Is an AI winter finally upon us? A distinct chill is in the air

The performance of OpenAI's GPT-5 has left diehard AI fans cold

- Dave Lee

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 AI 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 (AGI), as the company repeatedly said it would be, it's a tiny one indeed. The model was so poorly received by some ChatGPT diehards that OpenAI 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, 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 its IPO lock-up was coming to an end, which didn't help either.