TL;DR for Mary Meeker's 2025 AI Report
What Caught My Eye This Week - #13
Each week, I'll bring you the most relevant and insightful tech stories, saving you time and keeping you informed.
Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report has long been a landmark event in the tech industry—a moment to pause and take stock. After a hiatus since 2019, her new AI-focused report Trends – Artificial Intelligence, released by BOND Capital, was met with intense anticipation.
The full report is a deep dive, spanning over 300 slides. But for those looking for the core ideas, three themes stand out as essential for understanding the current state and future of AI.
Pointless Comparisons between Google and ChatGPT
One of the report's most striking claims is that ChatGPT reached key milestones, like achieving 365 billion annual searches, 5.5 times faster than Google.
At first glance, this seems like an unfair fight. The technological landscape has completely transformed. Google launched in an era of dial-up modems and desktop PCs. ChatGPT, by contrast, was born into a world of ubiquitous high-speed internet and billions of powerful smartphones, creating an environment primed for viral growth.
However, this comparison reveals a deeper truth. The real takeaway isn’t about which company is "better," but about the staggering new speed at which technology can scale. The fact that a company today can achieve in two years what took a titan like Google over a decade demonstrates a fundamental acceleration in technological adoption.
The environment isn't just different; it's operating on a completely new clock speed.
The Billion-Dollar Question: Is AI a Product or a Utility?
As investment in AI continues to soar, a critical question looms over the industry: will proprietary AI models be high-margin software products, or will they become a commoditized utility?
"The enabling technologies of the World Wide Web economic explosion were the web server and the browser. Both are now broadly available for free. The money is made in the applications enabled by them."
Think about it: Netscape pioneered the browser, but Google built its empire on top of the free and open web. Sun Microsystems sold servers, but Amazon Web Services created a new economy by turning computing into a utility. The most valuable companies weren't the ones who built the initial infrastructure, but the ones who built transformative applications on top of it.
The suggestion is that AI might follow the same path. We may one day look back on today’s AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI the way we now see Netscape or Sun—as foundational pioneers who paved the way for an entirely new generation of application-layer innovators.
Where AI's Real Impact Is Felt
Beyond the futuristic headlines, AI is already creating immense value in a less glamorous but far more practical way: through "good enough" applications.
The real revolution isn’t happening in flawless, human-like AGI. It’s happening when a programmer uses an AI assistant to write a solid first draft of code, or a marketer generates dozens of ad copy variations in seconds. The AI doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be a powerful-enough tool to augment human capability and dramatically boost productivity.
This is especially true in creative fields. The fear that AI will "replace artists" often misses the point. The more likely outcome is that AI will become an indispensable new tool for them.
Just as the synthesizer changed music and Photoshop transformed photography, generative AI offers a new canvas for human creativity. It's not about automation replacing imagination, but about technology empowering it.
If you would like to read through the 340-page report, it’s available here.