Mary Meeker, a prominent venture capitalist known for her famed internet trends reports, has returned to chart the explosive rise of artificial intelligence. Her latest 340-page document highlights the staggering rate at which this technology is advancing, using the word “unprecedented” a staggering 51 times.
Meeker’s new research underscores that AI is being developed, deployed, and adopted at breakneck speed, far surpassing previous technology waves such as mobile and cloud. She points to ChatGPT’s ballooning user base, which reached 800 million in only seventeen months, as a prime example of this acceleration.
What separates the current surge from past tech booms is the rapid drop in costs for using AI, even as the expense of training bigger models continues to mount. The cost of inference, or running AI tasks, has fallen ninety-nine percent over two years when measured per million tokens, according to data she cites from Stanford.
Race to Innovate and Reduce Costs
Companies around the world, including many developing open source alternatives, are matching and sometimes surpassing industry leaders’ performance, all while driving prices down. Meeker singles out Nvidia’s latest chip, the Blackwell GPU, for using vastly less energy per token compared to its predecessor from a decade ago.
Tech heavyweights such as Google and Amazon are scaling up their own chip designs to power cloud services, signaling a new era of foundational investments rather than simple add-ons. This technology race has also seen Chinese firms producing competitive options at remarkable speed.
Despite the intense push and the billions invested, few AI companies are yet able to deliver sustained profits. While startups and cloud firms build massive infrastructure, they are just as rapidly burning through investor capital, according to Meeker.
The beneficiaries so far are consumers and businesses, as they gain access to cheaper and constantly improving AI tools. Intense market competition is driving innovation forward, but the winners in the race to become the next wave of enduring tech giants are still unknown.
Meeker closes her report suggesting the stakes could not be higher, with financial success not yet keeping pace with technological leaps. Only with time will it become clear if today’s leading AI companies ultimately transform into profitable, lasting power players. For a detailed overview of these trends, see artificial intelligence market acceleration.
