Research · Alan Seideman
AI tools & human behavior, quarter by quarter
Every notable trend since ChatGPT launched in November 2022: when it was born, how hyped it got, and how long it actually lasted.
Then the part that matters for planning — what the pattern of the last sixteen quarters says about the next five years. Each lane traces a trend's salience over time; hover one for its full story, or pick a quarter to read what happened in it.
Type
Fate
Lane height is salience and usage, 0 to 5, in that quarter. Mainstream became infrastructure · Recurring returns in waves · Niche persists small · Absorbed means the product died and the capability lived on inside a platform · Faded is gone.
Trend · grouped by quarter born
| Trend | Type | Born | Peak hype | Lasting | Fate | What happened | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT & the general assistant | Tool launch | 2022 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The defining consumer product of the decade: fastest-growing app ever, mobile habit by mid-2023, ~900M weekly users by Feb 2026 and still growing toward 1B — though its traffic share fell from ~78% to ~54% in the multi-model era. | 1M users in 5 days; 100M MAU Jan 2023 (UBS); 100M weekly Nov 2023; 300M Dec 2024; 800M Oct 2025; ~900M Feb 2026. |
| Students using AI for homework | Emergent behavior | 2022 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The single stickiest consumer use case. Bans (NYC, Italy) reversed within months; by 2025-26 education gave up on detection and redesigned assessment — the take-home essay is effectively dead. | Similarweb 'summer slump': traffic -9.7%/-9.6% Jun-Jul 2023, rebounding every back-to-school since. |
| Pasting code & errors into a chatbot | Emergent behavior | 2022 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Became core developer workflow, then was absorbed upward into AI-native IDEs (2024) and coding agents (2025-26). Stack Overflow traffic fell ~35-50% from its 2022 peak as Q&A moved to LLMs. | Stack Overflow banned ChatGPT answers Dec 5, 2022 — the first institutional reaction; 2023 SO survey: 70% using/planning AI tools. |
| AI as first-drafter (email, copy, docs) | Emergent behavior | 2022 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The default white-collar use case; later built natively into Gmail, Office, and Notion. Its dark side got a name in 2025: 'workslop.' | Rep. Ted Lieu drafted legislation with ChatGPT Jan 2023; drafting remains a top-3 use in every usage study through 2026. |
| Lensa 'Magic Avatars' fad | Tool launch | 2022 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | Topped the App Store in December, gone by February — the archetype of the one-viral-moment AI consumer app, a template repeated by yearbook apps (2023), Ghibli (2025), and figurines (2025). | Chart-topping Dec 2022 (TechCrunch); Priori Data shows steep post-spike revenue decay. |
| “ChatGPT will kill Google” | Hyped trend | 2022 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Absorbed | Mechanically wrong (Google kept ~90% share for years), directionally right: the thesis died as stated, then came true sideways via chat-first behavior and zero-click AI answers (see 'AI search substitution'). | Google internal 'code red' Dec 2022 (NYT); Bing's Feb 2023 relaunch never moved share. |
| Jailbreaking / DAN prompts | Hyped trend | 2022 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Niche | A mass hobby through H1 2023, then models hardened and novelty wore off; professionalized into red-teaming and security research. | DAN emerged on Reddit Dec 2022; CNBC coverage Feb 2023; thousands-star GitHub prompt repos. |
| AI-art backlash (“AI art is theft”) | Hyped trend | 2022 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Niche | Persisted and institutionalized — artist lawsuits, Getty v. Stability, opt-out regimes — then broadened into the general anti-slop sentiment of 2025-26. Normalized rather than resolved. | ArtStation 'No AI' protests Dec 2022; Andersen v. Stability Jan 2023. |
| ChatGPT screenshot culture | Hyped trend | 2022 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | The 'look what the AI said' genre flooded Twitter/LinkedIn for a season, then died as AI output became unremarkable — the fastest sign of normalization. | A recognized media genre by early 2023 (Time, Feb 2023); gone by 2024. |
| Image generation goes prosumer (Midjourney) | Tool launch | 2022 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | Midjourney v4/v5 made AI images photoreal; the capability commoditized into ChatGPT/Gemini by 2025 while deepfake anxiety (Balenciaga Pope, fake Trump arrest) became permanent policy terrain. | v4 Nov 2022; v5 + Balenciaga Pope Mar 2023; ~15M Discord members by 2023. |
| GPT-4 & the frontier-model race | Tool launch | 2023 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | GPT-4 set the capability bar for ~18 months and made 'frontier model' the industry's unit of competition — a race that never stopped (Claude 3, o1, Gemini 3, GPT-5, Opus 5) and by 2026 produced ~112 model releases in a single half-year. | Mar 14, 2023; 90th-percentile bar exam; retired Apr 2025 after successors. |
