Every important new technology, and especially all general-purpose technologies, have benefits and “costs” (externalities), though most would likely assume that, on balance, every GPT brings more benefits than costs.
Some of us assume that will be true for artificial intelligence as it has been the case for earlier GPTs.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Just a few graphics that confirm what you probably already believe is happening, namely that humans using artificial intelligence in relatively direct ways (as compared to the indirect ways as when AI aids some other process) keeps growing.
source: Seeking Alpha, edge-ai-vision
For most consumers, the most-common direct use is the AI chatbot.
source: Business Insider, Seeking Alpha
As always is to be expected, there will be many more startups than are sustainable long term, and bigger apps will tend to acquire smaller apps, leading to some consolidation.
And, compared to internet apps, which in many cases were relatively affordable to create, AI models are prodigiously expensive. And that will ultimately favor deep-pocketed firms with access to lots of capital.
And, generally speaking, the more capable language models become, the more money it takes to train them. As we move towards agentic AI, more of the cost should shift to inference and “action on inference” operations, though.
On the other hand, the cost of using AI to make inferences keeps dropping, which means it will be used more often, further fueling usage.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Embodied artificial intelligence eventually will constitute the main ways most consumers routinely interact with AI, despite growth of “active” use such as chabot-enabled search. That already is the case for the ways most people “use” AI: e-commerce or media recommendations; social media; search.
The AI functions in the background, so there is no change in user behavior required.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Acqui-hiring, where a company is acquired primarily to gain its talent, rather than its products or technology, might seem to be a new trend in the technology business, but it has been going on for many decades.
The practice of acquiring companies for their talent dates back at least to the 1980s, but the term "acqui-hire" was coined in the mid-2000s. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo frequently used acqui-hires to secure top engineering talent, although the new spin involves moves that hire the talent while avoiding an acquisition of the target company.
Facebook’s acqui-hire of FriendFeed (2009) and Drop.io (2010), and Google’s purchases of Slide and Like.com, are early examples.
Google’s acquisition of DeepMind and Api.ai, and Facebook’s acqui-hire of Little Eye Labs provide other examples.
Acqui-hires have regulatory benefits for hyperscalers and other dominant firms as it avoids the scrutiny actual firm acquisitions would tend to generate. Hiring people does not create a basis for examining the impact on market structure and competition, as the dominant firm does not actually acquire the smaller firm or its market share.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Yeah, that's pretty much how you feel if you are a surfer paddling out and you see this. Great wave walling up; a longboard rider in perfect position; no other riders in sight; glassy (smooth ocean surface). And you're thinking, aside from elation for the other guy, that you will be in the lineup soon and you can expect a wave similar to that, soon!
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Sometimes history is a useful thing to know. Back in September 1993, Todd Gitlin, a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society (now how’s that for history!), and not someone anyone would mistake for anything like a “rightist” or “conservative,” discussed political correctness and identity politics.
He made some important observations in an article he authored for Harper’s magazine.
He noted what for a leftist seemed a “a troubling irony: the right, traditionally the custodian of the privileges of the few, now speaks in an apparently general language of merit, reason, individual rights, and virtue that transcends politics, whereas much of the left is so preoccupied with debunking generalizations and affirming the differences among groups (real as they often are) that it has ceded the very language of universality that is its birthright.”
This, some of us might note, is the underlying problem with “diversity, equity and inclusion” principles. The issue is not whether we have an obligation to rectify injustices. The issue is that we lost, in the process, any claim to other important principles, such as merit.
Though it seems ancient history now, for many of us who were college activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the principle was the unfairness of equally talented people not being treated fairly. We assumed the existence of equal talent and assumed that the unequal outcomes were related to suppression of that equal talent.
Some might have argued for outcomes not based on merit, talent, skill. I don’t recall hearing that as a policy prescription, but certainly some might have called for it.
But that is where reason and merit part ways. “In the academy but also outside it, standards and traditions are now viewed as nothing more than camouflage for particular interests,” Gitlin noted. In other words, “objective” standards either do not exist, are affectations of political power and not much more and therefore “do not matter” or should not be used.
That was not how I recall the movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, which was about the application of universality where particularism had reigned; the fulfillment of promises about equality before the law and in governance.
There was, of course, much feeling about lessening inequality, though much less emphasis on “equal” outcomes (fairness probably comes closer to the thought), which might strike most of us as contrary to our lived experiences.
Our experiences with amateur and professional sports likely come closest to our understanding that talent really is unequally possessed. Many of us in business or technology might have similar views about other elements of skill as well: they are unevenly distributed.
Gitlin’s observation might be equally relevant in 2025 as it was three decades ago: “We find ourselves today in a most peculiar situation: the left and right have traded places, at least with respect to the sort of universalist rhetoric that can still stir the general public.”
In other words, some focus on particularism, not universalism; that which divides, not that which unites.
All of which is a long way from the “anthem” some of us relished back then, in a song by the Youngbloods: “Come on, people now, smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now.”
Whatever else you think might be implied, those lyrics speak to universalism, unity, connection, caring and respect. Somewhere along the way, many leftists seem to have lost the plot.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Among the other effects artificial intelligence might be having on enterprise information technology spending, it appears there is a shift underway from application software to AI.
The Boston Consulting Group finds enterprises are deliberately reallocating budgets from mature categories such as enterprise resource planning and traditional application software to fund AI, cloud, and security initiatives.
The Information Services Group predicts enterprise AI spending will grow nearly six percent in 2025, while overall IT budgets are expected to increase by less than two percent.
Researchers at A16Z argue that enterprise AI spending is now competing directly with traditional enterprise software purchases.
IDC meanwhile argues that 66 percent of all software spending will go toward AI-enabled applications and platforms through 2028. Other studies confirm the general trend.
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
Lots of businesses in many industries use enterprise customer revenue models successfully. And, so far, that seems true for Anthropic, whose Clause chatbot is pitched to enterprise customers, compared to OpenAI, which tends to be thought of as the consumer user leader.
In fact, some might argue Claude has staked out a lucrative position in software development. The argument is that every major development platform (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Replit) uses Claude as the preferred or default model.
So Anthropic leads the enterprise developer market.
Claude has 18.9 million monthly active users and 2.9 million mobile app users, about five percent of ChatGPT’s user base. Yet this smaller, more focused audience generates 40 percent of OpenAI’s revenue.
Claude’s efficiency metrics:
16 million website visitors in January 2025
Average session duration of 6 minutes with 3.73 pages viewed
37.2 percent of interactions from “computer and mathematical” sectors
79 percent of Claude Code chats focused on automated coding tasks
Gary Kim was cited as a global "Power Mobile Influencer" by Forbes, ranked second in the world for coverage of the mobile business, and as a "top 10" telecom analyst. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top two percent.
