Five Things AI: State of AI, Evil Black Box, Doomprompting, AI Companions, AI Bubble

Everything you need to know about AI this week.

Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!

Turns out the "AI gold rush" of 2025 looks less like everyone striking rich veins of value and more like a messy food fight where half the startups brought spoons to a knife fight. Demos dazzle, buyers bite, and early growth graphs still make VCs salivate, but the hangover hits fast when customers realize your AI-powered productivity app doesn’t actually increase productivity (unless you count the productivity of double-checking its mistakes). Meanwhile, the SaaS dinosaurs have woken up hungry, casually tossing around $100M AI launches like confetti, leaving smaller players praying for an acquisition lifeline.

And just when the hype cycle feels a little predictable, along comes the “dark matter” stuff: multi-agent coordination, AI browsers, and a haze of weird use cases no one can quite explain, but everyone wants to slap a slide deck around. In other words: the only thing more oversubscribed than an early-stage AI funding round is confusion. Hypergrowth is suddenly cheap, defensibility is rare, and if you’re still daydreaming about being the next OpenAI, you might want to consider being the next acquired by Salesforce instead. The future’s still thrilling, but don’t bother pretending you’ve got it mapped - you’re just as dizzy as everyone else, only hopefully with less burn rate.

And stop doomprompting, it probably won’t get any better.

One quick question: what do you think of the newly launched Halo X glasses? Obvious privacy issues aside: I think this is an amazing step forward. I’m personally waiting for glasses that can tell me who the person is that just approached me, where I know this person from and where we last met. It would help me avoid so many awkward situations…

Also, from the brave new world department: Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet - what a time to be alive. I do hope that the fine people behind the Perplexity.ai powered browser Comet have really fixed this issue. If you’re still on the waitinglist for Comet: it’s really worth it, I quite like the browser!

Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI! Stop generating! Happy bubbling and hyping!