AI development is finally slowing down

Generative artificial intelligence probably won’t change your life in 2025 — at least, not more than it already has, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT two years ago, generative AI quickly captured the imagination of users around the world. Now, with the industry’s competitive landscape somewhat established — multiple big tech companies, including Google, have competing models — it’ll take time for another technological breakthrough to shock the AI industry into hyper-speed development again, Pichai said at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit last week.

“I think the progress is going to get harder. When I look at [2025], the low-hanging fruit is gone,” said Pichai, adding: “The hill is steeper … You’re definitely going to need deeper breakthroughs as we get to the next stage.”

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Current language models — like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Meta’s Llama — will keep getting incrementally better, particularly “at reasoning, completing a sequence of actions more reliably,” Pichai said. Those improvements could help push AI closer to generating profits for corporate users — which isn’t happening yet, despite investments in the technology that are expected to surpass $1 trillion “in coming years,” according to a recent Goldman Sachs report.

But another seismic shift that changes the way most people think about or envision AI is unlikely to happen within the next year, said Pichai.

Some tech CEOs, like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, agree with Pichai. “Seventy years of the Industrial Revolution, there wasn’t much industry growth, and then it took off … it’s never going to be linear,” Nadella said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2024 in October.

Others disagree, at least publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, posted “there is no wall” on social media platform X in November — a response to reports that the recently released ChatGPT-4 was only moderately better than previous models.

AI’s progress isn’t exactly walled off, Pichai said: Even incremental development will help hone the technology, making it increasingly more useful for a wider swath of people. Some industry jobs that don’t require college degrees can pay well: On average, AI trainers make more than $64,000 per year, and prompt engineers make more than $110,000, according to ZipRecruiter.

“I think 10 years from now, [computer programming] will be accessible to millions more people,” said Pichai.

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