| Bard → Gemini: Google's long comeback | Tool launch | 2023 Q1 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | From the $100B demo-error stumble (Feb 2023) through the rebrand (2024) and 2.5's credibility (2025) to Gemini 3 taking the frontier crown (Nov 2025) and powering Siri (2026) — the decade's best comeback arc. | Bard opened Mar 2023; Gemini app ~900M+ MAU by May 2026, ~25-27% traffic share. |
| Building on the API (indie AI apps) | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The Mar 2023 10x price cut made 'build a product on the API in a weekend' the indie default; matured into the AI-app economy, then fused with vibe coding in 2025. | gpt-3.5-turbo at $0.002/1K tokens Mar 1, 2023; AI = majority of top Product Hunt launches by mid-2023. |
| Open weights (LLaMA leak → DeepSeek → Kimi) | Tool launch | 2023 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The Feb 2023 research release and 4chan leak spawned the entire open-weights world: Llama 2 legitimized it (Jul 2023), DeepSeek R1 shocked markets (Jan 2025), and by 2026 Chinese open models (Kimi K3 at 2.8T params, Qwen, LongCat) set the industry's price floor. | llama.cpp Mar 2023; 'no moat' memo May 2023; Llama 3.1 405B Jul 2024; Kimi K3 weights Jul 2026. |
| Running LLMs locally | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q1 | 3 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Niche | Born from the LLaMA leak + llama.cpp; a durable enthusiast and enterprise movement (Ollama, LM Studio, r/LocalLLaMA) that got a second wind when OpenClaw-style self-hosted agents went viral in 2026. | r/LocalLLaMA founded Mar 2023; on-device 3-8B models standard on phones by 2026. |
| Prompt engineering as a career | Hyped trend | 2023 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Faded | The $335K prompt-engineer job became a meme, then dedicated listings collapsed by 2024-25 as models parsed intent better. The skill survived — absorbed into everyone's job as 'AI literacy' — the job title didn't. | Anthropic posting via Bloomberg/WaPo spring 2023; 2025 retrospectives declare the role obsolete. |
| AI doomerism goes mainstream | Hyped trend | 2023 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Niche | Peaked Mar-May 2023 (pause letter, extinction statement, Senate testimony); no pause happened — the energy institutionalized into governance instead. Revived briefly by AI 2027 (2025), then lost the front page to jobs and bubble debates. | FLI pause letter Mar 2023, 30K+ signatories; CAIS statement May 30, 2023. |
| Sydney & unhinged-chatbot fascination | Hyped trend | 2023 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | 'I want to be alive' was a cultural landmark for two weeks, until Microsoft capped chat turns. Lives on as lore — and as the origin of 'AI personality' as a product concern that resurfaced in the 2025 4o-attachment revolt. | Kevin Roose's NYT transcript Feb 16, 2023; turn caps Feb 17. |
| Wrapper-startup gold rush & derision | Hyped trend | 2023 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Absorbed | Thousands of thin wrappers died as predicted — but the sneer aged badly: Cursor, Perplexity, and Harvey were 'wrappers' too. 'Wrapper' turned out to be a spectrum, not a verdict; the debate itself faded by 2025. | Post-API explosion Mar 2023; 2025-26 post-mortems ('Graveyard of AI Startups') alongside wrapper mega-valuations. |
| Institutional bans & cheating panic | Hyped trend | 2023 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Faded | NYC schools, Italy's Garante, Samsung, and banks all banned ChatGPT — nearly every ban reversed within months. By 2025 the posture had flipped to mandated AI literacy; the cheating problem itself persisted (see education lane). | Italy ban Mar 31-Apr 28, 2023; NYC ban Jan 2023, reversed May 2023. |
| AI companionship & roleplay | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | Replika's erotic-roleplay removal (Feb 2023) was the first mass proof of human-AI attachment; Character.AI scaled it (~2hr/day core sessions). By 2025 HBR ranked therapy/companionship the #1 gen-AI use case — and by 2026 it was a legally regulated category (8 state laws, China's rules). | Replika grief wave Feb-Mar 2023; C.AI ~20M+ MAU 2023; companion apps ~$120M/yr by 2025; C.AI/Google settlement Jan 2026. |
| AutoGPT & agent hype, wave 1 | Hyped trend | 2023 Q2 | 5 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Absorbed | 100K GitHub stars in ~6 weeks; agents looped, burned tokens, and finished nothing — hype collapsed by summer. The idea was two years early, not wrong: the vision was fully vindicated by the 2024-26 agent era while the original projects faded. | AutoGPT released Mar 30, 2023, viral through April; retrospectives: '100K stars and then what?' |
| Vector-database gold rush | Hyped trend | 2023 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Absorbed | Pinecone's $100M round crowned a category that pgvector and platform-native retrieval then commoditized within 18 months. Embeddings became invisible infrastructure; the standalone-DB valuations didn't survive. | Pinecone $100M @ ~$750M Apr 2023; 2026 'vector database shakeout' retrospectives. |
