The AI investment tsunami that began with the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is starting to crash against the rocks of reality. An early AI adopter was Uber. As far back as 2016 the ride-sharing company had used machine learning for dynamic pricing and fraud detection. In 2022 it used neural networks to…
In two separate incidents in May 2026 at US graduation ceremonies, guest speakers were loudly booed by the students when they praised AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony, and executive Gloria Caulfield seemed utterly bewildered when she was booed by students after calling AI “the next…
Has the productivity impact of AI gone missing in action? We are now well over three years on from the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, since when there has been huge investment in AI across the global economy. No less than 61% of all venture capital ($259 billion) went into AI companies in 2025,…
Despite huge investment, turning AI hype into sustainable profit is proving far harder than expected. Vast amounts of venture capital have gone into AI companies, or at least into companies that claim to be AI companies in their pitch decks. In 2025 no less than $192 billion was invested in AI startups, 61% of the…
The technology media tends to focus on the latest foundation models for AI, products like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek etc. These are general-purpose models that can be adapted to specialist uses. What gets less attention in the press is that a whole industry of such specialist tools has sprung up to take advantage of the…
One cutting-edge area where AI is used is financial market trading. The banking industry has always been an early adopter of technology, and algorithmic trading is nothing new. As far back as 2019, fully 92% of all foreign exchange trading was done by algorithms rather than humans. For stock trading, the percentage is lower, but…
The current boom in AI has been sold to businesses as a great productivity improvement opportunity, at least by the AI vendors and the industry of consultants being paid to help with AI projects. There has been rapid adoption of the technology, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT having 800 million active weekly users, and 78% of companies…
It is now almost three years since ChatGPT was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Two months later, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest adopted consumer application in history. A torrent of money was thrown at AI, from venture capital firms backing AI start-ups (a third of all venture capital went into AI…
There is little doubt that the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, and the tsunami of artificial intelligence (AI) investment that followed had a seismic impact on the global economy. In Q2 2025 $40 billion, or 45% of all venture capital (VC) funding, went to AI-related companies, according to Crunchbase. On the day that I…