Is the AI Winter Finally Upon Us?

(Bloomberg Opinion) — I wrote at the beginning of the year that Wall Street investors should brace for an “AI winter” in 2025; not necessarily a slowdown in investment, and certainly not in hype from the companies, but in tangible progress. Patience would be tested. Some recent events warrant revisiting the question: Is the AI winter upon us? GPT-5, the long-awaited new model from Sam Altman’s OpenAI, was released earlier this month to a tepid reception. If it’s a step toward artificial general intelligence, as the company repeatedly said it would be, it’s a tiny one indeed. The model was so poorly received by some ChatGPT die-hards that the company was forced into an embarrassing rollback, making older models available again. Altman’s claim that GPT-5 was like talking to a “PhD-level” expert quickly became a joke.At the same time, CoreWeave Inc., one of the few pure-play AI stocks, plummeted more than 25% last week after guidance that spooked investors: Revenue growth is expected to be enormously outpaced by capital expenditure increases. (And the IPO lockup was coming to an end, which didn’t help either.)