Advertising market momentum has remained uneven in different parts of the world and the entertainment industry, according to a slew of latest reports and forecasts published Tuesday. Carat, a unit of London-based media buying and marketing services firm Aegis Group, on Tuesday slightly increased its 2005 global advertising spending growth forecast from 5 percent to 5.2 percent, citing continued strength in Asia that is making up for weaker-than-thought trends in big European markets and an in-line performance in the U.S. The Asian advertising market continues to expand, and Carat predicts that at current growth rates, its size will eclipse that of Europe by 2008. The main driver on the Asian continent remains China, which entertainment companies have increasingly tried to target. Also on Tuesday, marketing data tracker TNS Media Intelligence said total U.S. ad expenditures for the first half of the year increased 4.5 percent year-over-year to $70.5 billion, exceeding the firm's 4.1 percent estimate on strength in cable TV and Internet advertising.
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...