Tech prophet Mary Meeker just dropped a massive report on AI trends – here's your TL;DR

Mary Meeker, famed for her era-defining Internet Trends reports, has returned with a sweeping 340-page analysis of AI’s global impact in 2025. Her “Trends – Artificial Intelligence” report details a technology revolution moving at a pace and scale she calls “unprecedented.” She uses the term over 50 times in the report.

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For those unaware of Meeker’s work, she’s a venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst, widely recognized for her ability to spot major industry trends before they become mainstream. 

The “Queen of the Internet,” Meeker rose to prominence in the 1990s at Morgan Stanley, where her influential reports on internet companies and technology shifts earned her a sterling reputation. Her annual Internet Trends reports, published from 1995 through 2019, became essential reading for investors, executives, and policymakers. 

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Now, Meeker’s back. Based on her track record, you should pay attention. We all know that, like it or not, AI is here, but where it goes remains an open question. Here’s what Meeker sees in her crystal ball. 

AI adoption outpaces every previous tech wave

Meeker’s data shows AI is being adopted faster than the early internet. ChatGPT, the report’s standout example, reached 100 million users in just two months, far eclipsing the growth rates of TikTok, Instagram, or Netflix. By April 2025, ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users and was handling over 365 billion searches annually. These numbers make ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer technology product in history, achieving in two years what took Google more than a decade.

According to Meeker and her fellow analysts, “OpenAI’s ChatGPT — based on user/usage/monetization metrics — is history’s biggest ‘overnight’ success. AI usage is surging among consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments.”  

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She continued: “And unlike the internet 1.0 revolution — where technology started in the US and steadily diffused globally — ChatGPT hit the world stage all at once, growing in most global regions simultaneously.”

According to Meeker, “the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 [was] AI’s ‘iPhone Moment’…AI is now a compounder on internet infrastructure [which will enable] wicked-fast adoption of easy-to-use broad-interest services.”

This adoption pace will only accelerate because “AI user and usage trending is ramping materially faster [than the internet] and the machines can outpace us.” 

On top of that trend, the “AI company founders have been especially aggressive about innovation/product releases/investments/acquisitions/cash burn and capital raises.”

Global competition: China’s AI momentum

AI isn’t just a technology and business issue. Meeker sees a fierce and developing global race for AI dominance, with China emerging as a major contender. In 2025 alone, China released three large-scale open-source AI models, and DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model (LLM), rapidly captured 21% of the global user share. In addition, Alibaba’s Gwen 2.5-Max and DeepSeek R1 are now outperforming or matching Western models, such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5, on key benchmarks, often at lower costs.

Quoting Andrew Bosworth, Meta Platforms CTO, on a recent ‘Possible’ podcast, Meeket notes the “‘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.'”

In the report, she and her team often praise OpenAI. However, in an Axios interview, while continuing to believe that OpenAI will be a strong player, Meeker added: “They also have intense competition the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Both startups and incumbents. Everyone is engaged. It’s a period for lots of wealth creation and wealth destruction.”

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Meeker frames this shift as a “Sputnik moment” for technology, suggesting that nations leading in AI and automation will gain massive economic and geopolitical advantages. China now operates more industrial robots than the US and the rest of the world combined, signaling an aggressive push toward automation and AI-driven productivity.

She suggests, “This state of affairs brings tremendous uncertainty… yet it leads us back to one of our favorite quotes — Statistically speaking, the world doesn’t end that often, from former T. Rowe Price Chairman and CEO Brian Rogers.”

Meeker continues: “As investors, we always assume everything can go wrong, but the exciting part is the consideration of what can go right. Time and time again, the case for optimism is one of the best bets one can make.” 

AI reshapes work, productivity, and infrastructure

Things may be looking up for investors, but for employees, the rise of AI will be another story. Meeker predicts that AI’s impact on jobs and productivity will be profound by 2030. In particular, AI is fundamentally changing how we work.

AI will move from being an add-on feature to the core of new products and workflows, fundamentally altering how software is built and how businesses operate. We’re already seeing this trend. The top six US tech companies invested over $200 billion in AI and infrastructure last year, signaling a shift to AI-native platforms and business models.

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In particular, Meeker states, “Professions centered on intaking large bodies of structured, historical data and outputting rules-based decisions and judgment, fall squarely in the core competency of generative AI. In this emerging landscape, a unit of labor could shift from human hours to computational power.” She doesn’t, however, say what this new job market might look like. 

She does say that some people are touting an “agentic future,” where AI agents replace humans in many white-collar jobs. Although possible, history and pattern recognition suggest the role of humans is enduring and compelling. 

“In an extreme, entirely agentic future, humans maintain a role in the system, pivoting towards oversight, guidance, and training. Imagine facilities filled with humans teaching robots intricate movements or offices full of workers providing reinforcement learning human feedback (RLHF) to optimize algorithms. This is not conjecture. Companies like Physical Intelligence and Scale AI, respectively, are building powerful businesses based on this view of the world.”

