For our fifth anniversary, we reconnected with authors of recent Comments and Perspectives in Nature Machine Intelligence and asked them how the topic they wrote about developed. We also wanted to know what other topics in AI they found exciting, surprising or worrying, and what their hopes and expectations are for AI in 2024—and the next five years. A recurring theme is the ongoing developments in large language models and generative AI, their transformative effect on the scientific process and concerns about ethical implications.