AI in 2025 – The great normalisation, with Nathan Benaich

Now, I always grade my predictions.

I do a horizon scan at the end of every year.

And I know that you and your colleagues with the state of AI report also grade your prediction.

And you know what? We both graded ourselves pretty well.

So almost too well.

So are we being too unambitious with our predictions of the state of the AI world? Or is it just more predictable than we let on? Or

we're just insiders playing inside baseball.

I don't know.

I mean, there's certainly been predictions that we've made that have just not hit for several years.

I mean, the main one has been around competition around AI semiconductors.

And there's

been so many new chip companies that have been started over the years.

And I was originally excited about this as a prospect to compete with NVIDIA, but it just looks like it's a losing battle over and over again, which sort of prompted that slide we put in the report this year of trying to like stylize a portfolio um of you know six billion dollars invested in all these chip companies versus six billion dollars in nvidia at the same time points that the startups got the money the delta would is basically like six billion and startups would transform into 31 billion today versus 200 billion if you were to put it in nvidia so it's in video yeah so like there we got wrong but i mean some other stuff we got right that was like pretty punchy it's

Yeah, that semiconductor one is also one that I got wrong.

I got really excited back in 2015 and 2016 with companies like Graphcore.

And then when Jonathan spun out of Google to set up Grot, had Mythic, Mike Henry's business, Cerebras.

And I thought, these companies are going to do... really, really incredible things.

I think really only Cerebras is in the game now with this big single chip.

And as you say, everything has flooded back to NVIDIA, which I think is something we definitely got wrong.

This has happened against this remarkable landscape of scale and adoption.

But when we look at consumer adoption, I wouldn't have guessed 305 million weekly users for ChatGPT if you'd asked me at the start of this year, eighth busiest website in the world.

And then we see this with these revenue numbers.

Menlo Ventures just released their survey of enterprise spending on Gen AI, generative AI.

It was running at 13 billion for 2024 from about two and a half billion, three billion the year before that.

And at the same time, Dries and Horowitz are saying there's no money in foundation models.