According to Informa, the global mobile market is forecast to pass 2 billion subs this year and be approaching 3 billion by the end of 2010. Overall market growth was boosted in 2004, with 91 million more new customers during the year than there were in 2003. Although the annual growth rate is forecast to fall into single figures within a couple of years, over one billion new subs are due to be added between now and the end of 2010. Almost half of these new subs will be in Asia Pacific. Two huge Asian markets -- India and China -- will account for over 30 percent (371.6 million) of the region's total. Amongst the regions, it is the Middle East and Africa markets that will show the greatest growth. Their combined markets will more than double in size, with over 200 million new customers signing up for mobile services by 2010. As a result of the continued growth, several countries are already reporting penetration rates of over 100 percent and Western Europe's regional penetration is set to breach 100 percent in a couple of years. By 2010, the global penetration is estimated at 43 percent.
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...