This is it?

- This is the future?

Remember when the iPhone came out?

That really was something. A piece of glass in your pocket that could take better photos than your camera, hold your entire music library, let you check your bank balance, order dinner, text your mates, and even make a phone call.

It changed everything. That was 2007.

Since then? Nothing has come close.

But that hasn’t stopped the tech industry from trying to create the next 'Next Big Thing'. Desperately and pathetically hunting for growth.

Remember Web 3.0? Blockchain? NFTs? The metaverse? All pitched as the next iPhone moment. All of them died.

And now, after all these false starts and flops, we’ve arrived at AI, the latest saviour of Silicon Valley. The last big bet in a decade full of delusions.

Except here’s the problem...

What Does AI Actually Do?

ChatGPT can write a slightly better email. Perplexity gives you a slightly cleaner search result. Gemini can draw a picture.

Sometimes it gets things right. Sometimes it doesn’t. And the rest of the time, it just makes things up.

We’ve spent hundreds of billions on this. We are forecast to spend trillions more. And for what?

Mediocre tools with slick interfaces. Thin wrappers over large language models pretending to be intelligent. Startups built on nothing but prompts and vibes. Products that don’t solve real problems.

Writing? Marginally improved.

Search? Slightly less shit.

Customer service? Still a nightmare.

This is the revolution?

It’s Not About The Tech

The AI hype isn’t happening because the products are good. It’s happening because the industry needs a story. And the story, for now, is AI.

That’s all it is.

A story to justify another investment cycle. A new wave of spending. A reason for founders to raise and VCs to deploy and public companies to talk about transformation on earnings calls.

Because the growth is gone.

The last true platform shift was the smartphone. It created real demand, real utility, real value. And ever since, the industry has been chasing a ghost.

They’ve tried to conjure it in VR headsets, crypto wallets, decentralised apps, generative art. None of it stuck. But AI? AI is vague enough, broad enough, and confusing enough that they’ve managed to convince everyone that this time is different.

It isn’t.

There’s no product here. There’s no paradigm shift. There’s just a desperate industry clinging to the hope that if they throw enough money at the problem, eventually it will become important.

AI today is just a probability based, pattern recognition engine. That's it. It cannot and will not become an intelligent being. A better version of ChatGPT will not be able to reason. It cannot go from what it is today, to that bright eyed version of the future.

Don't worry about AI taking over the world and killing us all. It can't even take over my Inbox without fucking it up.

The Opportunity Cost Is Obscene.

We humans have currently spent about $2 trillion on AI. Just think about all that investment, all that talent, all that infrastructure for a minute.

I'll let that sink in.

$2,000,000,000,000.

And for what?

Slightly better writing tools?

Chatbots that lie to us?

Image generators?

Summarisers?

Assistants that mostly just parrot the internet back to you.

Imagine what we could have done instead. How many hospitals could we have built? How much progress could we have made in cancer research? How many real, difficult, worthwhile problems could we have tackled? But no. We spent it training models to talk confidently about things they don’t understand.

And now the whole industry is locked into the lie. No one can afford to blink first. So the hype keeps going.

Until it doesn’t.

Because eventually, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, people will wake up and say: wait, is this it?

Is this really it?

And when that happens, the whole thing comes crashing down.

So Here’s My Final Message for 2025

This was the year we convinced ourselves a chatbot was the future of humanity.

This was the year we told each other that copywriting tools were going to change the world.

This was the year Sam Altman became king of a kingdom built on sand.

So goodbye, 2025. You can keep your hallucinating assistants and trillion-dollar data centres. You can keep your fake productivity and inflated promises. You can keep your hype.

Because in 2026, reality bites. And it won't be pretty.

Raise your glasses to 2026. The year that the lie ends. The year when humans wake up to what makes us all human. And isn't tech. It isn't found on a screen.

So good riddance to social media.

Good riddance to Chat GPT.

Good riddance to big tech.

Happy Fucking New Year.

See you on the other side,

Jon "Scrooge and the Grinch all rolled into one" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

I tried to write this using AI but it didn't like the message. It kept saying I was wrong. Maybe it's not so stupid after all...