AI takes the gong, but society may yet pay a heavy price for that?
If artificial intelligence were an actor, it would have won several Oscars this year, or several Grammys, as a musician. It is neither an actor nor a music star, though. It is just a tool that has seemingly turned our world on its head. Since OpenAI’s introduction of its generative ChatGPT in 2022, AI’s impact on human life and in society has been colossal.
And this year, across the world, we just couldn’t get AI out of our hairs. In almost everything we did, AI seemed to find a way to be there: from business activities, politics, governance, economic, relationships to religion, leadership, entertainment, healthcare, education, manufacturing, services, diplomacy, and other spheres of human activities, AI was ever present.
It is therefore not surprising that AI and its leading proponents were jointly voted Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2025. For context, the iconic Time Person of the Year is a yearly recognition, started 97 years ago, for a person, an object or idea that had the most influence on the world in that particular year. Without a doubt, AI is the clear leader by several miles this year. Let’s look at the sheer numbers in terms of new models released this year alone, the amazing things this new generation of AIs can do, and the humongous capital expended by both private and public sector players on the chatbots.
AI the clear leader
AI had the world drooling in the year; the world was giddy with AI excitement much like a child who just discovered access to a fountain of candies. Rough estimates put the number of publicly announced significant AI models released for 2025 at over 40. If one adds the smaller or specialised AI models developed for audio, vision, reasoning, and multimodal also released, we could be talking about hundreds in 2025 alone. Some of these releases are OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, GPT‑5, GPT‑5.2, xAI’s Grok 3, Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5, Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek AI’s DeepSeek R1. Others include DeepCogito v2, Anthropic’s Claude 4 & 4.5 (Opus), YandexGPT 5, Runway Gen-3.
The AI landscape in 2025 was on steroid as industry focus shifted from cautious ethical deployment and use of AI to a sprint to be the fastest to the market as AI firms jostled for a larger share of the market.
Today, AI bestrides industries, human activities and engagements the way the Statue of Liberty dominates the New York skyline or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. We all use AI in one form or the other daily without even realising it. If you use banking apps, hail a ride, use Google map, make a phone call or tune in to your favourite radio or TV channel, AI is at play. AI apps are the fastest-growing consumer apps in app stores. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for instance, has over 800 million weekly users.
The money is on AI
The scale of investment and spending on AI globally in 2025 is mindboggling, further underscoring its dominance and perceived ability to change our world. For such a transformative tool, nobody wants to be left behind, and everybody certainly wants to be the head AI honcho, wielding the power.
Global AI spending estimates in 2025, according to Gartner, a leading global research and advisory firm, will hit about $1.5 trillion. These spendings are on software, services, hardware, infrastructure, and research & development. Private capital inflow into AI through venture capital funding of AI startups is in excess of $200 billion this year. The 2025 capital expenditure of big tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others on AI infrastructure and data centres is said to have exceeded $600 billion. Microsoft, for instance, committed $80 billion to build an AI-enabled data centre.
Governments, too, have been bullish in AI spending, committing an estimated $100 billion plus in AI-powered health, intelligence, smart cities, education, defence, R&D, climate, and infrastructure. These spendings are driven by national security concerns, economic advantages, and innovation goals. The United States is spending well over $35 billion yearly on AI, while China has committed over $30 billion annually. The European Union plans to spend €20 billion yearly. The spending is about gaining the advantage and leading the global AI drive.
Apart from the spending, governments have also sought to unshackle their AI industries to ensure they win the AI dominance race. The US government, for instance, fearing that state regulations may slow down the country’s AI drive and competitiveness against China, signed an executive order this month to block states from regulating AI. The United Kingdom government’s AI legislation is also considered liberal, especially when viewed against its European Union neighbour.
Is AI really that influential?
