What generative AI is good at right now (opens in new tab)

It’s late May 2026 and from my vantage point it’s quite unclear whether AI is a speculative bubble, or a Manhattan Project/Singularity arms race. Here I want to take the prosaic, pragmatic angle of understanding (and discussing) what generative AI is good and not good for, right now. It’d be silly for me to predict what hundreds of billions of dollars of capex riding on a quickly changing scientific field could make possible in a few months.