AI investment hit $1.5T in 2025. Think dot-com energy: bloated valuations, feverish M&A. Startup acquisitions shot up 13%. Deal volume? Up 115%.
Hype’s worn thin. Enterprises are done lighting money on fire with flashy tools. Focus is shifting to agents - LLMs that do things, not just say things.
System shift: Developer workflows are crawling toward agent-based stacks. But LLM non-determinism and lack of trust are killing momentum.
Coding practices are splintering. "Vibe coding" - AI generating entire chunks of code - lets non-devs play dev. But it’s messy. Bugs get weirder. Debugging feels like psychic work. Trust in AI tools is breaking. Engineer confidence, too. Junior hiring slid 25%, but Gen Z devs are crushing it with AI tools. Employers are rethinking “experience” as the resume gold standard.
Elsewhere, 2025 broke some serious ground. Google’s Willow chip leveled up quantum error correction. OpenAI, Adobe, and Microsoft aligned on C2PA watermarking for AI images. Stargate - the $500B datacenter fortress in Texas - went live with 50K NVIDIA Blackwell chips.