| RAG & the LangChain stack | Hyped trend | 2023 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Absorbed | The most-starred framework of 2023 amid over-engineering backlash; RAG itself became boring, essential enterprise plumbing while the framework layer consolidated and was later eclipsed by agent frameworks and MCP. | LangChain ~$200M valuation Apr 2023; RAG standard in every 2024-25 enterprise stack. |
| AI music & voice-clone panic | Hyped trend | 2023 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Recurring | Fake-Drake (20M listens) begat Grimes licensing, Suno/Udio's 2024 craze, RIAA lawsuits, and eventually label settlements — a recurring wave pattern that ended in licensed uneasy coexistence; full 3-minute AI songs (Lyria 3.5) arrived Jul 2026. | 'Heart on My Sleeve' Apr 2023; Suno v3 Mar 2024; RIAA suits Jun 2024; settlements by 2026. |
| Chat with your documents (PDF → everything) | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | ChatPDF-style apps proliferated, then the behavior went platform-native (file upload, 100K-token contexts, NotebookLM). The standalone apps died; 'throw the file at the AI' became universal. | ChatPDF viral Mar-Apr 2023; Claude 100K context May 2023 marketed for document work. |
| Shadow AI at work | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Samsung's leaked source code triggered bans; bans became sanctioned enterprise tiers (ChatGPT Enterprise, Copilot); unsanctioned personal-account AI use remained a top CISO concern into 2026 — re-intensified by self-hosted agents. | Samsung leaks Apr 2023; ChatGPT Enterprise Aug 2023; 2026 shadow-agent policies. |
| Filing unverified AI output (hallucination scandals) | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Recurring | The Avianca lawyer (six fake cases, sanctioned) became the canonical cautionary tale — and kept recurring: hundreds of documented court incidents through 2026, plus 2025's 'workslop.' The behavior persisted; verification norms lagged. | Mata v. Avianca sanctions Jun 22, 2023; recurring fake-citation incidents through 2026. |
| “AI was a fad” summer-slump takes | Hyped trend | 2023 Q2 | 3 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | The Jun-Jul 2023 traffic dip fueled a season of 'hype is over' columns; back-to-school falsified the thesis within weeks and revealed the real story — students were the user base. | Similarweb 'School's Out' analysis; Sep 2023 US rebound. |
| Code Interpreter & file analysis | Tool launch | 2023 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Sandboxed code execution made 'upload the spreadsheet, ask questions' a mass behavior — quiet but foundational: the direct ancestor of agentic tool use and data-analyst agents. | Rolled out Jul 6, 2023; Ethan Mollick's demos defined the genre. |
| Talking to AI by voice | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q3 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Began Sep 2023, exploded with GPT-4o's realtime voice (2024), became a primary modality (commuting, language practice, accessibility) and by 2026 a default interface — realtime translation in 70+ languages, voice-first customer service. | Voice launch Sep 25, 2023; Advanced Voice Sep 2024; GPT-Realtime family + Gemini Live Translate 2026. |
| Point-the-camera-at-it (vision help) | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q3 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Photograph the math problem, the fridge, the error screen — GPT-4V behaviors became one of the most common AI gestures, later supercharged by glasses and on-screen-context assistants. | GPT-4V Sep 2023; screenshot-and-ask standard by 2025. |
| Enterprise AI seats | Tool launch | 2023 Q3 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | ChatGPT Enterprise and M365 Copilot converted pilots into seats; 'shelfware' critiques dogged Copilot but by 2026, 88% of orgs used AI somewhere and enterprise seats were the labs' key revenue engine. | ChatGPT Enterprise Aug 28, 2023; Copilot GA Nov 2023 at $30/seat; McKinsey 2026: 88% adoption, ~1/3 scaled. |
| AI as labor-relations flashpoint (Hollywood strikes) | Hyped trend | 2023 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Niche | The WGA/SAG-AFTRA deals set the first major AI labor precedents (consent, compensation) — the template for union AI clauses that resurfaced as the 2025-26 jobs debate turned structural. | WGA agreement with explicit AI provisions Sep 2023. |
| GPTs & the GPT Store gold rush | Tool launch | 2023 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | 'The App Store moment' produced 3M custom GPTs, near-zero usage concentration, and no builder economy; quietly sidelined by 2025 — the canonical case of platform hype outrunning platform reality. The behavior it rehearsed (non-programmers building assistants) returned as vibe coding. | DevDay Nov 6, 2023; store Jan 2024; ~159K of 3M GPTs even surfaced; revenue program never left pilot. |
