Is the AI winter finally upon us?

I WROTE at the beginning of the year that Wall Street investors should brace for an “artificial intelligence (AI) winter” in 2025; not necessarily a slowdown in investment and certainly not in hype from the companies, but in tangible progress. Patience would be tested. 

Some recent events warrant revisiting the question: Is the AI winter upon us? GPT-5, the long-awaited new model from Sam Altman’s OpenAI, was released earlier this month to a tepid reception. If it is a step towards artificial general intelligence, as the company repeatedly said it would be, it is a tiny one indeed.

The model was so poorly received by some ChatGPT diehards that the company was forced into an embarrassing rollback, making older models available again. Altman’s claim that GPT-5 was like talking to a “PhD-level” expert quickly became a joke.