Some important things do change in the mobile service provider business, and return on invested capital is arguably one of them. Since 2002, for example, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon have improved ROIC substantially.
Just for comparison, mobile service providers arguably now have improved ROIC so much that those firms outperform retailers, transportation firms and electrical energy firms, for example.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
One might liken the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and large language models to the creation of the graphical user interface, the mouse and natural language interfaces. In other words, LLMs are to AI as GUIs, the mouse and natural language are to computing.
From the command-line interfaces of early computers to the way we now speak or point to interact with computing devices, innovations such as LLM allow people to interact seamlessly and naturally with technology.
We sometimes take very much for granted the role “what you see is what you get” displays, touch interfaces, spoken input and output, icons, buttons and menus play when we are interacting with computing appliances.
But there is an argument to be made that LLMs will have more impact than did GUIs
or the mouse, largely because LLMs use natural language and add conversational interaction in addition to a huge background of ingested knowledge. ------------------------------------
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
