As digital entertainment streams into consumers' lives, they are amassing valuable troves of stored data. A recent survey conducted by KRC Research and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies found that U.S. adults have an average of $1,135 worth of entertainment stored on devices such as laptops/PCs, MP3 players, DVRs, mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras or portable movie players, and that their appetite for more storage is growing as our lives become more mobile. In particular, "Generation Y" (18-24 years) consumers, a group known for their technology savvy, have an even higher average of $2,199 worth of entertainment stored on devices. The survey results also point to a larger belief within the hard drive industry: As the cost of digital storage becomes less than 10 percent of the content value, it is affordable enough for that content to be permanently retained -- increasing the pervasiveness of hard disk drives. Hitachi believes high-capacity hard drives -- unlike any other form of portable storage today -- have now achieved that level of affordability for consumers.
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...