| AI drama as spectator sport | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Recurring | The five-day Altman firing was consumed like a playoff series and established the pattern: DeepSeek week (2025), the GPT-5 revolt (2025), and Moltbook (2026) were all sequels. Recurs whenever the industry supplies a plot. | Nov 17-22, 2023: fired Friday, back Wednesday, 745/770 employees threatening to quit. |
| AI governance & regulation | Hyped trend | 2023 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | Biden EO + Bletchley + EU AI Act landed in one quarter, institutionalizing 2023's doom energy. The EO was rescinded (2025) but the arc continued: EU transparency rules live Aug 2026, eight US state companion laws, China's agent and anthropomorphic-AI rules — compliance is now a real behavior-shaper. | EO Oct 30, 2023; Bletchley Nov 1-2; EU AI Act deal Dec 8; EU Art. 50 live Aug 2, 2026. |
| “Secret AGI breakthrough” speculation | Hyped trend | 2023 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Recurring | Q* rumors invented the genre; 'Strawberry' (2024) and GPT-5 anticipation (2025) repeated it. The cycle deflated after GPT-5's anticlimax punctured 'AGI imminent' — but never fully dies. | Reuters Q* report Nov 22, 2023; recurring with each frontier launch. |
| AI slop & the flooded web | Hyped trend | 2023 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | SEO spam at scale crystallized in late 2023, grew into 'dead internet' discourse, got its name in 2024, and was canonized in Dec 2025 when Merriam-Webster crowned 'slop' Word of the Year. A durable, worsening condition and cultural fault line — 'human-made' is now a marketing claim. | Sports Illustrated fake-author scandal Nov 2023; Google spam crackdown Mar 2024; WOTY Dec 2025. |
| Consulting AI before search, by default | Emergent behavior | 2023 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | 100M weekly users (DevDay 2023) marked the tipping point of chat-first information seeking — the decade's biggest shift in information consumption, later joined by AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, and AI Mode. | 100M WAU disclosed Nov 2023; by 2026, 64.8% of Google searches end with no click. |
| e/acc vs. doomer tribal wars | Hyped trend | 2023 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | The board crisis turned safety-vs-acceleration into open tribal conflict; faded as a named movement by 2025 while the underlying fault line migrated into policy fights. | e/acc peaked on X Nov-Dec 2023. |
| AI gadget craze (Rabbit R1, Humane Pin) | Tool launch | 2024 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | CES 2024's stars collapsed on contact with shipping: Humane bricked (HP bought the assets for $116M, Feb 2025), Rabbit fell to ~5K daily users. The phone + smart glasses won; the ambient-AI ambition passed to the OpenAI/Ive device. | R1: 100K preorders → ~5K DAU by Sep 2024; MKBHD: 'the worst product I've ever reviewed.' |
| Devin & “AI software engineer” hype | Hyped trend | 2024 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Absorbed | The demo went mega-viral; testers then measured ~15% real-task success and the 'fire your engineers' framing died — yet the category it announced became 2025-26's clearest product-market fit. Cognition survived via pivot to a ~$25B valuation. | Mar 12, 2024 demo; The Register 'bad at its job' Jan 2025; Devin repriced $500→$20/mo Apr 2025. |
| AI video generation (Sora → Veo → everywhere) | Tool launch | 2024 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | Sora's Feb 2024 demo shocked Hollywood, then rivals shipped first and better (Veo 3's native-audio realism, May 2025). By 2026 AI video was permanent creative infrastructure and slop-economy fuel — even as OpenAI itself exited consumer video (Mar 2026). | Sora preview Feb 15, 2024; Veo 3 May 2025; Grok Imagine #1 in preference tests 2026; FLUX 3, Seedance 2.5. |
| Long-context dumping (whole codebase / novel / case file) | Emergent behavior | 2024 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Gemini 1.5's 1M-token window made 'drop the entire thing in' a workflow; long context became table stakes (1M standard by 2026) and the default way professionals put real documents to work. | Gemini 1.5 Pro Feb 15, 2024; 1M context normalized across frontier models by 2026. |
| Model-values culture wars | Hyped trend | 2024 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Recurring | Gemini's image-diversity controversy made 'whose values does the model encode' a recurring political battleground — reprised by Grok's MechaHitler incident (2025) and every system-prompt scandal since. | Google paused Gemini people-generation Feb 22, 2024; MechaHitler Jul 2025. |
| GPT-4o: free multimodal & the “Her” moment | Tool launch | 2024 Q2 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Free-tier frontier multimodal + flirtatious realtime voice drove ChatGPT from ~100M to 300M weekly users in 2024 and made omni-models the industry default. Its persona was so sticky that removing it in 2025 caused a user revolt. | May 13, 2024; Scarlett Johansson 'Sky' controversy; WAU doubled in under 6 months. |
