Introduction
Welcome back to Laboratory, where each week we peel back the layers of the AI revolution to uncover what’s driving its next chapter. This week we’re turning our gaze toward the broader forces that have propelled AI from lab curiosities into the fabric of everyday life. A sweeping 72-page analysis, Trends – Artificial Intelligence (May 30, 2025), lays out the data, the dollars, and the dynamics reshaping the field at breakneck speed. Compiled by Mary Meeker, Jay Simons, Daegwon Chae, and Alexander Krey, it stitches together benchmarks on user growth, compute economics, revenue trajectories, and geopolitical jockeying—painting a picture of AI’s ascent that’s as thrilling as it is cautionary.
Here’s what we’ll unpack:
Accelerated Adoption & Compute Economics: How ChatGPT jumped from zero to 800 million weekly users in under 18 months, why training costs (total FLOPs up 360% annually) are spiking even as inference expenses plummet, and what that means for infrastructure budgets and real-world use cases.
Open-Source, Geopolitics & Physical Deployment: Why projects like Llama 3 and Chinese LLMs are reshuffling the landscape, how state-backed strategies and regulatory debates are driving a new global arms race, and how AI is leaking into the physical realm—from autonomous taxis doubling market share in San Francisco to China’s robotics installations outpacing the world combined.
Labor Market Shifts, Historical Trajectory & Risks/Rewards: With AI-focused job postings up 448% since 2018 and non-AI IT roles declining 9%, the workforce is being rewired; a centuries-long timeline shows each tech wave halved adoption times, suggesting 50% of U.S. households could be “AI-native” in three years; and while AI promises 30–80% faster drug discovery and climate solutions, it also brings biased algorithms, autonomous weapons, and deepfake misinformation.
Join me as we dive into these data-rich insights—charting how AI’s explosive user growth, infrastructure firepower, and competitive pressures are reshaping every sector, every economy, and every global power dynamic.
Quick note on the author: Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Morgan Stanley securities analyst. She is renowned for her annual Internet Trends reports and deep analyses of technology adoption. She is the founder and general partner at BOND, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm. She previously served as partner at Kleiner Perkins.