What you need to know

• After a six-year blockbuster report hiatus, Bond Capital founder and partner, Mary Meeker famed for her Internet Trends Report that ran from 1995 to 2019 has released a new 340-page opus titled Trends – Artificial Intelligence, forecasting massive AI-driven disruption across business, society and geopolitics.

• AI progress is staggering, she says, highlighting the leap in AI cognitive ability since ChatGPT’s late 2022 debut, likening progress from high school level to PhD-level reasoning in under three years.

• Meeker connects today’s AI explosion to the founding visions of Google, Facebook and Alibaba, arguing those missions are now being supercharged by AI, computing power and global digital infrastructure.

• On the global race for AI supremacy, she says legacy tech giants and startups are sprinting to build the next AI layer, everything from enterprise copilots to autonomous systems, with AI adoption booming across consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide.

• Geopolitical implications loom large. The US-China tech rivalry is intensifying, with Meeker suggesting AI leadership could determine geopolitical dominance. She warns of uncertainty, but points to entrepreneurship and competition as tailwinds.

• On jobs, Meeker says AI is driving a shift from physical to cognitive automation, with major impacts on jobs tied to structured data. White-collar roles may increasingly be replaced or augmented by AI agents.

• Despite AI’s rapid advance, Meeker remains optimistic: history suggests humans will adapt, but warns this wave is moving faster than any prior tech revolution.

“The Queen of the Internet” Mary Meeker, who was recognised by Forbes in 2021 as one of the most powerful women in the world, is back in the public eye after an absence of almost six years, with a new blockbuster report on the impact of AI on business, politics, and society.

Now a partner at Bond Capital – a business she founded, Meeker became famous across the digital sector for her annual Internet Trend reports during her time at Morgan Stanley, and later Kleiner Perkins, which was published from 1995 to 2019.

Last week she released a 340-page opus on the global impact of AI on business and society. While she clearly didn’t use ChatGPT to come up with the headline – the report is simply called Trends – Artificial Intelligence, Meeker paints a picture of a world on the brink of dramatic, AI-driven transformation.

Among the nuggets in the data:

• There are now 800 million daily users of US based LLMs around the world.
• There is a huge surge in capital expenditure by Big Six – Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon (AWS only) and Meta spent US$212bn in 2024, up 64 per cent.
• AI is rapidly upending behaviours ushered in by internet leaders. In San Francisco, the market share for gross bookings for autonomous car services like Waymo has overtaken Uber.
• Evidence of dislocation in the jobs market is emerging – at least in tech, where AI jobs are up 448 per cent since 2018, while non-AI IT jobs are down 9 per cent.
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT now has 800m weekly active users, of whom only 20m have converted to paid subscriptions. Yet that small cohort is already helping the firm close in on $4bn in annual revenues.
• In its second year, ChatGPT hit 365 billion annual searches. Google took 11 years to achieve that milestone.

According to Meeker, the world is changing at an unprecedented rate. “The pace of improvement in AI’s cognitive ability is astounding. In the three years since ChatGPT’s 11/22 public launch, we’ve gone from the reasoning capabilities of a high school student to those of a PhD candidate.”

(It’s a rather different take to Apple’s recent AI report.)

“Rapid and transformative technology innovation and adoption represent key underpinnings of these changes. As does leadership evolution for the global powers.”

A key theme of the report is the almost inevitability of what is now happening based on the founding missions of digital giants such as Google, Alibaba, and Facebook; to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ ‘make it easy to do business anywhere,’ ‘and to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.’

“Fast forward to today with the world’s organised, connected, and accessible information being supercharged by artificial intelligence, accelerating computing power, and semi-borderless capital … all driving massive change.”

She says AI innovation has become self-sustaining as  “…computers are ingesting massive datasets to get smarter and more competitive. Breakthroughs in large models, cost-per-token declines, open-source proliferation, and chip performance improvements are making new tech advances increasingly more powerful, accessible, and economically viable.”

