AI Market Trends in Charts and Graphs: Venture Capitalist Mary Meeker Revives Her Trend Reports With a Deep Dive Into the AI Boom

Renowned investment analyst Mary Meeker is back with a report on the AI market, six years after publishing her last survey of the internet.

What’s new: Meeker, co-founder of the venture capital firm Bond who formerly analyzed technology portfolios for Merrill Lynch, Salomon Brothers, and Morgan Stanley, published “Trends — Artificial Intelligence (May ‘25).” The report, which spans 340 graph-packed pages, revives and updates a series that chronicled the rise of the internet nearly every year from 1995 through 2019.

How it works: The new report focuses on a handful of themes that arise from the unprecedented growth and capabilities of deep learning. As Meeker told Axios, AI is an arena for “intense competition the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” and that makes the present time “a period for lots of wealth creation and wealth destruction.”

• Rapid growth: Change in AI is happening faster than ever. Users of ChatGPT reached 1 million in 5 days — compared to the iPhone’s 74 days — and since then have rocketed to 800 million. Total capital expenditures of the six biggest technology companies (largely driven by AI) rose 63 percent to $212 billion between 2023 and 2024. Training datasets are growing 260 percent per year, processing power devoted to training is growing 360 percent per year, effective processing power is growing at 200 percent annually.
• Revenues and costs: The economics of this new world are not straightforward. On one hand, revenue is soaring at giants like Amazon, Google, and Nvidia as well as startups like Scale AI. On the other hand, the cost of computation is rising steadily even as the cost per token of output falls precipitously. Meanwhile, rapid turnover of models and proliferation of open-source alternatives are wild cards for AI-powered businesses.
• Rising performance: AI performance continues to increase. AI’s ability to complete the MMLU benchmark of language understanding outstripped human performance last year. This year, 73 percent of human testers classified responses generated by an LLM as human, according to one study. Synthetic images, video, and speech generation — all are increasingly capable of fooling human testers.
• Emerging capabilities: Today’s AI is capable of writing and editing, tutoring, brainstorming, automating repetitive work, and providing companionship. Within five years, it will generate code as well as humans, create films and games, operate humanlike robots, and drive scientific discovery. Meeker forecasts that within 10 years, AI will conduct scientific research, design advanced technologies, and build immersive digital worlds.
• Workforce implications: Industries most likely to be affected by AI include knowledge work, content creation, legal services, software development, financial services, customer service, drug discovery, and manufacturing. Employers are adopting AI to get a boost in workforce productivity that Stanford researchers estimate is an average 14 percent. Companies like Box, Duolingo, and Shopify are adopting an AI-first orientation, while AI-related job titles have risen 200 percent in the past two years.
• AI gets physical: AI is having a profound impact on the physical world. Lyft’s and Uber’s market share fell around 15 percent while Waymo’s gained 27 percent over the past 18 months. AI-driven mineral exploration is boosting mine efficiency, and AI-powered agriculture is cutting the use of pesticides. And, sadly, AI-equipped attack drones are wreaking destruction upon Ukraine and elsewhere, even as they play a critical role in defense.

Behind the news: Meeker published her first “Internet Trends” report in 1995, anticipating the coming online boom, and she issued new editions annually throughout the 2000s and much of the coming decade. Her final internet report arrived in 2019, the year after she founded Bond, when the report highlighted the rise of visual social media like Instagram, wearable technology, and digital payments.

Why it matters: “Trends — Artificial Intelligence” offers a wealth of market data culled from analyst reports, consumer surveys, and academic studies. The AI community has a number of excellent annual surveys, including Stanford’s AI Index and Air Street Capital’s State of AI. Meeker, who has been watching technology markets since the dawning of the web, adds another valuable perspective.

We’re thinking: One implication of the report: There has never been a better time to build software applications. For developers, it’s time to hone and update skills. For tech companies, it’s time to cast the net for talent. As Meeker said in her interview with Axios, “Companies that get the best developers often win.”