“The Queen of the Internet” Mary Meeker was recognized by Forbes as one of the most powerful women in the world in 2021, but has returned to the public after nearly six years of absence, with new blockbuster reports on the impact of AI on business, politics and society.
Meeker, a partner at Bond Capital, the business she founded, became famous throughout the digital sector with her annual Internet Trends Report in Morgan Stanley, and later became famous for her Kleiner Perkins, published between 1995 and 2019.
Last week she released a 340-page OPUS on the global impact of AI on business and society. She obviously didn't come up with a headline using ChatGpt, but the report is simply called Trends – Artificial IntelligenceMeeker draws pictures of the world on the brink of dramatic, AI-driven transformation.
Within the nuggets in the data:
- Currently, there are 800 million US-based users worldwide from LLMS every day.
- Big Six Severe Surge in Capital Expenditures – Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon (AWS only) and Meta spent USD 2120 billion in 2024, up 64%.
- AI is rapidly maintaining the actions that Internet readers have implemented. In San Francisco, the market share of total reservations for autonomous car services, like Waymo overtakes Uber.
- Evidence of dislocation in the job market is emerging. At least in technology, AI employment has increased by 448% since 2018, while non-AI IT jobs have declined by 9%.
- Openai's ChatGPT currently has 800m active users, only 20m of which have been converted to paid subscriptions. But that small cohort has already closed businesses with $4 billion in annual revenue.
- In its second year, ChatGPT hit an annual search of 365 billion people. It took Google 11 years to achieve that milestone.
According to Meeker, the world is changing at an unprecedented rate. “The pace of AI's cognitive improvements is surprising. In the three years since ChatGPT's release on November 22, we fell from high school students' reasoning ability to reason with PhD candidates.”
(This is a very different view from Apple's recent AI reports.)
“The rapid and transformative innovation and adoption of technology represent a key foundation for these changes, as do the evolution of global power leadership.”
A key theme in the report is the near inevitability of what is happening now based on the missions of digital giants such as Google, Alibaba and Facebook. To “organize and make global information universally accessible and convenient,” we “do business easily everywhere” and give people the power to connect the world more openly and openly. ”
“All massive changes are charging the organised, connected, accessible information of a world that is overcharged by artificial intelligence, accelerated computing power, and semi-boundary capital.”
She says, “…computers are smarter and more competitive by incorporating large datasets. With breakthroughs in large models, lower costs per token, spreading open source, and improving chip performance, new technological advances are becoming more and more powerful and economically viable.”
The adoption and usage of AI has been accelerated significantly, and machines can outweigh human capabilities. As the data clearly shows, the speed and scale of change driven by the evolution of artificial intelligence is truly unprecedented, she adds.
Everything, anywhere, at once
There are also significant changes from the Internet revolution, she suggests – ubiquitous.
“The use of AI is surged among consumers, developers, businesses and governments. And unlike the Internet 1.0 revolution that began in the US and spread steadily globally, ChatGpt has hit the global stage at once and is growing simultaneously in most global regions.”
Meanwhile, Meeker argues that established platforms and startup challengers are taking part in the race to develop and deploy the next layer of AI infrastructure, including agent interfaces, enterprise capellots, real-world autonomous systems, and sovereign models. She says AI breakthroughs, infrastructure and global connectivity are fundamentally changing the way jobs are performed, capital allocation and leadership are measured, both within the enterprise and across the country.
Geopolitics
Towards the end of the last decade, Meeker's Internet Status Report reports increasingly tracking the rise of China as a digital powerhouse.
Now, six years from now, she suggests, it is challenging US hegemony.
“Increasingly, two powerful forces are intertwined, technical and geopolitical. Andrew Bosworth (Metaplatform CTO), a recent “possible” podcast has revealed the current state of AI: “Our space race and the people we are discussing, China in particular, are very capable… There are few secrets. And there are progress. And you want to make sure you never get behind. In reality, AI leadership can produce geopolitical leadership, not the other way around.”
That poses obvious risks, especially for the US, Meeker points out. “This situation brings tremendous uncertainty… yet, we'll go back to one of our favorite quotes (by Brian Rogers, former price chairman and CEO of T. Lowe). “Statistically speaking, the world doesn't end that often.”
Rather, Bond Capital Partners are seeing better days driven by competition and entrepreneurialism.
“Creators/bettors/consumers utilize global internet rails that can be accessed by 55 billion citizens via connected devices, a digital dataset that has grown for over 30 years.
She says the founders of new AI companies are particularly aggressive in promoting innovation, launching products, creating investments and acquisitions, burning cash and raising capital.
At the same time, more established tech companies, often influenced by founders, have allocated substantial free cash flow increases to AI, aiming to accelerate growth and defend against emerging threats.
“In 1998, with the use of new internet access, Google set out to “organize and make global information universally accessible and convenient.” After almost 30 years later, humanity has seen the fastest change, much information is digitized/accessible/useful.
Please don't look up
As AI plunged into a general community consciousness, the tech sector tried to maintain the fiction that employment would not be affected.
For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously observed that “AI doesn't get a job, people using AI get your job.” Of course, the bottom line with that argument is that you are still out of work.
Meeker doesn't hold back the guns for that meaning.
“AI is fundamentally changing the way we work. We are seeing the rise of physical automation (think robots and drones adoption), as well as the rise of cognitive automation, where AI systems can reason, create and solve problems.
Ultimately, however, she remains optimistic, acknowledging the risks to her work relying on the processing of a large amount of historical data, structured, to generate rule-based decisions and judgments.
“In this new paradigm, labor force can be increasingly measured not by human time, but by computational power. In many cases, the availability and quality of a particular type of work can be determined by data centers and underlying models.
However, she says, “The recognition of history and patterns suggests that human roles are permanent and persuasive. The leap of technology usually promotes increased productivity and efficiency, and further new jobs.”
According to Meeker, “That being said, it's happening faster this time.”
Even in the extreme and completely agent future, she is “human.” [will] Maintain roles in the system and pivot towards monitoring, guidance and training. ”
