The Meeker Report: Capitalism's AI Gospel and Its Blind Spots

Mary Meeker's 2025 AI Trends Report charts a future of exponential adoption and investor euphoria. But what isn't she saying?

Mary Meeker¹ just dropped her 2025 AI Trends report, a 300+ slide compendium of hockey-stick charts, CapEx surges, and breathless adoption curves. If you wanted a single document that encapsulates Silicon Valley's consensus AI worldview—growth is good, more is better, and China is a threat—you've found your catechism.

But like most techno-optimist narratives, it's what the report doesn't say that matters most. The problem isn’t Meeker’s exuberance about growth. It’s her silence about the material preconditions of that growth. AI adoption curves don’t ascend in a vacuum. They run on electrons, water, and land. AI doesn’t scale on vibes. It scales on grid interconnects, substation backlogs, and megawatts-per-megachip.

What the Report Gets Right

AI Is a Compounder on Internet Rails

Meeker's sharpest insight is structural: AI isn't a new internet. It's a layer on top of the existing digital substrate. Adoption is fast not because AI is magical, but because the infrastructure for instant scale already exists. ChatGPT's global user growth outpaces the internet itself because it rides the rails of smartphones, APIs, and cloud distribution.

CapEx and Developer Growth Are Real

The developer ecosystems around NVIDIA and Google are exploding—6x and 5x YoY, respectively. CapEx among the "Big Six" (Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, NVIDIA) surged 63% to $212B. That money isn't imaginary. Neither are the chips or the hiring sprees.

Inference Is Getting Cheaper, Training Is Not

One of the more balanced takeaways: per-token inference costs are dropping, while training costs are skyrocketing. This leads to greater developer experimentation even as model development becomes more exclusive. It’s a tale of diffusion at the edge and concentration at the core.

AI's Physical World Infiltration

Real-world use cases, including robotics in China, autonomous taxis in SF, ambient AI scribes in healthcare, and more are starting to move from pilot to production. The “AI meets atoms” story is maturing.

What the Report Misses

The Energy and Infrastructure Cliff

The report glamorizes Jensen Huang's metaphor of “AI factories” but completely ignores the energy input side of that equation. Where is the power coming from? How does this scale without melting grids or overloading transformers? No mention of cooling, latency, or land constraints. It’s CapEx euphoria without physical context.

Open Source as Existential Threat

Meeker treats open-source models as a monetization headwind, not a foundational threat to API business models. She ignores the licensing innovation arms race (e.g., Mistral's Apache 2.0), edge inference, and decommodification of model weights. Open source isn’t just a competitor. It's a strategic regime shift.

Conflation of Adoption and Value Capture

Charts showing job postings, dev activity, and user growth are seductive. But adoption is not synonymous with economic transformation. Enterprise AI is still a value mirage for many, with latency between experimentation and ROI spanning years.

Superficial Geopolitics

China is framed as a competitive input-output machine (robots installed, LLM user share), but there’s no discussion of divergent institutional goals. No mention of epistemic control vs. capability. No examination of how authoritarian governance might suppress emergent AGI behavior.

What It Overhypes

ChatGPT vs Google Search

The claim that ChatGPT hit 365B annual searches faster than Google is a false equivalence. ChatGPT prompts are not the same as high-intent, monetizable queries. This is bandwidth inflation, not value density.

Turing Test Victory Laps

“73% of users mistook GPT-4.5 for human.” Yes, when talking about feelings and day-to-day trivialities. No one asked it to prove a theorem or interpret regulatory filings. Passing the Turing test in this setup is a parlor trick, not a benchmark.

Image and Audio Realism

Midjourney's progression and ElevenLabs' voice cloning are impressive. But photorealism does not equal defensibility. The leap from impressive to indispensable remains unproven.

Strategic Takeaways

• Infrastructure and inference are diverging. The edge is democratizing, the core is concentrating. Power will accrue to those who control tokens, not just weights.

• Sovereign bifurcation is coming. Nation-states will split the stack. Sovereign models, air-gapped inference, and data localization will fragment the universal model dream.

• Enterprise adoption is slow and political. AI isn’t just a technology. It’s an internal governance and workflows transformation. The friction is underpriced.

• CapEx signals intent, not inevitability. Massive infrastructure spend is a trailing indicator. Watch where token flow and downstream developer attention actually go.

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The Contrarian View

Meeker's report is brilliant inside the system of techno-capitalist acceleration. But step outside the flywheel and things look different:

• Inference cost compression = margin erosion

• Power and cooling constraints = hard ceilings

• OSS and sovereign models = moat destruction

• Adoption != transformation

AI is real. The adoption curves are steep. But the report's most compelling charts raise a better question than "how fast?" That question is: What breaks first?

And that’s where the next story begins.

1. She made her name as an equity research analyst in the late ‘90s, during the dot-com boom when she provided research about Netscape’s and others’ IPOs.