Cal Newport’s year-end wrap-up of AI in 2025 echoes Dr. Seuss and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Check out his podcast Ep 386: Was 2025 a Great or Terrible Year for AI? (w/ Ed Zitron). For added bonus points, read his newsletter Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025?

Newport’s entre into the discussion:

Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman ​made a bold prediction​: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Soon after, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, elaborated on this claim when he stated in an interview that 2025 would be the year “that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing…to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He provided examples, such as filling out paperwork and booking hotel rooms. ​An Axios article covering Weil’s remarks​ provided a blunt summary: “2025 is the year of AI agents.”

I’ve written to the founders of Axios about their use of click bait and misleading headlines. The content is often spot-on, but ignore the headlines. Aside from that, there was supposed to be a “hockey stick” growth curve in power and usefulness of Generative AI and Agentic AI. Heck, I even wrote a few columns on those relating to manufacturing.

The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-step computer programming problems. It seemed natural that this same skill might easily generalize to other types of tasks. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, became so enthusiastic about these possibilities that early in 2025, he claimed that AI agents would imminently unleash a ​“digital labor revolution”​ worth trillions of dollars.

Once again reality beats hype.

But here’s the thing: none of that ended up happening.

As I report in my most recent New Yorker article, titled ​“Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025,”​ AI agents failed to live up to their hype. We didn’t end up with the equivalent of Claude Code or Codex for other types of work. And the products that were released, such as ChatGPT Agent, fell laughably short of being ready to take over major parts of our jobs. (In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-down menu on a real estate website.)

Voice of a skeptic:

Silicon Valley skeptic Gary Marcus told me that the underlying technology powering these agents – the same large language models used by chatbots – would never be capable of delivering on these promises. “They’re building clumsy tools on top of clumsy tools,” he said. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy implicitly agreed when he said, during ​a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast​, that there had been “overpredictions going on in the industry,” before then adding: “In my mind, this is really a lot more accurately described as the Decade of the Agent.”

What I have been trying to parse out for all of last year in my AI interviews:

I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.

For those trying to reach me with more AI hype—I am most interested in those pieces of actually useful AI that are helping people do their jobs while providing benefits to organizations. Let’s see more of that. I want to know what’s real.

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