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Meeker continues: “The idea of the human workforce reconfigured to teach and refine machines as a primary function might sound dystopic. But it’s worth remembering historical parallels. Fifty years ago, this prospect of rows of cubicles and uniformed office workers sitting quietly in front of LED computers ten hours a day likely sounded equally dystopian. Yet here we are.” 

In this scenario, the workers would return to the office the next day. But what will people do when they’ve trained AI all they know? Meeker is unsure, and it’s a question no one can answer. However, we need to start thinking about answers now. The future waits for no one, and change is coming faster than ever.

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It’s not just white-collar workers whose jobs might be in danger. While Meeker doesn’t address the question of other manual labor jobs, she does point out that developments in AI accompany advances in robotics and drones to automate manual work.

For example, Ukraine has demonstrated that victory in battle is not determined by soldiers or expensive aircraft but by intelligent drones. For less than a million dollars of open-source, AI-trained, self-guided drones, Ukraine destroyed millions of dollars worth of Russia’s Tu-95 bombers. 

The rise of open-source AI

Meeker observes that “Open-source AI has become the garage lab of the modern tech era: fast, messy, global, and fiercely collaborative.” Yep, that’s open source alright. I know it well. 

She says, for now, “China … is leading the open-source race, with three large-scale models released in 2025: DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba Qwen-32B, and Baidu Ernie 4.5.” While proprietary models power Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, Meeker says, “Open-source technology is fueling sovereign AI initiatives, local language models, and community-led innovation.” 

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As Meeker says, “We’re watching two philosophies unfold in parallel — freedom vs. control, speed vs. safety, openness vs. optimization — each shaping not just how AI works, but who gets to wield it.” 

While Meeker isn’t ready to make a call yet as to who will win out, I’m not so shy. Today, almost all software is built with open-source technology. As Harvard Business School has pointed out, 96% of commercial programs are made from open-source software, accounting for $9 trillion in value. While the relationship between open source and AI has been a contentious one, I believe the open-source way will win. 

AI approaches human-level performance

Meeker’s analysis reveals that AI is rapidly closing the gap with human abilities. For example, by early 2025, evaluators mistakenly believed that 73% of the output from a prototype “GPT-4.5” came from humans. Yes, machines can now pass the Turing Test. 

According to Meeker’s analysis, “We’ve gone from the reasoning capabilities of a high school student to those of a Ph.D candidate.” I don’t buy that conclusion myself. I keep seeing AI make errors you might observe in a high school paper. In fact, from what I’m seeing, AI is getting worse as model collapse begins to trip up AIs. 

Meeker’s team asked ChatGPT to predict what AI will achieve in five and ten years, highlighting the possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2035. Even if true AGI remains elusive, the incremental advances already underway are set to reshape entire industries and economies. 

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I’m not so confident. I will note, however, that even today’s AI can show independent thought processes. For example, Palisade Research, a group that studies the real-world ways AI can turn against us, found in a recent study that “OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models sometimes refuse to shut down, and will sabotage computer scripts in order to keep working on tasks.”

What did HAL say in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? Oh, yes: “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Ethics, regulation, and workforce evolution

Unlike many recent AI debates, Meeker’s report spends little time on calls for heavy regulation or AI “pauses.” Instead, she focuses on growth, competition, and opportunity, while noting that responsible governance, such as transparency, bias audits, and privacy safeguards, will be a market differentiator, especially for regulated industries.

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She also emphasizes the importance of talent, arguing that the US must remain open to global AI expertise to maintain its leadership position. Pushing intelligent people out, or not letting them in the first place, is the worst thing we can do. With China catching up quickly to the US in AI, and given the field’s growing importance, building walls is a terrible idea for our future economy. 

As Meeker concludes:  

The global race to build and deploy frontier AI systems is increasingly defined by the strategic rivalry between the United States and China. While US companies have led the charge in model innovation, custom silicon, and cloud-scale deployment to date, China is advancing quickly in open-source development, national infrastructure, and state-backed coordination. Both nations view AI not only as an economic tailwind but also as a lever of geopolitical influence. These competing AI ecosystems are amplifying the urgency for sovereignty, security, and speed. In this environment, innovation is not just a business advantage; it is national posture.

The AI revolution

The pace of adoption, the intensity of global competition, and the shift toward AI-native business models signal a new era for technology and society. As Meeker suggests, the future is arriving faster than ever, and those who adapt now will define the next decade. It’s up to us to decide what that future will look like. While I’m not as sanguine about AI as Meeker, I agree with her completely that, “One thing is certain — it’s gametime for AI, and it’s only getting more intense… and the genie is not going back in the bottle.”