Super helpful assembly of lots of data on point - a bit too much to digest quickly. Mary Meeker is great.
Some limitations:
- Unhelpful modernity-scale trend/hype-lines. Everyone knows prospects are big and real.
- No significant coverage of robotics, factory automation? (TAM for physical products is 15X search+streaming+saas)
- No insight? No new categories, surprising predictions, critical technologies identified?
Surprises:
- AI productivity improvements are marginal, esp. relative to the concern over jobs
- US ratio of top public companies by market cap increased from ~50% in 1995 to ~85% in 2025. Seems big; or is it an artifact of demographics of retirement investments? Or is it less significant due to growing private capital markets?
What I would like addressed: The AI means of production seem very capital-intensive, even as marginal cost of consumption is Saas-scalable (i.e., big producers, small consumers). I have some concern that AI development directions are decided in relatively few companies (which are biased to Saas over manufacturing, where consumers are closer to producers in size). This increases the likelihood of a generational whiff (a mistake I suspect China won't make).
As an aside, I wish Elon Musk would pivot xAI out of Saas AI (and science AI), focusing exclusively on manufacturing robotics -- dogfooding at Tesla, SpaceX and even Boring -- with the simpler autonomy of controlled environments but the hard problem of not custom building everything every time. They're well positioned, he could learn some discipline from working with downstream and upstream partners on par (instead of slavish employees, fan investors, and dull consumers or slow governments as customers). He'd redeem himself as a builder of stuff that builds, so we can make infrastructure for generations to come.
Some limitations:
- Unhelpful modernity-scale trend/hype-lines. Everyone knows prospects are big and real.
- No significant coverage of robotics, factory automation? (TAM for physical products is 15X search+streaming+saas)
- No insight? No new categories, surprising predictions, critical technologies identified?
Surprises:
- AI productivity improvements are marginal, esp. relative to the concern over jobs
- US ratio of top public companies by market cap increased from ~50% in 1995 to ~85% in 2025. Seems big; or is it an artifact of demographics of retirement investments? Or is it less significant due to growing private capital markets?
What I would like addressed: The AI means of production seem very capital-intensive, even as marginal cost of consumption is Saas-scalable (i.e., big producers, small consumers). I have some concern that AI development directions are decided in relatively few companies (which are biased to Saas over manufacturing, where consumers are closer to producers in size). This increases the likelihood of a generational whiff (a mistake I suspect China won't make).
As an aside, I wish Elon Musk would pivot xAI out of Saas AI (and science AI), focusing exclusively on manufacturing robotics -- dogfooding at Tesla, SpaceX and even Boring -- with the simpler autonomy of controlled environments but the hard problem of not custom building everything every time. They're well positioned, he could learn some discipline from working with downstream and upstream partners on par (instead of slavish employees, fan investors, and dull consumers or slow governments as customers). He'd redeem himself as a builder of stuff that builds, so we can make infrastructure for generations to come.