2025: The Year the Bubble Didn’t Pop (Yet)
Reflecting on my 2025 predictions.
2025 is not over yet, but it is time to consolidate and reflect on what has been a very eventful, sometimes challenging year.
Sometimes I’m happy to be wrong. Looking back at my predictions for 2025, the reality is far messier than a simple “boom” or “bust.” We didn’t get the market correction we needed, and we didn’t get the enterprise automation we were promised. Instead, 2025 somehow became the year of The Great Stalling (although it looked like a boom year in may ways) - a strange time where old metrics are broken, but new value hasn’t yet arrived.
Here is the brutal retrospective on what actually happened.
1. The AI Investment Bubble: No Pop, Just “Hot Potato”
Prediction: A market correction and bubble burst. Reality: ❌ Failed. The bubble didn’t pop; it just hardened.
I predicted that profits would fail to catch up to valuations, triggering a crash. The first part was true - profits are nowhere to be found. But the crash never came.
Instead, the venture world adopted a cynical new playbook: Hot Potato. We are seeing “insane valuations” handed to pre-revenue startups based on hype, not fundamentals. The strategy isn’t to build value; it’s to “get in, mark it up, and pass the bomb to the next fund” before the music stops.
We are staring at a ticking bomb of burn rates and astronomical training costs. But as of late 2025, the explosion hasn’t happened. We are just sweating, waiting for the timer to hit zero.
2. Hyperautomation: The “Doing” Gap
Prediction: 30% of enterprises would embrace hyperautomation. Reality: ❌ Failed. AI isn’t “doing” work; it’s just answering questions.
I thought AI would streamline operations. I was wrong. The data from 700 million users reveals a glaring disconnect: AI is not primarily a work tool. A staggering 73% of usage is for non-work purposes.
In the enterprise, AI hasn’t become the “productivity suite” we imagined; it has become a “high-cost Google competitor”. Its dominant function is “Seeking Information” (49%), while high-value workflows like software development account for a measly 4.2% of usage. We aren’t automating the enterprise; we’re just building the world’s most expensive search engine.
3. Software Development: The “Vibecoding” Hangover
Prediction: AI handles 40% of software tasks. Reality: ✅ Validated (with a heavy cost).
We hit the numbers, but we missed the quality. Summer 2025 brought the “vibecoding” wave, where simple prompts promised instant MVPs.
The result? A massive “vibecoding hangover.” We learned the hard way that a product built over the weekend is often a liability on Monday. These tools produced “dazzling one-shot demos” that turned into unmaintainable “spaghetti code” the moment they needed to scale.
The lesson is clear: Speed of creation is irrelevant if it leads to a velocity of zero months later. The winners aren’t the “vibecoders,” but the engineers using AI to solve actual hard problems.
4. AGI: The 7.5 Million Year Wait
Prediction: No AGI in 2025. Reality: ✅ Validated.
We are getting dangerously good at building the ultimate “Answer Machine,” but AGI remains a fantasy.
If we want an AI to answer the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” the current trajectory suggests we might be waiting 7.5 million years for the answer. The gap between computational capability and true utility remains absurd. We are still building “Question Machines” that require us to be the smart ones.
5. The Compute Surge: Building the Fortress
Prediction: A “computational fabric” would emerge. Reality: ✅ Validated. (It’s a closed loop).
The infrastructure was built, but it wasn’t a democratized fabric. It was a fortress.
We watched OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia construct a circular economy where capital is simply recycled between partners. OpenAI pays Oracle, Oracle pays Nvidia, Nvidia invests in OpenAI. This isn’t just a boom; it’s the construction of a private utility designed to lock out competition.
The Verdict
2025 wasn’t the year of the Revolution. It was the year of the Squeeze.
Startups are getting squeezed by infrastructure costs.
Investors are getting squeezed by valuations that defy gravity.
Enterprises are getting squeezed by tools that cost more than the value they create.
The “easy money” will come to an end. The only metric that matters going forward is Output per Watt - the ability to turn expensive energy into actual, defensible economic value. Everything else is just noise.