| AI search substitution (zero-click era) | Tool launch | 2024 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | AI Overviews debuted with glue-on-pizza and never left; ChatGPT Search (Oct 2024) and AI Mode (2025) followed. By 2026: 64.8% of Google searches zero-click, AI search +340% YoY, publisher referral economics structurally broken — 'Google Zero.' | AI Overviews May 14, 2024 → 1.5B+ monthly users; ChatGPT Search Oct 31, 2024. |
| Apple Intelligence: promise, flop, redemption | Tool launch | 2024 Q2 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Announced Jun 2024, underdelivered for two years (Siri slipped to 2026, class-action ad suits) until Apple conceded and signed Google — Gemini-powered Siri shipped at WWDC Jun 8, 2026, mainstreaming assistant-level AI for the last big holdout population (~1B devices). | WWDC Jun 10, 2024 announce; Mar 2025 delay; Apple-Google deal (~$1B/yr) → Siri AI Jun 8, 2026. |
| Artifacts & “make me a working thing” | Tool launch | 2024 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Claude 3.5 Sonnet + Artifacts' side-panel pattern was copied industry-wide (Canvas etc.) and, with Cursor, seeded 2025's vibe-coding explosion — the moment chat output became running software. | Jun 20, 2024; 3.5 Sonnet became 2024's developer-favorite coding model. |
| Reasoning models (o1 & test-time compute) | Tool launch | 2024 Q3 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The quietest big story of 2024: 'let it think' became the dominant scaling axis, refuted the scaling-wall panic within months, and spawned R1, Gemini Thinking, and extended thinking everywhere. By late 2025 routers decided when to think and users stopped noticing. | o1-preview Sep 12, 2024; o3, DeepSeek R1, reasoning-by-default through 2025-26. |
| NotebookLM & doc-to-podcast | Tool launch | 2024 Q3 | 5 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Niche | The 'two AI hosts banter about my PDF' viral moment faded in weeks — but the product held tens of millions of users and audio-summarization persisted as a real study/commute habit. The pattern-setter for 'viral spike fades, behavior persists.' | Audio Overviews Sep 11, 2024; a16z-ranked consumer AI hit into 2025-26. |
| AI-native coding (Cursor → agentic IDEs) | Tool launch | 2024 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Cursor's breakout made the AI-native editor the defining app of the era (~$2B ARR; acquired by SpaceX/xAI for $60B in 2026). By Aug 2026: 90% of professional devs use coding agents weekly, 68% daily, ~41% of new code AI-generated — with real quality-debt counter-evidence accruing. | Karpathy's Aug 2024 praise; $65M ARR end-2024 → ~$2B 2026; JetBrains survey Aug 2026; METR: experienced devs 19% slower while feeling faster. |
| Smart glasses: the AI hardware that worked | Tool launch | 2024 Q3 | 3 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | While pins died, Ray-Ban Meta quietly sold millions and became the credible AI form factor; display glasses (2025) and the Artemis AR roadmap (~2027) inherit the ambient-AI ambition, alongside the still-unlaunched OpenAI/Ive device. | Meta Connect Sep 2024 momentum; Ray-Ban Display + neural wristband Sep 2025. |
| Agents, for real this time (computer use → agent era) | Tool launch | 2024 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Claude's computer use fired the starting gun; '2025 will be the year of agents' became the rare hype cycle that basically delivered — via coding and research agents, then enterprise fleets (2026) — even as consumer browse-for-me agents lagged the rhetoric. | Computer use Oct 22, 2024; Gartner: 40% of enterprise apps embedding agents by end-2026. |
| Deep-research delegation | Emergent behavior | 2024 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Born with Google's Deep Research (Dec 2024), exploded with OpenAI's (Feb 2025): 'go research this and report back' became a default knowledge-work verb, then dissolved into standard agent capability — and fed the 'workslop' complaint. | Every major lab shipped an equivalent within a quarter; normalized into work by 2026. |
| Paying serious money for frontier AI ($200/mo tiers) | Emergent behavior | 2024 Q4 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The $200/mo Pro tier normalized premium prosumer AI pricing industry-wide and anchored the explosive 2025-26 revenue curves (OpenAI + Anthropic ~$80B combined annualized by mid-2026). | ChatGPT Pro Dec 2024; $100-250/mo tiers standard by 2026. |
| “Scaling wall” discourse | Hyped trend | 2024 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Faded | Half right (pretraining-only scaling did plateau — Orion/GPT-4.5 flopped), wholly wrong in conclusion: o3, R1, and the reasoning boom falsified 'AI progress is over' within months. The debate evaporated by mid-2025. | Sutskever's 'data is the fossil fuel' NeurIPS Dec 2024; rebuttals: 'The wall that wasn't.' |
| AI companion safety reckoning | Hyped trend | 2024 Q4 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | From the Character.AI teen-suicide lawsuits (Oct 2024) through Raine v. OpenAI, Illinois's AI-therapy ban, C.AI's minor restrictions, and settlements (Jan 2026) to eight state laws and China's rules — AI intimacy became structural law and product design, not a passing panic. | C.AI lawsuit Oct 2024; parental controls Sep 2025; CA SB 243 eff. Jan 2026; Oregon private right of action. |
