This year’s rendition of The State of AI Report is making rounds on LinkedIn (yes, LinkedIn the place where the great E = MC2 + AI equation was “discovered”).
Worth keeping in mind this is made by Nathan Benaich the Founder of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in “AI-first companies”, so obviously comes with a lot of bias. It’s also a relatively small, open survey, with 1'200 “AI practitioners” surveyed. An example of the bias:
shows that 95% of professionals now use AI at work or home
It’s obvious that 95% of professionals don’t use AI at work or home, and these results are heavily skewed. Nevertheless, the slide deck has a nice comprehensive review of research headlines over the year:
- OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and DeepSeek all releasing reasoning models capable of planning, verification, and self-correction.
- China’s AI systems closed the gap to establish the country as a credible #2 in global AI capability.
- 44% of U.S. businesses now paying for AI tools (up from just 5% in 2023), average contracts reaching $530'000, and 95% of surveyed professionals using AI regularly—while the capability-to-price ratio doubles every 6-8 months.
- Multi-gigawatt data centers backed by sovereign funds compete globally, with power supply and land becoming as critical as GPUs.
(13/10/2025) Update: I was just reminded that a sample size of 1'200 is highly statistically significant, even for a national-level poll. The main concern here, however, remains, which is potential selection bias, likely stemming from the fact that participation is driven by people who want to take the survey. It’s unclear how much this bias affects the results, but purely in terms of sample size, it is more than sufficient.