Money was no object for the AI industry in early 2025. A vibe check crept in the second half of the year.
OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machine Labs raised individual $2 billion seed rounds before shipping a single product. Even first-time founders were raising at a scale that once belonged only to Big Tech.
Such astronomical investments were followed by equally incredible spends. Meta shelled out nearly $15 billion to lock up Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and spent countless more millions to poach talent from other AI labs. Meanwhile, AI’s biggest players promised close to $1.3 trillion in future infrastructure spending.
The first half of 2025 matched the fervor, and investor interest, of the prior year. That mood has shifted in recent months to deliver a vibe check of sorts. Extreme optimism for AI, and the accompanying wild valuations, is still intact. But that rosy view is now being tempered with concerns over an AI bubble bursting, user safety, and the sustainability of technological progress at its current pace.
The era of unabashed acceptance and celebration of AI is fading just a skosh at the edges. And with it, more scrutiny and questions. Can AI companies sustain their own velocity? Does scaling in the post-DeepSeek era require billions? Is there a business model that returns a sliver of the multi-billions of investment?
We’ve been there for every step. And our most popular stories of 2025 tell the real story: an industry hitting a reality check even as it promises to reshape reality itself.
How the year started
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 21: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appears during a news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump. Image Credits:Getty Images
The biggest AI labs got bigger this year.
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