What’s The Takeaway For India From Mary Meeker?

An AI-related report is released almost every day. I may be exaggerating a bit but at least it feels like that. However, the biggest news from the world of AI this week has been tech prophet Mary Meeker’s AI Trends report. Meeker is a legend in the world of tech and arguably the most respected analyst when it came to Internet trends, and her report was therefore dissected with a focus that is rarely seen today amidst the flood of reports around AI.

One reason Meeker is much respected is also because she’s been extremely successful as a venture capitalist—you could say she put her money where her mouth was. And considering the inaugural AI Trends report came almost six years after Meeker stopped publishing her famous, annual Internet Trends report, there was immense buzz around it.

Here's a look at some of the key numbers from the report, some of the top insights and a take with a closer look at one of the report’s key propositions—that AI leadership will determine geopolitical leadership.

It’s not that India’s leadership has been unaware of this fact—in many technology shifts earlier, from the advent of the personal computer to the Internet and cloud computing, the United States has led the march. In this newsletter alone we have discussed many times how China is trying to take the AI crown away and doing a pretty good job of it.

Given the democratisation of the Internet, ChatGPT, the AI tool that was the first mass consumer AI super brand, didn’t start in the US and then gradually proliferate to the rest of the planet, but rather took off everywhere almost simultaneously. Meeker’s AI Trends report also points to the fact that India is the country with the world’s largest number of users of ChatGPT’s mobile app (14%) and even for DeepSeek India accounts for the third largest number of monthly active users (MAUs).

While it’s great that Indian users have flocked to AI apps, it is what we are doing with these apps that really matters. I am a proponent of the view that B2B adoption often determines how a technology is really being used and while Meeker provides some great examples from the US, and even there many enterprises are still at the pilot phase when it comes to AI, Indian enterprises definitely have some catching up to do. Especially when it comes to regulated sectors, the men and women in charge need to do more to build the regulatory frameworks that will give companies more confidence to move AI deployments from pilot to mission-critical. But even the DAU data shows that there is a gap between initial adoption and trying something out, to repeated use that results in use cases that deliver business transformation.

At the end of the day, while Meeker and her colleagues have done a great job of demonstrating that the pace of AI development and adoption is historically unprecedented, just how much things will change is still in the realm of guesswork because no one can be absolutely sure how things will pan out. Or when Artificial General Intelligence will become reality—2 years, 5 years or ten years, or more. As some have said, AI tools are as capable as a human with a PhD today, but AGI will take AI’s capabilities (and use cases) to a level that will make the use of the word ‘unprecedented’ to describe AI today seem like overkill.

Meeker’s report is from a 30,000-feet perspective and countries like India also need to carefully prepare for the implications of where AI is headed in terms of jobs, education and more. As Meeker makes clear, ChatGPT may be the AI super brand today, but in AI as with all tech, things can change quickly and there are no guarantees that ChatGPT will stay on the throne even as the United States’ own place in geopolitical leadership has never been on shakier ground in the past 100 years.

While it’s clear that China is the challenger today, there is an opportunity for India too though at the moment we don’t seem to play in the same league. The answers will lie in how successful we are in developing home-grown AI tools and foundational models (there’s a story on that below) and much beyond that in how successful we are in building an ecosystem that catalyses innovation in AI. If we get it right India will have a far greater presence in future editions of Mary Meeker’s AI Trends reports.

Meanwhile, here are some of the other interesting AI-related stories from the past few days:

-India Adds 15,000 GPUs Under AI Mission; Soket AI, Gnani AI, Gan AI Selected To Build Foundational Models

-Indian Railways Uses AI-Powered Bot Mitigation To Deactivate 2.5 Crore Suspicious User IDs

-OpenAI's Sam Altman Expects AI To Unearth New Knowledge, Solve Complex Business Issues By 2026

-Elon Musk’s AI Startup Set To Get Debt Backing From TPG

-Facebook Owner Meta To Buy Nuclear Power From Constellation As AI Demand Soars

-Karnataka Police To Tackle Fake News, Cyber Frauds With Agentic AI

-Hewlett Packard Enterprise Expands Wired, Wireless Portfolio To Meet AI, Computing Demands

Till next week,

-Ivor Soans

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