philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Tech prophet Mary Meeker just dropped a massive report on AI trends – here’s your TL;DR

... Meeker's data shows AI is being adopted faster than the early internet. ChatGPT, the report's standout example, reached 100 million users in just two months, far eclipsing the growth rates of TikTok, Instagram, or Netflix. By April 2025, ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users and was handling over 365 billion searches annually. These numbers make ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer technology product in history, achieving in two years what took Google more than a decade. ...

ChatGPT hit the world stage all at once, growing in most global regions simultaneously." ...

In 2025 alone, China released three large-scale open-source AI models, and DeepSeek,  a Chinese large language model (LLM), rapidly captured 21% of the global user share. ...

Everyone is engaged. It's a period for lots of wealth creation and wealth destruction." ...

China now operates more industrial robots than the US and the rest of the world combined, signaling an aggressive push toward automation and AI-driven productivity. ...

In particular, Meeker states, "Professions centered on intaking large bodies of structured, historical data and outputting rules-based decisions and judgment, fall squarely in the core competency of generative AI. ...

"In an extreme, entirely agentic future, humans maintain a role in the system, pivoting towards oversight, guidance, and training. Imagine facilities filled with humans teaching robots intricate movements or offices full of workers providing reinforcement learning human feedback (RLHF) to optimize algorithms. This is not conjecture. Companies like  Physical Intelligence and Scale AI, respectively, are building powerful businesses based on this view of the world." ...

But what will people do when they've trained AI all they know? Meeker is unsure, and it's a question no one can answer. ...

... she does point out that developments in AI accompany advances in robotics and drones to automate manual work. ...

She says, for now, "China … is leading the open-source race, with three large-scale models released in 2025: DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba Qwen-32B, and Baidu Ernie 4.5." While proprietary models power Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, Meeker says, "Open-source technology is fueling sovereign AI initiatives, local language models, and community-led innovation."  ...

As Meeker says, "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." ...

The pace of adoption, the intensity of global competition, and the shift toward AI-native business models signal a new era for technology and society. ...

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-prophet-mary-meeker-just-dropped-a-massive-report-on-ai-trends-heres-your-tldr/