Azeem Azhar

We're still using some of that infrastructure today.

Artificial intelligence looks a lot like the latter.

And my gauges for now say that this is still in the boom phase rather than the bubble phase.

But keep in mind that the question of whether a technology is a bubble is fundamentally a financial one.

Even if there is a financial bubble brewing around artificial intelligence and it bursts, it doesn't make the technology any less revolutionary, any less meaningful, or any less useful.

We'll still be left with the infrastructure for an AI economy.

We will be left with companies building and investing with a greater deal of financial discipline.

We will be left with a lot of talent that knows how to build these models, the applications on top of them, make them safe, make them reliable.

And there will still be billions of people using AI every day.

We still, after all, use train tracks and websites, even though their bubbles burst a very long time ago.

Today I want to talk about GPT-5.

This model was met with mixed emotions.

I called it evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Many people were a bit underwhelmed by it.

Some were positively cross.

Here's the thing.

GPT-5 could never have impressed us.

It's because it falls between two paradoxes of progress.

Paradoxes that have played out time and time again through history and they do give us a clue to how we're going to react to ever improving artificial intelligence.

To understand this first paradox, we have to go back to the early days of computing.