Why the AI Future Is Unfolding Faster Than Anyone Expected
AI is improving more quickly than we realize. The economic and societal impact could be massive.
By Brad Stone
May 20, 2025 at 8:30 AM EDT
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When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022, people could instantly see that the field of artificial intelligence had dramatically advanced. We all speak a language, after all, and could appreciate how the chatbot answered questions in a fluid, close-to-human style. AI has made immense strides since then, but many of us are—and let me put this delicately—too unsophisticated to notice.
Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says our limited ability to gather specialized knowledge makes it much harder for us to recognize the disconcerting pace of improvements in technology. Most people aren't high-level mathematicians and may not know that, just in the past few years, AI's mastery has progressed from high-school-level algebra to ninja-level calculus. Similarly, there are relatively few musical virtuosos in the world, but AI has recently become adept at reading sheet music, understanding musical theory, even creating new music in major genres. 'What a lot of people are underestimating is just how much has happened in a very short amount of time,' Tegmark says. 'Things are going very fast now.'
In San Francisco, still for now the center of the AI action, one can track these advances in the waves of new computer learning methods, chatbot features and podcast-propagated buzzwords. In February, OpenAI unveiled a tool called Deep Research that functions like a resourceful colleague, responding to in-depth queries by digging up facts on the web, synthesizing information and generating chart-filled reports. In another major development, both OpenAI and Anthropic—co-founded by Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei and a breakaway group of former OpenAI engineers—developed tools that let users control whether a chatbot engages in 'reasoning': They can direct it to deliberate over a query for an extended period to arrive at more accurate or thorough answers.
Another fashionable trend is called agentic AI —autonomous programs that can (theoretically) perform tasks for a user without supervision, such as sending emails or booking restaurant reservations. Techies are also buzzing about 'vibe coding'—not a new West Coast meditation practice but the art of positing general ideas and letting popular coding assistants like Microsoft Corp.'s GitHub Copilot or Cursor, made by the startup Anysphere Inc., take it from there.
As developers blissfully vibe code, there's also been an unmistakable vibe shift in Silicon Valley. Just a year ago, breakthroughs in AI were usually accompanied by furrowed brows and wringing hands, as tech and political leaders fretted about the safety implications. That changed sometime around February, when US Vice President JD Vance, speaking at a global summit in Paris focused on mitigating harms from AI, inveighed against any regulation that might impede progress. 'I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety,' he said. 'I'm here to talk about AI opportunity.'
When Vance and President Donald Trump took office, they dashed any hope of new government rules that might slow the AI juggernauts. On his third day in office, Trump rescinded an executive order from his predecessor, Joe Biden, that set AI safety standards and asked tech companies to submit safety reports for new products. At the same time, AI startups have softened their calls for regulation. In 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Congress that the possibility AI could run amok and hurt humans was among his ' areas of greatest concern ' and that companies should have to get licenses from the government to operate new models. At the TED Conference in Vancouver this April, he said he no longer favored that approach, because he'd ' learned more about how the government works.'
It's not unusual in Silicon Valley to see tech companies and their leaders contort their ideologies to fit the shifting political winds. Still, the intensity over the past few months has been startling to watch. Many tech companies have stopped highlighting existential AI safety concerns, shed employees focused on the issue (along with diversity, sustainability and other Biden-era priorities) and become less apologetic about doing business with militaries at home and abroad, bypassing concerns from staff about placing deadly weapons in the hands of AI. Rob Reich, a professor of political science and senior fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University, says 'there's a shift to explicitly talking about American advantage. AI security and sovereignty are the watchwords of the day, and the geopolitical implications of building powerful AI systems are stronger than ever.'
If Trump's policies are one reason for the change, another is the emergence of DeepSeek and its talented, enigmatic CEO, Liang Wenfeng. When the Chinese AI startup released its R1 model in the US in January, analysts marveled at the quality of a product from a company that had raised far less capital than its US rivals and was supposedly using data centers with less powerful Nvidia Corp. chips. DeepSeek's chatbot shot to the top of the charts on app stores, and US tech stocks promptly cratered on the possibility that the upstart had figured out a more efficient way to reap AI's gains.
The uproar has quieted since then, but Trump has further restricted the sale of powerful American AI chips to China, and Silicon Valley now watches DeepSeek and its Chinese peers with a sense of urgency. 'Everyone has to think very carefully about what is at stake if we cede leadership,' says Alex Kotran, CEO of the AI Education Project.
