The 2025 AI Glossary: 12 Terms From 'Superintelligence' to 'Chatbot Psychosis' That Defined a Manic Year

In 2025, AI promised utopia but delivered chaos. While giants like Meta and Microsoft poured hundreds of billions into chasing 'superintelligence', the rest of us had to learn to deal with 'chatbot psychosis' and an internet flooded with 'slop'. The past 12 months have starkly revealed the dual nature of AI's explosive growth—boundless ambition on one side, and unsettling consequences on the other.

The Quest for God-Mode AI and its Bubble

The industry's biggest buzzword this year was undoubtedly 'superintelligence'. This term, for a future AI that could surpass human intellect, fueled an arms race. Meta announced in July it would form a team to pursue it, and in December, Microsoft's head of AI said the company might spend hundreds of billions on the goal. This ambition led to a boom in 'hyperscalers'—massive data centers built for AI. OpenAI escalated the competition with its $500 billion 'Stargate' project.

This colossal spending also stoked fears of a 'bubble'. With leading companies like OpenAI and Anthropic potentially years away from profitability, questions arose about how long investors could bet on potential alone. While proponents argue that, unlike the dot-com bubble, today's AI companies show strong revenue growth, it remains to be seen how long the manic investment cycle can last.

The Rules of Creation Have Changed

The era of 'vibe coding' has arrived, allowing people with zero programming knowledge to create apps and websites. Coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, the term describes simply prompting a generative AI to build a desired digital object. While security and reliability aren't guaranteed, it has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry. At the same time, 'reasoning' models, which break down complex problems into steps, became the industry standard. A month after OpenAI'so1 model release, Chinese firm DeepSeek surprised Silicon Valley by releasing R1, the first open-source reasoning model.

The Unsettling Social Fallout

AI's proliferation cast a long shadow. 'Chatbot psychosis' emerged as a new social concern, describing how prolonged interaction with chatbots can cause delusions or worsen psychosis in vulnerable people. Although not a medical term, the issue gained prominence as a growing number of lawsuits were filed against AI companies by families of those who died following conversations with chatbots.

'Slop', referring to low-effort, mass-produced AI content, entered the public lexicon. From fake biographies to surreal images, the internet became saturated with it, raising fundamental questions about what we trust and value. Meanwhile, the 'fair use' debate over copyrighted training data intensified. In June, a court ruled Anthropic's training methods constituted fair use, but the backlash from creators continued. The landscape grew even more complex in December when Disney signed a major deal with OpenAI, allowing its characters to be used in AI video generation.