AI adoption and usage are accelerating significantly, and the machines have the potential to surpass human capabilities. The speed and scale of change driven by the evolution of artificial intelligence are truly unprecedented, as the data clearly shows, she adds.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

There is also an important change from the internet revolution, she suggests – ubiquity.

“AI usage is surging among consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments. And unlike the Internet 1.0 revolution where technology started in the USA and steadily diffused globally, ChatGPT hit the world stage all at once, growing in most global regions simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, Meeker argues that established platforms and upstart challengers are in a race to develop and roll out the next layers of AI infrastructure—including agentic interfaces, enterprise copilots, real-world autonomous systems, and sovereign models. She says breakthroughs in AI, computing infrastructure, and global connectivity are radically transforming how work is executed, how capital is allocated, and how leadership is measured, both within companies and across nations.

Geopolitics

Towards the end of the last decade, Meeker’s State of the Internet reports increasingly tracked the rise of China as a digital powerhouse.

Now, six years later, it is challenging the hegemony of the US, she suggests.

“Increasingly, two hefty forces, technological and geopolitical, are intertwining. Andrew Bosworth (Meta Platforms CTO), on a recent ‘Possible’ podcast described the current state of AI as “our space race and the people we’re discussing, especially China, are highly capable… there’s very few secrets. And there’s just progress. And you want to make sure that you’re never behind. The reality is AI leadership could beget geopolitical leadership,  and not vice-versa.”

That comes with obvious risks, Meeker notes, especially for the US. “This state of affairs brings tremendous uncertainty…yet it leads us back to one of our favourite quotes (by former T. Rowe Price Chairman and CEO Brian Rogers), “Statistically speaking, the world doesn’t end that often.”

Rather, the Bond Capital partner sees better days ahead, driven by competition and entrepreneurialism.

“Creators / bettors / consumers are taking advantage of global internet rails that are accessible to 5.5bn citizens via connected devices; ever-growing digital datasets that have been in the making for over three decades; breakthrough large language models (LLMs) that, in effect, found freedom with the November 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT with its extremely easy-to-use / speedy user interface.”

Founders of newer AI companies have been notably aggressive in driving innovation, launching products, making investments and acquisitions, burning cash, and raising capital, she says.

At the same time, more established tech firms, often still influenced by their founders, have been allocating a growing share of their substantial free cash flow to AI, aiming to accelerate growth and defend against emerging threats.

“In 1998, tapping emerging Internet access, Google set out to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Nearly three decades later, after some of the fastest change humankind has seen, a lot of information is indeed digitised / accessible / useful. The AI-driven evolution of how we access and move information is happening much faster… AI is a compounder – on internet infrastructure, which allows for wicked-fast adoption of easy-to-use broad-interest services.”

Don’t look up

Since AI burst into general community consciousness, the tech sector has attempted to maintain a fiction that employment would not be affected, or at least not to an extent that worker bees should be worried about.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang for instance, famously observed that “AI won’t take your job, someone using AI will take your job.” Of course, the bottom line with that argument is you are still out of a job.

Meeker is less gun-shy about the implications.

“AI is foundationally changing the way we work. Alongside the growth in physical automation (think adoption of robots and drones), we are now also seeing the rise of cognitive automation, where AI systems can reason, create, and solve problems. The ramifications are widespread.”

Yet, ultimately, she remains optimistic while acknowledging the risk to jobs that rely on processing large volumes of structured, historical data to produce rules-based decisions and judgments.

“In this new paradigm, labour may increasingly be measured not in human hours but in compute power. In many cases, the availability and quality of certain types of work could be determined by data centres and foundation models. As a result, some predict an ‘agentic future’ in which AI agents take over many white-collar roles.”

But she argues, “History and pattern recognition suggest the role of humans is enduring and compelling. Technology-forward leaps have typically driven productivity and efficiency gains and more but new jobs.”

Per Meeker, “That said, this time it’s happening faster.”

Even in an extreme, and entirely agentic future, she argues that “humans [will] maintain a role in the system, pivoting towards oversight, guidance, and training.”