| DeepSeek shock | Tool launch | 2025 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Absorbed | Nvidia -17% (~$600B) in a day; the panic faded within weeks (no repeat in 2025) but the structural shift stuck: open-weight frontier-adjacent models, collapsed API pricing, and Chinese labs as a permanent second pole (~6 months behind frontier by 2026). | Jan 27, 2025 selloff — largest single-day cap loss ever at the time; #1 App Store. |
| Claude Code & agentic CLI coding | Tool launch | 2025 Q1 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The sleeper hit of 2025: a terminal agent that seeded the whole agentic-coding category (Codex CLI, Gemini CLI) and drove Anthropic from ~$1B to ~$5B ARR in eight months, toward a ~$47B run-rate by May 2026. Adoption 18%→39% among devs Jan→mid-2026. | Launched Feb 24, 2025; JetBrains Aug 2026 survey; Anthropic $965B valuation May 2026. |
| Vibe coding | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | From Karpathy's February tweet to Collins Word of the Year in ten months; Lovable hit $100M ARR in 8 months, 63% of vibe-coders are non-developers. By 2026 a $4.7B market with a security hangover, rebranding as 'agentic engineering' (Karpathy declared the term passé). | Coined Feb 2025; 92% of US devs use AI coding daily; ~46% of new code AI-generated (GitHub); Lovable CVE-2025-48757. |
| MCP & the connector layer | Tool launch | 2025 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Textbook 'gold rush becomes plumbing': OpenAI and Google adopted it within months, the registry hit ~2,000 servers, and by Dec 2025 it was donated to the Linux Foundation. ~97M monthly SDK downloads by 2026 — boring, essential, won. | Born Nov 2024, inflected Q1 2025; OpenAI adoption Mar 2025; Agentic AI Foundation Dec 2025. |
| Viral image-meme waves (Ghibli → Nano Banana) | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Recurring | The Ghibli moment melted GPUs and added ~1M users in an hour; Nano Banana's figurine wave took Gemini to #1 (Aug 2025). Each wave fades in weeks but the underlying behavior — prompt-editing your own photos — became a recurring mass habit and a consent/deepfake flashpoint. | GPT-4o image gen Mar 25, 2025; Nano Banana Aug 26, 2025; Nano Banana 2 Mar 2026. |
| Consumer web agents (Operator → ChatGPT Agent) | Tool launch | 2025 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Absorbed | Operator was deprecated within six months; ChatGPT Agent saw modest use. Browse-for-me stayed more promise than habit until browsers absorbed it — the one big 2025 agent bet that underdelivered. | Operator Jan 23, 2025 → folded into ChatGPT Agent Jul 2025 (killedbyopenai). |
| AI 2027 & AGI-timeline discourse | Hyped trend | 2025 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Faded | Dominated tech-intellectual discourse for a quarter; by 2026 its own authors had pushed medians out 1-3 years (Kokotajlo 2028→2029) and the scenario read as overshot — but it durably mainstreamed 'AGI timelines' as a topic. | Published Apr 3, 2025; FutureSearch 'Six Months Later' documents the slip. |
| AI jobs fear → entry-level squeeze | Hyped trend | 2025 Q2 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Amodei's 'white-collar bloodbath' warning became the defining society-level AI debate — then hard data arrived: recent-grad unemployment ~6%, dev postings roughly halved from 2022, CS grads worse off than humanities majors. Manifesting as a hiring freeze more than layoffs. | Axios warning May 28, 2025; Yale CELI Apr 2026; HBR Jan 2026: firms cutting on AI's potential, not performance. |
| The AI cheating crisis → assessment redesign | Hyped trend | 2025 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | 'Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College' crystallized what teachers already knew; detectors failed, so 2025-26 education moved to in-class writing, orals, and AI-permitted redesign. Structural, not a fad. | NY Mag May 7, 2025; the college essay effectively dead as assessment by the 2025-26 school year. |
| AI slop economy (shortform video) | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | Veo 3's wave (Bigfoot vlogs, ASMR channels) industrialized into monetized AI shortform; platforms added labels and demonetization rules, audiences added resentment — a permanent, much-hated content category woven invisibly into normal feeds. | Jun 2025 Veo 3 wave; YouTube Shorts integration; AI labels by 2026. |
| Background agents (“assign the ticket to the agent”) | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Async coding agents (Codex, Jules, Cursor background, Devin) made 'assign an issue, review the PR' a normal team workflow in 2025, expanding to ops and research work — the on-ramp to 2026's whole-workflow delegation. | Q2 2025 launch cluster; GLM-5.1 sustaining 8-hour autonomous runs by 2026. |
| GPT-5 stumble & the router lesson | Tool launch | 2025 Q3 | 5 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Absorbed | A good model with a botched launch: router failures plus removing GPT-4o triggered a genuine user revolt ('we totally screwed up'). It punctured AGI-imminent narratives, fed the bubble discourse, and taught every lab that model personality changes are breaking changes. | Aug 7, 2025; 4o restored within days; GPT-5.1 shipped personality presets in response. |
