According to the Wall Street Journal, "Two U.S. phone companies lost a major showdown with cable-TV rivals over telecommunications legislation in Texas, setting a precedent that is likely to slow their efforts to roll out television service across the country. SBC and Verizon had lobbied aggressively to win new rules in Texas that would help them accelerate the rollout of TV service to millions of households. State legislators over the weekend failed to act on a bill allowing phone companies to seek statewide -- instead of local -- approval to offer TV programming. The Texas Legislature has ended its session, and phone companies now face the lengthy and expensive process of gaining permission to offer TV from hundreds of individual municipalities. Phone companies are hoping to get similar legislation passed in numerous states, many of which are likely to look at the Texas decision as a model. The phone companies' loss gives cable companies a head start in the race to offer the most attractive packages of phone, TV and high-speed Internet service. The unusual defeat by the two Bells, in SBC's home state, now increases the stakes on Capitol Hill, where phone companies have been advocating a major overhaul to the country's telecommunications laws."
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...