After years of inflated promises, the market is moving past the initial AI hype cycle. Leaders realize that simply attaching "AI" to a company name is not a strategy. This shift leads to a more realistic understanding of where AI provides practical value, which will stabilize hiring and investment.

Previous technology shifts like mobile or client-server were often pushed by technologists onto a hesitant market. In contrast, the current AI trend is being pulled by customers who are actively demanding AI features in their products, creating unprecedented pressure on companies to integrate them quickly.

AI should be viewed not as a new technological wave, but as the final, mature stage of the 60-year computer revolution. This reframes investment strategy away from betting on a new paradigm and towards finding incumbents who can leverage the mature technology, much like containerization capped the mass production era.

As consumers become wary of "AI," the winning strategy is integrating advanced capabilities into existing products seamlessly, like Google is doing with Gemini. The "AI" branding used for fundraising and recruiting will fade from consumer-facing marketing, making the technology feel like a natural product evolution.

AI models will produce a few stunning, one-off results in fields like materials science. These isolated successes will trigger an overstated hype cycle proclaiming 'science is solved,' masking the longer, more understated trend of AI's true, profound, and incremental impact on scientific discovery.

In the early days, Synthesia and peers decided "Generative AI" sounded too geeky and collectively chose to brand the space as "Synthetic Media." They later regretted this as "Generative AI" became the dominant term, costing them significant SEO advantages and brand association built over four years.

In 2015-2016, major tech companies actively avoided the term "AI," fearing it was tainted from previous "AI winters." It wasn't until around 2017 that branding as an "AI company" became a positive signal, highlighting the incredible speed of the recent AI revolution and shift in public perception.

The dramatic increase in "AI PM" job listings isn't just about new roles. It's a marketing tactic. Companies use the "AI" label to attract top talent, and candidates adopt it to signal value and command higher salaries, creating a feedback loop.

The term "AI" is a moving target. Technologies like databases or even machine learning were once considered AI but are now just "software." In common usage, AI simply refers to the newest, most novel computational capabilities, and the label will fade as they become commonplace.