Report Overview
"Trends - Artificial Intelligence" is a comprehensive report published by BOND on May 30, 2025. The report provides an in-depth analysis of how artificial intelligence is transforming industries, economies, and societies at an unprecedented pace.
Key Insight: The pace and scope of change related to artificial intelligence technology evolution is unprecedented, as supported by data showing user, usage, and revenue charts that go "up-and-to-the-right" - often supported by spending charts that also go "up-and-to-the-right."
Key Data Points
Key Insights Summary
Unprecedented Adoption Speed
AI user and usage trends are ramping materially faster than previous technologies. ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users in just 17 months - a growth trajectory that far outpaces historical technology adoption curves.
AI Development Acceleration
Training dataset size has grown 260% annually over 15 years, while training compute has grown 360% annually. This compounding effect has led to AI performance surpassing human levels of accuracy and realism in many domains.
Technology Compounding Effect
AI represents a compounding effect on existing internet infrastructure, which allows for wicked-fast adoption of easy-to-use broad-interest services. Breakthroughs in large models, cost-per-token declines, and chip performance improvements are making AI increasingly more powerful and accessible.
Enterprise Adoption Ramping
50% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI in quarterly earnings calls, with 75% of global CMOs using or testing AI tools. Enterprises are focusing on revenue generation and productivity improvements rather than just cost reduction.
Global Competition Intensifying
Competition among tech incumbents, emerging attackers, and sovereign nations is accelerating, particularly between the US and China. Nations are increasingly adopting sovereign AI policies, treating AI infrastructure as critical national infrastructure.
AI Agent Evolution
AI is evolving from simple chat responses to autonomous agents capable of executing multi-step tasks. This shift represents a step-change from reactive assistants to proactive service providers that can reason, act, and complete work on users' behalf.
Content Overview
Document Contents
Overview
The report begins by contextualizing the unprecedented pace of AI development and adoption. The document is filled with user, usage, and revenue charts that show exponential growth, often supported by spending charts that follow the same trajectory.
Creators, investors, and consumers are taking advantage of global internet rails accessible to 5.5 billion citizens via connected devices; ever-growing digital datasets accumulated over three decades; and breakthrough large language models that found widespread adoption with the November 2022 launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The report highlights how AI leadership could beget geopolitical leadership, with intense competition especially between the US and China. The document aims to add to discussions about the breadth of change at play - technical, financial, social, physical, and geopolitical.
Technology Compounding
The report demonstrates how technology compounding over centuries has led to better, faster, and cheaper solutions. AI represents the latest phase in this progression, building on previous revolutions like the printing press, steam engines, electrification, and the internet.
Key metrics show:
- 260% annual growth in training dataset size over 15 years
- 360% annual growth in training compute over 15 years
- 200% annual growth in compute gains from better algorithms over 9 years
- 150% annual growth in performance gains from better AI supercomputers over 6 years
- 167% annual growth in the number of powerful AI models over 4 years
ChatGPT hit 365 billion annual searches in just 2 years, compared to Google's 11 years to reach the same milestone.
Knowledge Distribution Evolution
The report traces the evolution of knowledge distribution from the printing press (1440) to the internet (public release 1993) to generative AI (public launch of ChatGPT 2022).
Generative AI has led to an explosion in AI-created content and widespread adoption across sectors. By mid-2024, about 7% of global news articles were AI-generated, and 1% of all scientific articles published in 2023 showed signs of generative AI involvement.
This represents a fundamental shift from static, physical delivery of knowledge to active, digital, and now generative delivery.
AI Milestone Timeline
The report provides a comprehensive timeline of AI development from 1950 to 2025, highlighting key milestones:
- 1950: Alan Turing creates the Turing Test
- 1962: Arthur Samuel creates a self-learning checkers program
- 1997: IBM's Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov
- 2005: Stanford's Stanley wins DARPA Grand Challenge
- 2014: Apple integrates Siri into iPhone 4S
- 2022: OpenAI releases ChatGPT to the public
- 2023-2025: Rapid acceleration with GPT-4, Claude, Llama 3, and other models
AI Today (Q2 2025)
The report outlines ten key capabilities of current AI systems (per ChatGPT itself):
- Write or edit anything
- Summarize and explain complex material
- Tutor on nearly any subject
- Be a thinking partner
- Automate repetitive work
- Roleplay anyone needed
- Connect to tools
- Offer therapy and companionship
- Help find purpose
- Organize your life
AI Future (2030 & 2035)
The report provides predictions for AI capabilities in 5 and 10 years (again, per ChatGPT):
By 2030: AI will likely generate human-level text, code & logic; create full-length films & games; understand & speak like humans; power advanced personal assistants; operate humanlike robots; run autonomous customer service; personalize digital lives; build autonomous businesses; drive scientific discovery; and collaborate creatively.
By 2035: AI will likely conduct scientific research; design advanced technologies; simulate human-like minds; operate autonomous companies; perform complex physical tasks; coordinate systems globally; model biological systems; offer expert-level decisions; shape public debate and policy; and build immersive virtual worlds.
AI Development Trending
The report highlights several key development trends:
- Industry Surpassed Academia: In 2015, industry surpassed academia as the primary source of notable machine learning models, driven by rising data, compute, and financial needs.
- Developer Growth: NVIDIA's ecosystem grew from 1 million to 6 million developers from 2018 to 2025, while Google's ecosystem saw 5x growth to 7 million developers year-over-year.
- Performance Breakthroughs: AI systems surpassed human levels of accuracy on the MMLU benchmark in 2024, and 73% of AI responses were mistaken as human-generated in Q1 2025.
- Realistic Outputs: AI has achieved increasingly realistic image generation, audio translation, and content creation capabilities.
AI Adoption & Growth
The report documents unprecedented adoption across multiple sectors:
- Consumer Adoption: ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users in 17 months, with usage spanning all age groups.
- Enterprise Adoption: 50% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI in earnings calls, with focus shifting from cost reduction to revenue generation.
- Industry Applications: AI is being deployed in healthcare (FDA-approved medical devices), finance (virtual assistants), education, and government.
- Agent Evolution: AI is evolving from chat responses to autonomous agents that can execute multi-step tasks.
Retention rates for ChatGPT (80%) significantly outperform traditional services like Google Search (58%).
CapEx Spend & Infrastructure
The report highlights massive capital expenditure increases driven by AI:
- Big Six USA tech companies (Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta) saw 21% annual CapEx growth over ten years.
- Hyperscaler cloud revenue grew 37% annually over the same period.
- AI has transformed from a research feature in 2019 to a capital expenditure line item by 2023.
As Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith noted: "Like electricity and other general-purpose technologies in the past, AI and cloud datacenters represent the next stage of industrialization."
Note: The above is only a summary of the report content. The complete document contains extensive data, charts, and detailed analysis. We recommend downloading the full PDF for in-depth reading.