Yes, it is. A few empirical instances will demonstrate how truly transformative AI is and can be. A US congresswoman Jennifer Wexton from Virginia had Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a rare neurological disorder that affected her ability to speak intelligibly. An AI voice cloning software allowed the congresswoman to deliver a flawless farewell message to Congress in her own voice, demonstrating the power of AI to restore human dignity.
Fernando da Silva, a 67-year-old man living in Angola was diagnosed of prostrate cancer in March. In June, a surgeon Dr Vipul Patel, based in Florida, US, performed a successful remote (robotic telesurgery) prostatectomy on da Silva, who was 11,000 kilometres away. That was a momentous advancement in healthcare delivery.
Today, companies like General Motors, Tesla, Google/Alphabet, and Mercedes-Benz have developed driverless autonomous vehicles using AI. Artificial intelligence provides these autonomous vehicles the deep learning for decision-making and route planning, AI and neural networks for lane keeping, traffic-aware cruise control, and self-parking, computer vision to detect roads, traffic lights, and pedestrians, and sensor fusion to combine data from radar, cameras, and light detection and ranging (LIDAR). Vehicles such as Google/Alphabet’s Waymo, China’s Baidu Apollo Go, Motional by Hyundai/Aptiv, and Drive Pilot by Mercedes-Benz all have Level 4 autonomous driving certification, meaning they are fully autonomous without any human interference.
In music, Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist (AIVA), an AI music composition software, was formally recognised by Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM), a music rights society based in France, as a composer. SACEM is equivalent to Nigeria’s Copyright Society of Nigeria or COSON, which protects the rights of songwriters, musicians, composers, and producers by ensuring that media platforms that use their works pay royalty. It was the first non-human composer registered with SACEM. The registration is based on the fact that Aiva composed and produced classical orchestra pieces such as “Among the Stars”, “Prelude in C Minor”, and “I Am AI” entirely without human input. Even its 2016 album “Genesis” was composed independently of human input. Its compositions are favourites for short films, game trailers, and commercials.
This influence has not all been positive, though. Criminals have latched onto the incredible power of AI to defraud individuals, organisations, and even governments. In 2019, in the United Kingdom, for instance, criminals using AI voice clone posed as the German CEO of an energy company. The criminals called the company’s chief financial officer using the CEO’s cloned German accent and instructed the CFO to urgently transfer $243,000 to a provided account. The unsuspecting CFO, who recognised his CEO’s voice, quickly complied. There have been other similar cases.
The often-unseen darker side of AI
Governments, regulators, and society often highlight issues such as ethics, safety, transparency, and accountability in the use of AI. These are indeed critical areas that must be properly addressed to ensure the safe use of AI.
However, there is a much darker side to AI development and use that society often glosses over, how AI impacts the climate and the increasing efforts globally to curb carbon emissions. Massive computing resources are required to train AI models. These resources require high energy use. Data centres that power AI mostly run on fossil fuel so are the cooling systems. Then consider billions of people across the world using AI daily. That’s a humongous amount of energy consumption.
For perspective, a report showed that GPT-3’s training caused an estimated 550 metric tons of CO₂ to be released into the atmosphere. This emission equals “flying 1 person round-trip from New York to London around 300 times, or running 120 gas-powered cars for a year, or charging 70 million smartphones once.” So, imagine training hundreds of AI chatbots. Considering that AI optimisation has barely scratched the surface, these emissions are going to skyrocket in the coming years, thus undermining the modest gains made in climate control and greenhouse emissions.
Stakeholders must be responsible
Governments and the AI industry must actively seek to balance the AI gains in healthcare, education, agriculture, and climate modelling with managing their carbon footprints. Tech companies must increase investments in more efficient chips and greener data centres. The world cannot afford to trade off gains in emission control for AI.
As CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang once remarked, “This [AI] is the single most impactful technology of our time.” And it is still in its early years. “Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it,” Huang said. Indeed, the world is in for an interesting ride with AI in the coming years. How great the ride will be will be dependent on responsible adoption of AI.
