Every loud statement about the imminent halt of progress in the field of artificial intelligence has invariably turned out to be wrong. Specialists at Rand Group conducted a deep analysis of this pattern and found that all the "funerals" of AI shared the same fundamental problem — a lack of a "body," since development never stopped but only gained momentum.
The analysts illustrated their thesis with a clear graph, where the black line shows real AI progress, and the yellow lines show erroneous forecasts. The key metric is the length of a task in human-hours that AI can complete in half of the cases. The data clearly shows: every time skeptics predicted a "plateau," the curve of actual growth only accelerated.
Why forecasts of a "plateau" systematically fail
As vivid examples, experts cite two landmark episodes. In March 2022, an article titled "Deep Learning Hits a Wall" was published. However, less than a year later, the world saw the GPT-4 model, which revolutionized perceptions of neural network capabilities. The second episode dates to November 2024, when a wave of statements swept through the industry claiming that "the returns from model pre-training have plateaued." For an entire month, the sector was filled with "obituaries" on this topic.
It's important to understand what was happening with the machines at the time these "farewell speeches" were written. The curve didn't just slow down — it accelerated. Many projects relied precisely on the belief in an imminent plateau: from prompt engineering and RAG stacks to "wrapper" startups and web coding tools. All of them were built on the assumption that "the black line would flatten."
The trap of the "mature position"
The psychological aspect deserves special attention. The 2024 statement sounded particularly convincing because it came from people who were themselves creating the technology. This is where the trap lies: predicting a plateau always seems like a "mature" position — skeptical and immune to hype.
However, this position has turned out to be losing for the seventh year in a row. Every forecast of an imminent limit has been shattered by continued growth. The key takeaway is that skepticism about AI capabilities systematically fails to hold up. Betting on a halt in progress has repeatedly let down those who made that bet.
Cryptalist's comment: The cryptocurrency and blockchain market directly depends on innovations in related fields, including AI. History teaches us that betting against technological progress is betting against the market itself. Investors should consider this pattern when evaluating projects, especially those whose business model is based on the assumption of a slowdown in AI development.