Understanding How AI Works in 2025: Core Concepts, Breakthroughs, and Societal Impact
By 2023, the U.S. FDA had approved 223 AI-powered medical devices, up from 6 in 2015. GPT-4, released in 2023, is described as having over 100 trillion parameters and powers ChatGPT-like capabilities. The Transformer architecture was introduced in 2017 with the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” enabling self-attention and the training of very large models. Diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, introduced in 2022–2023, revolutionized image generation. AlphaFold solved the protein folding problem in 2021, and by 2025 its database provides structures for nearly all catalogued proteins. By 2025, 78% of organizations report using AI