AI Rolls On

Artificial Intelligence is atop nearly every 2025 list of trends to track for nearly every field. Despite a momentary panic over China's success with DeepSeek, a cheaper AI model, every major technology company in North America remains all-in on the technology. To put the economic scale of their investment into perspective, the United States spent roughly $288B in adjusted 2024 dollars  between 1960 and 1974 to develop and execute the Apollo program. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft plan to spend a collective total of about $250B in 2025 alone. Pretending that AI won’t upend every level of education misses the raw scale of what is happening.

To call AI a moonshot seems like an understatement! One big difference is that most of the cost of the Apollo program (and its Gemini precursor) was borne by the U.S. Federal Government. The overwhelming bulk of the cost of AI development is being footed by private firms with an ROI expectation.