This is TechCrunch.

2025 was the year AI got a vibe check.

I'm Amaran Jake, and this is a TechCrunch Daily Crunch special.

Money was no object for the AI industry in early 2025.

A vibe check crept in the second half of the year. Opening AI 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 Alexander 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 interests 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 scosh at the edges,

and with it more scrutiny and questions.

Can AI companies sustain their own velocity?

Does scaling in the post-deep-seek era require billions?

Is there a business model that returns a sliver of the multi-billions of investment?

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