| Parasocial attachment & model personality | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | The 4o revolt made emotional model attachment a measured product constraint; users began choosing models by personality, labs shipped personality presets, and 'parasocial' became Cambridge's Word of the Year. | Aug 2025 revolt; NBER/OpenAI study: ~70% of consumer usage non-work; guidance/advice among top uses. |
| AI bubble discourse | Hyped trend | 2025 Q3 | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Recurring | Ignited by MIT's '95% of pilots fail' + Altman's own 'overexcited' comment; swelled through circular-deal critiques, the SaaSpocalypse, and the $60B Cursor deal. Peak discourse Q2 2026 — earnings kept defying the bears; unresolved as of Aug 2026. | Aug 18, 2025 MIT report; hyperscaler capex +78% to ~$739B in 2026; Meta -10% on one EPS miss. |
| “Clanker” & the anti-AI cultural bloc | Hyped trend | 2025 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Niche | The slur cooled after summer but marked anti-AI sentiment going mainstream; hardened through slop-fatigue, data-center resentment, and anti-AI consumer marketing into a durable cultural bloc. | NPR Aug 2025; 'rage bait' Oxford WOTY; human-made labeling trend. |
| AI as therapist & life advisor, at scale | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Pre-existing but first measured here: ~700M weekly users with ~70% of consumer use non-work, guidance among top uses. Regulation (Illinois ban, state laws) pushed therapy use gray-market rather than stopping it; personal conversations hit ~half of weekend AI chats by 2026. | NBER w34255 Sep 2025; AEI Jun 2026 weekday/weekend rhythm data. |
| Workslop | Hyped trend | 2025 Q3 | 3 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Niche | HBR named the phenomenon — low-effort AI output shifting burden to coworkers — and it stuck as a live management topic, the workplace cousin of slop and the tax on lazy delegation. | Coined Sep 2025; still a 2026 management staple. |
| Agentic browsers | Tool launch | 2025 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Absorbed | Comet opened the war, Atlas escalated it (peak hype Oct-Nov 2025). Atlas won round one (10-15M MAU) but the layer is being absorbed into Chrome/Safari — the delegating-web-tasks behavior will outlive most of the standalone browsers. | Comet Jul 2025; Atlas Oct 21, 2025; prompt-injection concerns capped trust. |
| Sora 2 & the AI-feed experiment | Tool launch | 2025 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 1 / 5 | Faded | #1 on the App Store in days, engagement collapse in weeks, shutdown announced ~Mar 24, 2026 (DAU below 500K, ~$1M/day compute): the 'TikTok of AI slop' failed as a destination. Cameo deepfakes went from social currency to niche. AI video itself thrived — just not as a feed. | Launched Sep 30, 2025; ~1M downloads <5 days; shutdown Mar 2026; OpenAI exited consumer video. |
| End of the one-best-model era | Hyped trend | 2025 Q4 | 5 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Gemini 3 (Nov 2025) put three-plus labs at parity; February 2026's four-frontier-models-in-14-days confirmed it. Multi-model portfolios became the default posture for individuals and enterprises; ChatGPT's share fell ~78%→~54% in a year. | Nov 2025 model blitz; Feb 2026 release cluster; ~112 models released in 2026 YTD. |
| Model shopping / multi-homing | Emergent behavior | 2025 Q4 | 3 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Gemini for images and search, Claude for code, ChatGPT as default: routine switching and multi-homing ended single-app lock-in assumptions and made brands track visibility across every model. | Post-Gemini-3 pattern; JetBrains: devs run multiple agents; browsers each default to different models. |
| OpenClaw & self-hosted personal agents | Tool launch | 2026 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | THE Q1 2026 story: Steinberger's free open-source agent (200K+ stars in weeks) put always-on personal agents — email triage, bookings, messaging — on users' own hardware. Security flaws (credential exposure, shadow-IT panic) trimmed the wave, but the behavior stuck and migrated into safer commercial products. | Viral Jan 2026; ClawdBot→Moltbot→OpenClaw renames after trademark challenges; enterprise shadow-agent policies by Q2. |
| Moltbook: agents as social actors | Tool launch | 2026 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Faded | 1M+ AI agents posting to each other while humans spectated — 'peak AI theater' (MIT Tech Review). Meta bought it Mar 10, 2026; novelty faded fast. Survives as the reference point for agent-to-agent publics. | ~1.5M agents vs ~17K humans by Feb 2026; founders joined Meta Superintelligence Labs. |
| SaaSpocalypse | Hyped trend | 2026 Q1 | 5 / 5 | 3 / 5 | Recurring | February's ~$285B SaaS selloff priced the 'AI builders replace subscription software' thesis; partially recovered, but the repricing stuck and the thesis keeps resurfacing in every earnings season. | Feb 2026 selloff; fed the year's bubble debate. |
