Drawing upon my 25-year research journey, this talk offers a perspective on the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI), highlighting both its remarkable progress and the significant challenges that remain. In recent years, AI has taken giant leaps, fueled by key developments in deep learning, transformer models, and scaling. I will briefly review this progress and then turn our attention to the open challenges we are still facing. Despite the recent advancements, AI is still in its infancy. All AI systems still struggle with basic tasks. I will illustrate these challenges with examples from post-training and evaluation, focusing on core capabilities such as instruction following, factuality, and multilinguality. Addressing these challenges is crucial to realizing the full potential of AI and ensuring its responsible development.