(2025-08-10) Butler I've got bad news. The AI cycle is over for now

Adam Butler I've got bad news. The AI cycle is over for now.

I’ve been an unapologetic AI maximalist since the first time I tricked GPT-4 into writing a working Python back-test for a volatility strategy back in early 2023. I’m still convinced it will take the wider economy years—maybe decades—to fully digest the productivity shock we’ve already uncorked. But the curve we’ve been riding just flattened into a long plateau.

the models we have remain, at their core, next-token roulette wheels.

What comes next is not the next spectacular demo but the quiet absorption of today’s tools into the 80 percent of the economy that still runs on Excel and email.

To my fellow zealots: we are not going back to the pre-2022 world. The ceiling just got higher, but the ladder is longer than we thought. That isn’t failure; it’s physics. The next breakthrough will arrive; maybe from a grad student with a sparse attention kernel, maybe from a national lab running a ten-gigawatt reactor. Until then the boring work of integration is the only game in town.

Robb Smith replies: I think I start w a different premise. The longest Archimedean lever for human society of AI is not in superintelligence, which under our current systems of sensemaking and governance would just amplify our global problems, rather it is in upleveling the collective sensemaking at scale that has limited our ability to generate new structures to address those problems. AI of today is adequate to do so, properly deployed. (collective thought)