A bill that would make it easier for telephone companies to sell cable TV may be put to a vote again in the Texas statehouse this week, revived for the second time since May courtesy of an unrelated stalemate over public school funding. The wide-ranging telecommunications bill, approved by separate House and Senate committees on Thursday, is one of several initiatives in statehouses around the nation and in Congress that would enable phone companies to avoid the arduous task of securing thousands of local cable TV licenses. Those efforts have already stalled in Virginia and New Jersey, two of the states where Verizon Communications Inc. and SBC Communications Inc. are investing billions of dollars to upgrade their local phone networks to deliver TV and faster Internet connections.
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...