Latest news with #Meeker
NDTV
an hour ago
- Business
- NDTV
'Queen Of The Internet' Mary Meeker Calls AI The Most "Unprecedented" Tech Shift Yet
New Delhi: Venture capitalist Mary Meeker, once called the "Queen of the Internet," is back with her first big trends report since 2019. Titled " Trends - Artificial Intelligence," the 340-page deep dive argues the rise of AI is unlike any tech revolution seen before. "The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented..." Ms Meeker writes, using the word "unprecedented" 51 times in the report. Rise Of AI Ms Meeker's report talks about how quickly AI has scaled. Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube took 2-4 years to hit 100 million users. ChatGPT did it in under three months. By April this year, ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users and now handles over 365 billion searches annually. Based on Morgan Stanley data, it took 6-12 years for half of US households to get access to mobile and desktop internet. For AI platforms, Ms Meeker predicts the same will happen in only three years. India Has A Major AI User Base India has turned out to be a vital market for AI platforms. The country contributes the highest percentage of mobile app users for ChatGPT (13.5 per cent), ahead of the US (8.9 per cent) and Germany (3 per cent). It is also the third-largest user base (6.9 per cent) for China's DeepSeek. "India has been a key user-base market for AI companies," the report said. Open Source vs Closed Source AI Ms Meeker says AI is splitting into two paths: closed models like GPT-4 and Claude, and open models like Llama and Mixtral. Closed models lead in performance and are favoured by enterprises, but they lack transparency. Open models are more accessible and are driving innovation in local languages, grassroots tools, and sovereign AI efforts. "We're watching two philosophies unfold in parallel, freedom vs control, speed vs safety, openness vs optimization - each shaping not just how AI works, but who gets to wield it," Ms Meeker writes. China, for instance, is leading the open-source race. As of Q2 2025, it has released major models like DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba's Qwen-32B, and Baidu's Ernie 4.5. Falling Costs, Soaring Competition While training costs for models have gone up (reaching up to $1 billion), inference costs have dropped by 99 per cent in two years, according to Stanford data. Nvidia's 2024 Blackwell GPU uses 105,000 times less energy per token compared to its 2014 predecessor. Google's TPU chips and Amazon's Trainium are also scaling rapidly. "These aren't side projects, they're foundational bets," Ms Meeker notes. Financial Reality Check Despite massive user growth, she has warned that revenue per user is still low with a median of $23 (Rs 2000) across most platforms. The industry is burning through cash. Investors are betting big, but it is still unclear who will come out on top. "Only time will tell which side of the money-making equation the current AI aspirants will land," she writes. AI Already Shaping The Real World AI is moving beyond apps, the report says. It is driving cars, running factory robots, and aiding in healthcare. Jobs aren't vanishing but evolving, with AI becoming a co-pilot for coders, writers, and analysts. AI-related job listings have jumped 448 per cent since 2018 Ms Meeker says. The Infrastructure Race Access to powerful tech, like GPUs, chips, and data centres, is now a global competition. Mary Meeker compares it to the space race during the Cold War. There are serious concerns too. AI can be biased, spread wrong info, or behave unpredictably. Ms Meeker says we need clear rules, honest leadership, and smarter systems to handle AI's fast growth.
Indian Express
6 hours ago
- Business
- Indian Express
India's rapid AI adoption, China's open source lead in focus in Mary Meeker report
'Unprecedented' – that's the word frequently used by venture capitalist Mary Meeker—once known as the 'Queen of the Internet'—in her latest trends report on artificial intelligence (AI) development and adoption. The 340-page report, titled 'Trends — Artificial Intelligence,' charts out the speed at which costs of usage are dropping, and how its adoption curve is unlike any tech disruption of the past. 'The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented…' Meeker writes in her report, her first major trends report since 2019. While largely upbeat about AI's disruptive promise, the report also outlines cautions against well-known pitfalls including hallucinations, biases, misinformation and slow moving regulation. It also said that while AI platforms have racked up the user-base, revenue per user is still quite low for most of them, with a median of $23. The adoption of AI platforms has been unlike anything that has come before it, the report said. For instance, it took the likes of Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube between 2-4 years to reach 100 million users, but for ChatGPT, it took less than 3 months. The report also speculated, based on data from Morgan Stanley, that while it took between 6-12 years for 50% households in the US to have access to mobile and desktop internet, it will take only 3 years for the same number of households to become users of AI platforms. Owing to its large demography and internet penetration, India has been a key user-base market for AI companies, the report said. It is the second largest market for ChatGPT, and contributes the highest percentage of its mobile app users (13.5%), ahead of countries like the US (8.9%), and Germany (3%). India is also the third-largest user base (6.9%) for China's homegrown platform DeepSeek, and is behind only China (33.9%) and Russia (9.2%). However, the thing to note here is that ChatGPT, one of DeepSeek's main rivals, is banned in both China and Russia. Indians therefore contribute a substantial user base to DeepSeek, despite the availability of its Western rivals. The report said that two different philosophies in shipping AI models are playing out in parallel – closed and open source. Closed models follow a centralised, capital-intensive arc. These models – like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Anthropic's Claude – are trained within proprietary systems on massive proprietary datasets, requiring months of compute time and millions in spending, it said. They often deliver more capable performance and easier usability, and thus are preferred by enterprises and consumers, and – increasingly – governments. However, the tradeoff is opacity: no access to weights, training data, or fine-tuning methods, the report added. Meanwhile, platforms like Hugging Face have made it frictionless to download open source models like Meta's Llama or Mistral's Mixtral, giving startups, academics, and governments access to frontier-level AI without billion-dollar budgets. 'And China (as of Q2:25) – based on the number of large-scale AI models released – is leading the open-source race, with three large-scale models released in 2025 – DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba Qwen-32B and Baidu Ernie 4.5,' it said. 'The split has consequences. Open-source is fueling sovereign AI initiatives, local language models, and community-led innovation. Closed models, meanwhile, are dominating consumer market share and large enterprise adoption. We're watching two philosophies unfold in parallel – freedom vs. control, speed vs. safety, openness vs. optimization – each shaping not just how AI works, but who gets to wield it,' Meeker said in her report.
