According to Informa Telecoms & Media, the number of mobile subscriptions worldwide will reach 2.14 billion by the end of 2005, having already surpassed the 1.8 billion mark. Building on record growth of 354 million in 2004, net additions are again expected to exceed 350 million in 2005. Rapid growth in key developing markets will not be offset by a decline in mature markets to the extent previously expected. Reductions in access fees in expanding markets such as Nigeria and Mexico have had an impact on short-term growth. The Russian mobile market grew by 89 percent in 2004 on the back of four previous years of annual growth in excess of 100 percent, and Russia alone is forecast to account for 43 percent of net additions in Central and Eastern Europe in 2005-2010. The Chinese mobile market, which exceeded the 400-million-subscription mark in March 2005, is forecast to grow by 65 percent by the end of 2010. Indonesia is forecast to exceed 50 million subscriptions in 2007. According to Informa the global penetration rate is just 28 percent, meaning that there are still more than four billion potential new mobile users worldwide.
The prevailing narrative around artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of relentless scale. Bigger models, bigger clusters, bigger budgets. The assumption, largely unchallenged until recently, was that raw parameter count translated directly into competitive advantage. New research from Omdia suggests it's time to retire that assumption. According to the latest market study by Omdia, parameter growth in frontier AI models has slowed to around 5 percent annually since 2021, a stark contrast to the more than hundredfold expansion seen between 2019 and 2021. Enterprise AI Market Development For executives who have been making infrastructure and investment decisions based on the assumption that AI would keep demanding ever-larger, ever-more-expensive hardware, this finding deserves serious attention. The race to the top of the model size leaderboard has, at least for now, plateaued. Crucially, Omdia's analysts are not reading this as an AI winter. Alexander Harrowell, senior pri...