In 2026, AI will move from hype to pragmatism

Summary

If 2025 was the year AI got a vibe check, 2026 will be the year the tech gets practical. The focus is already shifting away from building ever-larger language models and toward the harder work of making AI usable. In practice, that involves deploying smaller models where they fit, embedding intelligence into physical devices, and designing systems that integrate cleanly into human workflows. The experts TechCrunch spoke to see 2026 as a year of transition, one that evolves from brute-force scaling to researching new architectures, from flashy demos to targeted deployments, and from agents that promise autonomy to ones that actually augment how people work. The party isn’t over, but the industry is starting to sober up. Scaling laws won’t cut it Image Credits:Amazon In 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton’s AlexNet paper showed how AI systems could “learn” to recognize objects in pictures by looking at millions of examples. The approach was computationally expensive, but made possible with GPUs. The result? A decade of hardcore AI research as scientists worked to invent new architectures for different tasks. That culminated around 2020 when OpenAI launched GPT-3, which showed how simply making the model 100 times bigger unlocks abilities like coding and reasoning without requiring explicit training. This marked the transition into what Kian Katanforoosh, CEO and founder of AI agent platform Workera, calls the “age of scaling”: a period defined by the belief that more compute, more data, and larger transformer models would inevitably drive the next major breakthroughs in AI. Today, many researchers think the AI industry is beginning to exhaust the limits of scaling laws and will once again transition into an age of research. Yann LeCun, Meta’s former chief AI scientist, has long argued against the over-reliance on scaling, and stressed the need to develop better architectures. And Sutskever said in a recent interview that current models are plate...