The rapid development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a unique phenomenon in the history of technology. In her 340-page slideshow report titled "Trends — Artificial Intelligence," venture capitalist Mary Meeker describes the unprecedented pace at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used, backed up with chart after chart.
Meeker, the founder and general partner at VC firm Bond, was once known as the Queen of the Internet for her previous annual Internet Trends reports. Before founding Bond, she ran Kleiner Perkins' growth practice from 2010-2019, where she backed companies like Facebook, Spotify, Ring, and Block (then Square). She hasn't released a trends report since 2019, but she dusted off her skills to document, in laser detail, how AI adoption has outpaced any other tech in human history.
ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months is unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates is also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping is unprecedented. While the costs of training a model (also unprecedented) is up to $1 billion, inference costs — for example, those paying to use the tech — have already dropped 99% over two years, when calculating cost per 1 million tokens, she writes, citing research from Stanford.
The pace at which competitors are matching each other's features, at a fraction of the cost, including open source options, particularly Chinese models, is unprecedented. For example, she points out that Nvidia's 2024 Blackwell GPU uses 105,000x less energy per token than the company's 2014 Kepler GPU predecessor. Meanwhile, chips from Google, like its TPU (tensor processing unit), and Amazon's Trainium, are being developed at scale for their clouds — that's moving quickly, too. "These aren't side projects — they're foundational bets," she writes.
The one area where AI hasn't outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns. While VCs are pouring money on the AI fire as fast as they can, AI companies and cloud service providers are also burning through cash. AI requires massive investments in infrastructure. That's good for consumers and enterprises, the beneficiaries of fast improvements, while competition lowers costs, Meeker points out. But the jury is still out over which of the current crop of companies will become long-term, profitable, next-generation tech giants. "Only time will tell which side of the money-making equation the current AI aspirants will land," she writes.
As for the rest of us, just hold on to your hats and brace for the unprecedented AI revolution that is shaping the future of technology.