{"id":213260,"date":"2025-12-27T16:10:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-27T16:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/213260\/"},"modified":"2025-12-27T16:10:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T16:10:15","slug":"why-a-i-didnt-transform-our-lives-in-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/213260\/","title":{"rendered":"Why A.I. Didn\u2019t Transform Our Lives in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

One year ago, Sam Altman<\/a>, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, made a bold prediction: \u201cWe believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents \u2018join the workforce\u2019 and materially change the output of companies.\u201d A couple of weeks later, the company\u2019s chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said at the World Economic Forum conference at Davos in January, \u201cI think 2025 is the year that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.\u201d He gave examples of artificial intelligence filling out online forms and booking restaurant reservations. He later promised, \u201cWe\u2019re going to be able to do that, no question.\u201d (OpenAI has a corporate partnership with Cond\u00e9 Nast, the owner of The New Yorker.)<\/p>\n

This was no small boast. Chatbots can respond directly to a text-based prompt\u2014by answering a question, say, or writing a rough draft of an e-mail<\/a>. But an agent, in theory, would be able to navigate the digital world on its own, and complete tasks that require multiple steps and the use of other software, such as web browsers. Consider everything that goes into making a hotel reservation: deciding on the right nights, filtering based on one\u2019s preferences, reading reviews, searching various websites to compare rates and amenities. An agent could conceivably automate all of these activities. The implications of such a technology would be immense. Chatbots are convenient for human employees to use; effective A.I. agents might replace the employees altogether. The C.E.O. of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, who has claimed that half the work at his company is done by A.I., predicted that agents will help unleash a \u201cdigital labor revolution,\u201d worth trillions of dollars.<\/p>\n

2025 in Review<\/a><\/p>\n

New Yorker writers reflect on the year\u2019s highs and lows.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

2025 was heralded as the Year of the A.I. Agent in part because, by the end of 2024, these tools had become undeniably adept at computer programming. A demo of OpenAI\u2019s Codex agent, from May, showed a user asking the tool to modify his personal website. \u201cAdd another tab next to investment\/tools that is called \u2018food I like.\u2019 In the doc put\u2014tacos,\u201d the user wrote. The chatbot quickly carried out a sequence of interconnected actions: it reviewed the files in the website\u2019s directory, examined the contents of a promising file, then used a search command to find the right location to insert a new line of code. After the agent learned how the site was structured, it used this information to successfully add a new page that featured tacos. As a computer scientist myself, I had to admit that Codex was tackling the task more or less as I would. Silicon Valley grew convinced that other difficult tasks would soon be conquered.<\/p>\n

As 2025 winds down, however, the era of general-purpose A.I. agents has failed to emerge. This fall, Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, who left the company and started an A.I.-education project, described agents as \u201ccognitively lacking\u201d and said, \u201cIt\u2019s just not working.\u201d Gary Marcus, a longtime critic of tech-industry hype, recently wrote on his Substack that \u201cAI Agents have, so far, mostly been a dud.\u201d This gap between prediction and reality matters. Fluent chatbots and reality-bending video generators are impressive, but they cannot, on their own, usher in a world in which machines take over many of our activities. If the major A.I. companies cannot deliver broadly useful agents, then they may be unable to deliver on their promises of an A.I.-powered future.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cA.I. agents\u201d evokes ideas of supercharged new technology reminiscent of \u201cThe Matrix\u201d or \u201cMission: Impossible\u2014The Final Reckoning.\u201d In truth, agents are not some kind of customized digital brain; instead, they are powered by the same type of large language model that chatbots use. When you ask an agent to tackle a chore, a control program\u2014a straightforward application that co\u00f6rdinates the agent\u2019s actions\u2014turns your request into a prompt for an L.L.M. Here\u2019s what I want to accomplish, here are the tools available, what should I do first? The control program then attempts any actions that the language model suggests, tells it about the outcome, and asks, Now what should I do? This loop continues until the L.L.M. deems the task complete.<\/p>\n

This setup turns out to excel at automating software development. Most of the actions required to create or modify a computer program can be implemented by entering a limited set of commands into a text-based terminal. These commands tell a computer to navigate a file system, add or update text in source files, and, if needed, compile human-readable code into machine-readable bits. This is an ideal setting for L.L.M.s. \u201cThe terminal interface is text-based, and that is the domain that language models are based on,\u201d Alex Shaw, the co-creator of Terminal-Bench, a popular tool used to evaluate coding agents, told me.<\/p>\n

More generalized assistants, of the sort envisioned by Altman, would require agents to leave the comfortable constraints of the terminal. Since most of us complete computer tasks by pointing and clicking, an A.I. that can \u201cjoin the workforce\u201d probably needs to know how to use a mouse\u2014a surprisingly difficult goal. The Times recently reported<\/a> on a string of new startups that have been building \u201cshadow sites\u201d\u2014replicas of popular webpages, like those of United Airlines and Gmail, on which A.I. can analyze how humans use a cursor. In July, OpenAI released ChatGPT Agent, an early version of a bot that can use a web browser to complete tasks, but one review noted that \u201ceven simple actions like clicking, selecting elements, and searching can take the agent several seconds\u2014or even minutes.\u201d At one point, the tool got stuck for nearly a quarter of an hour trying to select a price from a real-estate site\u2019s drop-down menu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One year ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, made a bold prediction: \u201cWe believe that, in 2025,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[4311,220,218,45805,219,1711,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-213260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-a-i","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","12":"tag-artificialintelligence","13":"tag-google","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}