by code, but by physics and kilowatts.

So, is GenAI a bubble?

The financial speculation was. The technology is not.

In late 2025, AI feels less like "Skynet" and more like electricity or the internet itself. It is becoming boring, invisible infrastructure. We don't talk about "using AI" to write code anymore than a carpenter talks about "using electricity" to power a saw. It’s just how the job gets done.

The magic trick is over. Now we're just living with the machinery. And frankly, while it’s less exciting than the hype of 2023, it’s a whole lot more useful.