The AI bubble is starting to deflate, and that's actually a good thing for everyone except the people who invested billions expecting magic.

Here's what happened: In 2023-2024, companies threw AI at everything. AI toothbrushes. AI doorbells. AI note-taking apps that were just regular apps with a chatbot stapled on. The tech worked, kind of, but it didn't revolutionize most of these products. It just made them slightly different and often more expensive.

Now we're seeing the correction. The companies that slapped "AI-powered" on their landing pages without solving real problems are quietly removing those claims. The ones that remain are the tools that actually use AI to do something genuinely difficult or tedious—code assistants that understand context, content tools that handle genuinely creative tasks, research tools that synthesize information at scale.

This is the pattern with every transformative technology. The web had the dot-com bubble. Mobile had a thousand apps for everything. Cloud computing had the same hype cycle. The bubble inflates, the bubble pops, and what remains are the actual use cases that make sense.

What makes AI different is that the underlying technology keeps getting better even as the hype fades. The models are more capable in 2026 than they were in 2024. They're also cheaper and faster. This means that AI features that were novelties at launch are becoming genuinely useful tools.

For regular users, this correction means you can finally see which AI tools are actually worth your time. If an AI feature survived the hype cycle, it's probably solving a real problem. If it disappeared or got quietly removed, it was probably just marketing.

The practical takeaway: Don't adopt AI tools because they're trendy. Adopt them because they save you time on tasks you actually do. The good ones will become obvious as the noise fades.

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