Why AI progress is likely to slow in 2025

Are we slowly approaching a new AI “winter”? While, for 2 years, ChatGPT has ignited the digital industry, dangling mountains and wonders to all those who wanted to believe in the revolution of artificial intelligence, it could be that the coming years will be much less transcendent than hoped. In any case, this is the opinion of Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, who spoke on the subject during a recent interview.

As CNBC points out, the manager invited to the DealBook Summit exhibition explained that “ the most accessible levels of progress have been reached » and that, from now on “improvements will become rarer“. According to Sundar Pichai, the long-awaited revolution which will make AI essential will not arrive in 2025, despite the colossal liquidity injected year after year into this sector.

Limits to growth

The industry, which has already devoured tens of billions of dollars, now finds itself facing two major problems: the lack of data and economic and technical difficulties in supporting its own growth.

The first is already well documented. After having swallowed all the data on the Internet, generative AI has nothing left to sink its teeth into, and therefore no obvious path for improvement. Faced with this little problem, the promoters of artificial intelligence are trying to put in place a risky solution. Generate AI content to support AI growth. Unfortunately, this recursive training would pose complex technical challenges and could even lead to “model collapse.” The cyclical regurgitation of data would indeed impoverish their usefulness.

The other concern is less immediately adjustable, since it concerns the physical and technological limits of generative AI. The computing power, and therefore energy, required to train even more advanced AI models is such that it becomes almost impossible to sustain the current rate of growth. Faced with these problems, large digital companies are banking on a revolution in the energy sector. But this last one is struggling to happen.

And GPT-5 disappointing?

Sundar Pichai’s relative pessimism is also echoed in a recent media surveyThe Informationwhich noted that GPT-5 may well be less impressive than expected. Some sources interviewed by the media even indicate that OpenAI’s next chatbot would be worse than GPT-4 on certain tasks.

To go further
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Other big names in the industry, like Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft), are trying to put things together. The manager explained a few weeks ago that, as during the industrial revolution, progress in AI “will not be linear“. However, certain niche improvements could still improve the usefulness of AI in certain sectors, Sundar Pichai wants to believe. If the industry manages to maintain its frenetic pace of investment.