Losing to China isn't the only potential downside, though. AI-generated content is becoming so pervasive online that it could soon sap the web of any practical utility, and the Pentagon is using machine learning to hasten humanity's possible contact with alien life. Let's hope they like us. Nor has this geopolitical footrace calmed the widespread fear of economic damage and job losses. Take just one field: computer programming. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., said on an earnings call in April that AI now generates 'well over 30%' of all new code for the company's products. Garry Tan, CEO of startup program Y Combinator, said on a podcast that for a quarter of the startups in his winter program, 95% of their lines of code were AI-generated.
MIT's Tegmark, who's also president of an AI safety advocacy organization called the Future of Life Institute, finds solace in his belief that a human instinct for self-preservation will ultimately kick in: Pro-AI business leaders and politicians 'don't want someone to build an AI that will overthrow the government any more than they want plutonium to be legalized.' He remains concerned, though, that the inexorable acceleration of AI development is occurring just outside the visible spectrum of most people on Earth, and that it could have economic and societal consequences beyond our current imagination. 'It sounds like sci-fi,' Tegmark says, 'but I remind you that ChatGPT also sounded like sci-fi as recently as a few years ago.'
More from the AI Issue
DeepSeek's 'Tech Madman' Founder Is Threatening US Dominance in AI Race
The company's sudden emergence illustrates how China's industry is thriving despite Washington's efforts to slow it down.
Microsoft's CEO on How AI Will Remake Every Company, Including His
Nervous customers and a volatile partnership with OpenAI are complicating things for Satya Nadella and the world's most valuable company.
America's Leading Alien Hunters Depend on AI to Speed Their Search
Harvard's Galileo Project has brought high-end academic research to a once-fringe pursuit, and the Pentagon is watching.
How AI Has Already Changed My Job
Workers from different industries talk about the ways they're adapting.
Maybe AI Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All
The assertion that bots are choking off human life online has never seemed more true.
Anthropic Is Trying to Win the AI Race Without Losing Its Soul
Dario Amodei has transformed himself from an academic into the CEO of a $61 billion startup.
Why Apple Still Hasn't Cracked AI
Insiders say continued failure to get artificial intelligence right threatens everything from the iPhone's dominance to plans for robots and other futuristic products.
10 People to Watch in Tech: From AI Startups to Venture Capital
A guide to the people you'll be hearing more about in the near future.
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An Appeal to My Alma Mater
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Maggie Li Zhang enrolled in a college class where students were told to take notes and read on paper rather than on a screen, she felt anxious and alienated. Zhang and her peers had spent part of high school distance learning during the pandemic. During her first year at Pomona College, in Southern California, she had felt most engaged in a philosophy course where the professor treated a shared Google Doc as the focus of every class, transcribing discussions in real time on-screen and enabling students to post comments. So the 'tech-free' class that she took the following semester disoriented her. 'When someone writes something you think: Should I be taking notes too?' she told me in an email. 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The Wall Street Journal reported last month that sales of old-fashioned blue books for written exams had increased over the past year by more than 30 percent at Texas A&M University and nearly 50 percent at the University of Florida, while rising 80 percent at UC Berkeley over the past two years. And professors at schools such as the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland are banning laptops in class. The pervasiveness of technology on campuses poses a distinct threat to small residential liberal-arts colleges. Pomona, like its closest peer institutions, spends lots of time, money, and effort to house nearly 95 percent of 1,600 students on campus, feed them in dining halls, and teach them in tiny groups, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 8 to 1. That costly model is worth it, boosters insist, because young people are best educated in a closely knit community where everyone learns from one another in and outside the classroom. 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McWilliams has never allowed laptops or other devices in her classes; she has also won Pomona's most prestigious teaching prize every time she's been eligible. 'There may not be a million college-bound teens across this country who want to attend such a school,' she said, 'but I bet there are enough to sustain a vibrant campus or two.' So far, Pomona's leadership has not aligned itself with the professors and students who see the status quo as worse than what came before it. 'I have done a little asking around today and I was not able to find any initiative around limiting technology,' the college's new chief communications officer, Katharine Laidlaw, wrote to me. 'But let's keep in touch. I could absolutely see how this could become a values-based experiment at Pomona.' Pomona would face a number of obstacles in trying to make itself less tech-dependent. 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