Recuperating from AI-Induced CES Fatigue

Navigating the sea of AI hype to find the islands of relevance and reality.

January 24, 2025

Sebastian Blanco

Thousands of media and industry professionals attended the NVIDIA keynote at CES 2025. (Consumer Technology Association)

Listening to some end-of-the-year music shows recently, I was reminded of how natural it is to get jaded about things, even things we truly enjoy, as we get older. The critics I listened to didn’t start covering music because they had an indifference to beats and melodies. No, they loved (and love) listening to music until it fills the room. It’s just that after a decade of putting out annual Top Ten lists, the shine has dulled.

I bring this up after a busy week in Las Vegas for the large and growing CES tech show last month. I’m still a relative CES newbie, only attending four or five times, but they were not consecutive and with the pandemic messing up my sense of time, it feels like I’ve been going for ages.

This year was, as you may have seen, the year of AI. CES ’ own promotional material proclaimed that the “global technology supercycle of AI is here” and as a media attendee, I was the lucky recipient of more suspicious AI-related PR pitches than I would have thought possible. No, I do not need an AI spice rack, thank you very much.

I’m much more in the Cory Doctorow camp when it comes to AI. Tech writer Doctorow calls the AI bubble the new crypto bubble, and said that “the same people are … doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto ─ trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users.”

Part of my AI hesitancy is because I’m still trying to wrap my head around just how it’s all supposed to work. Over here, in the general tech press, I read articles explaining why large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) will always be susceptible to at least some minor hallucinations. Then, over and over again at CES, I hear how AI will change this or that part of the auto industry. One company told me that they rely on an AI in their simulation-based battery development, but acknowleged that the tool they’re relying on may suggest hallucinations as solutions. That feels problematic.

Other announcements, like BMW and Honda showing off generative AI-powered assistants for their respective infotainment systems, were easier to wish well, and NVIDIA said at its press conference that it would focus its barrage of new AI models at solving two main problems: autonomous driving and robotics.

As you can tell from the pages that follow, we were not enraptured by the AI hype at CES this year. We report on it when appropriate, but we knew there was more to CES this year to let it dominate our coverage. We’re all eager to see what positive changes AI can bring to our industry, but before that happens we’ve got to see the AI hype over through to a more stable end. Some of that ride will create legitimately cool technology what will, yes, solve some of humanity’s problems. But a lot of it, if CES 2025 was anything to go on, will be eminently ignorable.