According to the recent report, traditional search engines like Google are getting left behind with AI chatbots like ChatGPT growing 5.5x faster…
As far as the future of tech is concerned, AI is not just the next big thing anymore – it is ‘the’ biggest thing. And if there is one person that Silicon Valley trusts blinding when it comes to tech shifts, it’s Mary Meeker.
After a 6-year hiatus from publishing her famed Internet Trends report, Meeker has made her comeback with a gigantic 340-slide deep dive into Artificial Intelligence. Apart from the speed and scale of AI adoption, the report has also taken a closer look at investment patterns, business models and global implications of the new AI era.
Who is Mary Meeker
Popularly known as the ‘Queen of the Internet’, Mary Meeker rose to fame in the 1990s and 2000s of her Internet Trend reports which accurately predicted the rise of mobile phones, social media and cloud platforms.
She was a partner at Kleiner Perkins before she founded her own growth stage investment firm called Bond Capitals which manages over USD 6 billion.
Long story short, when Meeker speaks up about tech or venture capital, the entire Silicon Valley takes notes.
AI Growing Faster than Any Previous Tech
One of the standout features of Meeker’s latest report is the pace at which generative AI is being adopted. According to the data, ChatGPT gets 365 billion annual searches, a milestone it reached five times faster than Google did during its nascent stages.
What’s even more unbelievable is that 800 million people use ChatGPT every week, just 17 months after its launch. That’s faster user growth than any consumer internet product in history – faster than TikTok, Instagram or even the iPhone.
Meeker also noted that a significant portion of this adoption is outside the US, showing that AI adoption has indeed become global.
The Infrastructure Arms Race
The AI boom is powered by largescale investment in infrastructure. Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Apple and Alphabet have increased their capital expenditures – even upwards of 20% year-on-year- in a bid to build the data centres, chips and models that are needed to power AI.
The training costs for large AI models continues to remain high, over hundreds of millions of dollars. But at the same time, the cost of running (or inference) has dropped 99.7% in the last two years.
Meeker also mentions that in this new computing era, physical assets like cars, machines and homes have all become ‘software endpoints’ because of the rise of AI. This hints at a future that is full of autonomous systems, smart factories and intelligent robotics.
Who is Winning & at What Cost
According to the report, closed AI models like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google DeepMind are growing faster than open-source alternatives. These closed models are also receiving a lot more funding, approximately five times more than closed models.
As far as the geopolitical race is concerned, US and China are far ahead with over 100 large scale AI models. This is also reshaping the labour market, since 2018 AI related jobs in the US have increased by 448% while traditional IT jobs have decreased by nearly 9%.
While Meeker is confident about how AI’s rise has the potential to increase productivity, transform creative work and reinvent how businesses operate, she also warned about drawbacks like AI hallucinations, algorithmic bias, deepfakes and the lack of regulatory oversight.
So apart from capital and computing power, Meeker says AI desperately needs ethical safeguards, smarter governance and a global conversation about what we want AI to be.
The Last Word
Considering the fact that AI has been around and widely adopted for some time now, the Meeker report is quite timely. And the details of the report are not very surprising: The tools have arrived, the money is flowing and adoption rate is high.Now all we need to ensure is that we use it wisely.
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