Despite intensifying concerns about declining DVD sales, boxoffice receipts and advertiser spending, traditional media executives attending Herbert Allen's exclusive Sun Valley summit this month didn't exactly flock to the so-called new media moguls, whose emerging venues could be critical in offsetting the industry's mounting economic risks. That uniform observation from elite executive conference attendees begs the question: "Why not?" When presented with the opportunity to aggressively explore viable new alternatives to their challenged business models, why didn't traditional media players respond as if their existence depends on it, as suggested by a recent flood of troubling statistics? "There was almost no interaction between traditional media companies and new media companies," one high-level Sun Valley conference attendee says. "Google was talking about video search and Intel talked about WiMax, and all the new media companies were talking about changing the existing business models. The traditional media companies sat there and listened to them with their heads in the sand, like it's business as usual," another conference attendee says. "It was really bizarre."
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...