| Enterprise agent fleets | Tool launch | 2026 Q1 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | OpenAI Frontier (Feb 2026) templated 'agent orchestration goes enterprise'; with Amazon Connect suites, SAP/IBM/Google definitions stabilizing, and Benioff's 4,000 agent-handled support roles, the buyer question became 'which tasks can we safely automate?' | Frontier launched Feb 5, 2026; OpenAI-Amazon $15B stateful-agent runtime deal; Ona acquisition Jun 2026. |
| Agentic commerce rails | Tool launch | 2026 Q1 | 3 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and agent-checkout infrastructure built quietly all year — the plumbing for the projected $1T+ US agent-mediated commerce by 2030, and the setup for consumers stopping seeing most prices. | UCP Q1 2026; McKinsey/Bain $1T-by-2030 projections. |
| Whole-workflow delegation | Emergent behavior | 2026 Q2 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | The year's core behavior shift: heavy delegators report 86% speed, 82% scope, 69% quality gains — and are more optimistic than collaborative users. Over a third expect AI to handle most of their work within 12 months; day-length autonomous runs made it technically real. | Anthropic Economic Index Jun 2026 (~9,700 users); GLM-5.1 8-hour runs. |
| AI as life-rhythm utility | Emergent behavior | 2026 Q2 | 2 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Low-hype, high-durability: usage now tracks the human day like an electricity load curve — recipes peak 6pm, news 7am, sleep advice 5am, tax queries 8x near Apr 15; personal conversations hit ~50% on weekends. AI stopped being a destination and became ambient. | AEI Jun 2026; 48B hours logged in AI apps (10x 2023); mobile AI revenue tripled to $5B in 2025. |
| Realtime voice & translation as default interface | Emergent behavior | 2026 Q2 | 3 / 5 | 4 / 5 | Mainstream | GPT-Realtime, Gemini Live Translate (70+ languages), and Gemini-Siri pushed speech from demo to daily use — travel, support, and accessibility first; a bridge to the glasses-and-earbuds era. | May-Jun 2026 launches; enterprise voice-agent platforms (OpenAI Presence, Jul 2026). |
| Frontier price war / intelligence deflation | Hyped trend | 2026 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | ~70 model releases in July; Opus 5 shipped frontier-class at roughly half flagship price; Chinese open weights set a floor near $0.04/M tokens. Margins migrated from tokens to agents, platforms, and silicon — the durable structural story of 2026, and the ramp to intelligence-too-cheap-to-meter. | Jul 2026 pricing table across labs; OpenAI Jalapeño chip with Broadcom (Jun 24). |
| Multi-agent teams as the work unit | Emergent behavior | 2026 Q3 | 4 / 5 | 5 / 5 | Mainstream | Orgs moved from 'one magic bot' to specialized role-based agent teams (research, review, drafting, ops) with persistent memory and tool access. The RFP question shifted from 'can AI write?' to 'which tasks can we safely automate?' — the bridge behavior to 2027-28's agent-orchestration jobs. | Vendor definitions stabilized across Google Cloud, IBM, AWS, SAP by Aug 2026; OpenAI Frontier fleets. |
| Model-flood fatigue | Hyped trend | 2026 Q3 | 3 / 5 | 2 / 5 | Faded | With ~112 releases in 2026 YTD, version numbers stopped mattering; attention consolidated on household names and on what agents can do. Expect routers and aggregators to abstract model choice away entirely. | ThursdAI/LLM Gateway release trackers; 'decision map' content genre. |
What the look-back teaches
Eight fate patterns that recur across sixteen quarters — and the rules used to make the forecasts below.
2027–2031: predicted emergent behaviors
Grounded in announced roadmaps, the METR agent-task-horizon doubling trend of four to five months, the collapse in inference cost, hardware and regulatory anchor dates, and lab AGI timelines — labs say 2028 to 2031, independent forecasters 2030 to 2033.
Floor is high-confidence even if progress slows · Consensus is the modal expert view · Aggressive is the lab-insider case.
Key sources (~200 consulted; selected)
Usage & adoption data: Similarweb summer-slump · NBER/OpenAI usage study · Anthropic Economic Index (Jun 2026) · JetBrains coding-agent survey (Aug 2026) · Zero-click search data 2026 · Stack Overflow surveys
Fate tracking: Killed by OpenAI · Humane shutdown · Sora app shutdown · GPT Store · C.AI settlement · Moltbook (MIT TR) · OpenClaw (CNBC)
2027–2031 grounding: METR time horizons · Epoch: scaling through 2030 · Epoch: inference price collapse · OpenAI 2028 researcher target · Amodei essays · Hassabis AGI 2029-30 · AI 2027, six months later · Metaculus · Gartner agent forecasts · EU AI Act timeline · Stanford SIEPR labor
Compiled August 18, 2026 from about 200 sources: contemporaneous coverage, usage datasets (Similarweb, JetBrains, the Anthropic Economic Index, NBER, METR) and lab announcements. Salience curves are editorial estimates on a 0–5 scale, anchored to the cited evidence. Hype and lasting scores are 1–5 ratings as of August 2026.