15 hours ago
AI models' supersonic progress, in 120 slides
Generative AI has entered the mainstream faster than any previous new technology. But the tech industry hasn't yet figured out the best ways to build AI products — and fierce competition, along with rapid advances, means nobody stays at the top of the heap for long.
Those are some of the top-line findings of a new report on the state of AI foundation models from Innovation Endeavors, the venture capital firm co-founded in 2010 by former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt.
By the numbers: The report (video), by Innovation Endeavors partner Davis Treybig, says that 1 in 8 workers globally now uses AI on a monthly basis. 90% of that growth took place in the last six months.
New models regularly topple technical benchmarks, but the cost of training them is also ballooning.
"The average duration of human task a model can reliably do is doubling every seven months," per the report.
Stunning stat: New models typically spend three weeks at the top of the usage charts and then drop off as newcomers emerge and open-source rivals absorb and commoditize their advances.
Frontier models "depreciate on a 6–12 month timescale," the report says.
AI is "fundamentally disrupting" software development and collapsing the distinctions between programming, product management and design, the report also finds.
"Therapy, life organization and learning" lead the list of general-interest AI use cases.
