AI's Adoption and Growth Truly is 'Unprecedented'

"If the adoption of AI feels different from any tech revolution you may have experienced before - mobile, social, cloud computing - it actually is," writes TechCrunch. They cite a new 340-page report from venture capitalist Mary Meeker that details how AI adoption has outpaced any other tech in human history - and uses the word "unprecedented" on 51 pages:ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months: unprecedented. The number of companies and the rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. The speed at which costs of usage are dropping: unprecedented. While the costs of training a model (also unprecedented) is up to $1 billion, inference costs - for example, those paying to use the tech - has already dropped 99% over two years, when calculating cost per 1 million tokens, she writes, citing research from Stanford. The pace at which competitors are matching each other's features, at a fraction of the cost, including open source options, particularly Chinese models: unprecedented... Meanwhile, chips from Google, like its TPU (tensor processing unit), and Amazon's Trainium, are being developed at scale for their clouds - that's moving quickly, too. "These aren't side projects - they're foundational bets," she writes. "The one area where AI hasn't outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns..." the article points out. "[T]he jury is still out over which of the current crop of companies will become long-term, profitable, next-generation tech giants."

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