Will Street follow boxoffice pattern? -- As the wave of quarterly earnings reports from big media and entertainment companies is set to start in earnest with Sony Corp.'s latest figures, Wall Street observers are hoping for new insight into how the much-discussed advertising, boxoffice and DVD sales trends are affecting the financial performance of sector giants. Amid much recent gloom and doom talk, as well as weak first-half stock trading momentum, however, many wonder if anything can turn investors more bullish on the sector over the near-term. According to analysts, second-quarter earnings figures from such media giants as Time Warner and Viacom Inc. are unlikely to inspire much enthusiasm, while the Walt Disney Co. and News Corp. should provide some of the strongest quarterly reports.
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...