This post was originally published by [email protected] (Louis Rosenberg, Unanimous A.I.) on Venture Beat.

Three years ago, ChatGPT was born. It amazed the world and ignited unprecedented investment and excitement in AI. Today, ChatGPT is still a toddler, but public sentiment around the AI boom has turned sharply negative. The shift began when OpenAI released GPT-5 this summer to mixed reviews, mostly from casual users who, unsurprisingly, judged the system by its surface flaws rather than its underlying capabilities.

Since then, pundits and influencers have declared that AI progress is slowing, that scaling has “hit the wall,” and that the entire field is just another tech bubble inflated by blusterous hype. In fact, many influencers