Economic Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Economic Times
DeepSeek can undercut larger ChatGPT, ace investor Mary Meeker warns
Mary Meeker predicts AI will spawn numerous trillion-dollar companies, with competition intensifying from firms like China's DeepSeek. Rising training costs for leading US models, such as OpenAI's GPT, are creating opportunities for cheaper, task-specific alternatives. The current AI landscape resembles a capital-intensive commodity market, demanding deep funding and patient investors for startups to thrive. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Artificial intelligence (AI) forerunners like OpenAI could soon face serious competition from cheaper rivals such as China's DeepSeek , according to renowned Silicon Valley analyst and investor Mary Meeker Meeker, an early investor in companies like Meta, Spotify, and Airbnb, told the Financial Times that AI will create 'multiple companies worth $10 trillion' — and not all of them will be based in North America. 'The wealth creation will be extraordinary. We've never had a five-billion-user market that was this easy to reach,' she a recent report, Meeker and others point out that US companies, such as OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini, leading the development of large language models (LLMs) are now facing rising training costs. At the same time, competition from players like DeepSeek has intensified.'The business model is in flux,' Meeker wrote. 'Smaller, cheaper models tailored for specific tasks are emerging, challenging the idea that one large, general-purpose LLM can do it all.'While AI companies have enjoyed rise in revenues and stock prices, they face growing threats. New, more powerful chips and improved algorithms are lowering the cost of running AI models. This is helping competitors like DeepSeek launch models that are more affordable and goes on to underscore that, in the short term, these AI businesses are starting to look like commodity operations that burn through venture capital at a rapid pace. Despite the advances in the space, training the most advanced AI models is still extremely expensive. Costs have increased 2,400 times in the past eight years, making it nearly impossible for smaller players to compete. Only a few companies can afford to keep up, and even those lack a clear path to lower prices and more model options benefit consumers, they create a tough environment for startups. To survive, these companies need deep funding and patient investors. Meeker compares their situation to companies like Uber, Amazon, and Tesla , which all spent heavily for years before turning a reported earlier this week how several Indian startups may have to tap external funding to scale up their GenAI-based applications as AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic pause steep price cuts of their generative AI rose to fame during her time at Morgan Stanley with bets like Google and Apple, earning the moniker "queen of the internet". She joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2010 and later co-founded her own firm, Bond, in 2019.
Time of India
2 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
DeepSeek can undercut larger ChatGPT, ace investor Mary Meeker warns
Artificial intelligence (AI) forerunners like OpenAI could soon face serious competition from cheaper rivals such as China's DeepSeek , according to renowned Silicon Valley analyst and investor Mary Meeker . Meeker, an early investor in companies like Meta, Spotify, and Airbnb, told the Financial Times that AI will create 'multiple companies worth $10 trillion' — and not all of them will be based in North America. 'The wealth creation will be extraordinary. We've never had a five-billion-user market that was this easy to reach,' she added. In a recent report, Meeker and others point out that US companies, such as OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini, leading the development of large language models (LLMs) are now facing rising training costs. At the same time, competition from players like DeepSeek has intensified. 'The business model is in flux,' Meeker wrote. 'Smaller, cheaper models tailored for specific tasks are emerging, challenging the idea that one large, general-purpose LLM can do it all.' While AI companies have enjoyed rise in revenues and stock prices, they face growing threats. New, more powerful chips and improved algorithms are lowering the cost of running AI models. This is helping competitors like DeepSeek launch models that are more affordable and efficient. Live Events She goes on to underscore that, in the short term, these AI businesses are starting to look like commodity operations that burn through venture capital at a rapid pace. Despite the advances in the space, training the most advanced AI models is still extremely expensive. Costs have increased 2,400 times in the past eight years, making it nearly impossible for smaller players to compete. Only a few companies can afford to keep up, and even those lack a clear path to profitability. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories While lower prices and more model options benefit consumers, they create a tough environment for startups. To survive, these companies need deep funding and patient investors. Meeker compares their situation to companies like Uber, Amazon, and Tesla , which all spent heavily for years before turning a profit. ET reported earlier this week how several Indian startups may have to tap external funding to scale up their GenAI-based applications as AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic pause steep price cuts of their generative AI models. Meeker rose to fame during her time at Morgan Stanley with bets like Google and Apple, earning the moniker "queen of the internet". She joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2010 and later co-founded her own firm, Bond, in 2019.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
It's not your imagination: AI is speeding up the pace of change
If the adoption of AI feels different from any tech revolution you may have experienced before — mobile, social, cloud computing — it actually is. Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report — which used the word 'unprecedented' on 51 of those pages — to describe the speed at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used, backed up with chart after chart. 'The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented, as supported by the data,' she writes in the report, called "Trends — Artificial Intelligence." There's a certain poetic history to this person writing this kind of report. Meeker is the founder and general partner at VC firm Bond and was once known as 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: unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping: 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 — has 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: 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. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
