“Unprecedented” – that’s the phrase continuously utilized by enterprise capitalist Mary Meeker—as soon as often known as the ‘Queen of the Web’—in her newest traits report on synthetic intelligence (AI) improvement and adoption.
The 340-page report, titled ‘Developments — Synthetic Intelligence,’ charts out the pace at which prices of utilization are dropping, and the way its adoption curve is in contrast to any tech disruption of the previous. “The tempo and scope of change associated to the bogus intelligence know-how evolution is certainly unprecedented…” Meeker writes in her report, her first main traits report since 2019.
Whereas largely upbeat about AI’s disruptive promise, the report additionally outlines cautions towards well-known pitfalls together with hallucinations, biases, misinformation and gradual transferring regulation. It additionally stated that whereas AI platforms have racked up the user-base, income per person continues to be fairly low for many of them, with a median of $23.
Fast rise
The adoption of AI platforms has been in contrast to something that has come earlier than it, the report stated. As an illustration, it took the likes of Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube between 2-4 years to achieve 100 million customers, however for ChatGPT, it took lower than 3 months.
The report additionally speculated, primarily based on information from Morgan Stanley, that whereas it took between 6-12 years for 50% households within the US to have entry to cellular and desktop web, it would take solely 3 years for a similar variety of households to turn into customers of AI platforms.
India’s contribution to AI adoption
Owing to its giant demography and web penetration, India has been a key user-base marketplace for AI corporations, the report stated. It’s the second largest marketplace for ChatGPT, and contributes the very best proportion of its cellular app customers (13.5%), forward of nations just like the US (8.9%), and Germany (3%).
India can also be the third-largest person base (6.9%) for China’s homegrown platform DeepSeek, and is behind solely China (33.9%) and Russia (9.2%). Nonetheless, the factor to notice right here is that ChatGPT, considered one of DeepSeek’s major rivals, is banned in each China and Russia. Indians subsequently contribute a considerable person base to DeepSeek, regardless of the supply of its Western rivals.
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China main the open supply race
The report stated that two totally different philosophies in transport AI fashions are enjoying out in parallel – closed and open supply.
Closed fashions comply with a centralised, capital-intensive arc. These fashions – like OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Anthropic’s Claude – are educated inside proprietary techniques on huge proprietary datasets, requiring months of compute time and thousands and thousands in spending, it stated. They usually ship extra succesful efficiency and simpler usability, and thus are most well-liked by enterprises and customers, and – more and more – governments. Nonetheless, the tradeoff is opacity: no entry to weights, coaching information, or fine-tuning strategies, the report added.
In the meantime, platforms like Hugging Face have made it frictionless to obtain open supply fashions like Meta’s Llama or Mistral’s Mixtral, giving startups, teachers, and governments entry to frontier-level AI with out billion-dollar budgets. “And China (as of Q2:25) – primarily based on the variety of large-scale AI fashions launched – is main the open-source race, with three large-scale fashions launched in 2025 – DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba Qwen-32B and Baidu Ernie 4.5,” it stated.
“The cut up has penalties. Open-source is fueling sovereign AI initiatives, native language fashions, and community-led innovation. Closed fashions, in the meantime, are dominating client market share and huge enterprise adoption. We’re watching two philosophies unfold in parallel – freedom vs. management, pace vs. security, openness vs. optimization – every shaping not simply how AI works, however who will get to wield it,” Meeker stated in her report.