Foreign Investment Faces Third Year of Decline on Tariff Uncertainty, UN Warns
Overseas investment by businesses around the world is at risk of falling for a third straight year as rising tariffs and geopolitical tensions freeze big decisions about where to locate factories, the United Nations warned.
In an annual report, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said Thursday that foreign direct investment fell 11% in 2024, having also declined sharply in 2023. It said the early signs for 2025 are 'negative,' as businesses face high levels of uncertainty about the duties and other obstacles they will face in moving goods across national borders.
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Forbes
21 minutes ago
- Forbes
The Unstoppable Growth Of Generative AI (AI Outlook Part 1)
The digital creation of an image using Stable Diffusion. When Tirias Research first forecasted global generative AI demand in 2023, we predicted token output would reach an aggressive 20 trillion tokens, such as a letter, word, or punctuation, by the end of 2024. That estimate was soon overwhelmed, as actual usage surged to a staggering 667 trillion tokens. The latest forecast now expects demand to grow 115x by 2030. Disclosure: My company, Tirias Research, has consulted for IBM, Nvidia, and other companies mentioned in this article. Growth drivers The growth in generative AI usage was more explosive than even the most aggressive forecasts could anticipate. Then, a new demand surge began in September 2024 with the release of ChatGPT-o1, the first widely deployed "reasoning" model. Unlike previous generations, it didn't just answer questions, it reasoned through them, generating more thoughtful, logical, and nuanced responses. Reasoning required far more behind-the-scenes "reasoning tokens" per session, resulting in a drastic increase in token generation. In addition, user engagement skyrocketed. By the end of 2024, the time spent generating content via generative and reasoning AI models had grown by more than 22x compared to the previous year. Overview of conditional computing and model sparsity There was also an unprecedented and accelerating rate of innovation. From the introduction of transformers in 2017 to ChatGPT-1 in 2022 and reasoning models in 2024, the innovation timeline continues to accelerate. Advanced model architectures, such as mixture-of-experts (MoE), enable more efficient reasoning while keeping active parameter use low. Open-source models, such as Meta's Llama series, challenge closed-source dominance by offering lighter, faster alternatives that run locally on laptops and smartphones. And optimizations operational efficiencies, such as sparse attention and conditional computing, are resulting in more efficient models like DeepSeek R1 (introduced in 2025), which originally used only 37 billion active parameters per token compared to Llama's 405 billion or over 1 trillion in some closed models. Token demand by the numbers Tirias Research forecasts continued growth in the number of users, visit frequency, time spent, and AI-generated content. Additionally, with agentic APIs rolling out in 2025, AI agents will start autonomously chaining AI models together, forming thoughts, executing tasks, and collaborating with other services. Human prompting will no longer be the sole driver of AI activity once autonomous agents begin to generate usage on their own. As a result, the annual rate of token generation is expected to skyrocket from 677 trillion in 2024 to 2,092 trillion by the end of 2025 and 77,000 trillion (77 quadrillion) by the end of 2030. Generative AI forecast 2024-2030 Simon Solotko, Senior Analyst at Tirias Research, explains: "The AI ecosystem is under unprecedented pressure. Multimodal capability, user demand, and agentic and multimedia workflows are advancing so quickly that even efficiency gains in compute hardware and software won't be enough to offset the surge in demand." A 2028 snapshot of the forecast demonstrates that the use of AI assistants and agents is likely to be concentrated among a small number of providers. However, on the infrastructure side, AI models accessed via APIs are anticipated to drive a wide range of business and consumer applications by enabling AI capabilities for customer-facing service providers. 2028 forecast estimates of service providers token share and the token production infrastructure The industry may consolidate into a natural monopoly similar to Google's dominance in Internet searches. Being the first to market with ChatGPT and wide brand recognition, OpenAI currently dominates the AI market for AI models and token generation. Whether OpenAI retains its lead remains uncertain. Future Trends Larger models will continue to grow in size and complexity, outpacing hardware improvements. The largest models already exceed the memory of any single accelerator, requiring clusters of GPUs and entire racks to process tasks. However, innovations in distillation and efficiency will aid in scaling down to smaller, more targeted models. The introduction of DeepSeek represented a significant leap in model efficiency, resetting the performance baseline. AI Agents will become pervasive. Industry leaders, such as Nvidia's Jensen Huang and IBM's Arvind Krishna, foresee every employee working with multiple AI agents. Some agents will live in machines, others in virtual spaces, and still others in physical robots. AI agents will also begin to collaborate. AI competition will increase. 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Rapid improvements in both capability and efficiency are accelerating demand. As agentic AI expands beyond human usage, the number of "users" of generative AI will multiply exponentially. I will discuss the rising AI demand for images, video, autonomous agents, and autonomous machines, as well as the global infrastructure requirement and total cost of operation (TCO) of generative AI in future articles.
Bloomberg
43 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Citadel's Head of Fixed Income Edwin Lin Is Taking a Sabbatical
Edwin Lin, Citadel's head of fixed income and macro, is taking a sabbatical from the firm after 14 years. The move was announced to investors this week, people familiar with matter said. He is expected to leave on July 1, one of the people said, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters.
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
What to know about billionaire Mark Walter, the L.A. Lakers' new owner
The billionaire slated to take over the controlling interest in the Los Angeles Lakers has built a career leading businesses investing in everything from sports franchises to artificial intelligence. Mark Walter is CEO of the global investment and advisory company Guggenheim Partners, which is estimated to have more than $325 billion in assets. He's also co-founder and CEO of holding company TWG Global. Forbes estimates Walter's net worth is $6.1 billion. The publication ranked him at No. 216 on its Forbes 400 list last year. Walter received an undergraduate degree in business administration from Creighton University and a law degree from Northwestern University, but ultimately chose business over a career in law. In the mid-1990s, he co-founded Liberty Hampshire, an investment management firm in Chicago. That business became part of Guggenheim Partners, which Walter co-founded in the late 1990s. In addition to Guggenheim, Walter co-founded TWG Global with film producer Thomas Tull. The company holds a portfolio of finance and insurance sector companies, including Guggenheim Investments, Guggenheim Securities, Group 1001 Insurance and Delaware Life. It also includes aerospace and defense technology company Shield AI. Last month, TWG Global announced a partnership with Palantir Technologies and Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, maker of Grok, aimed at developing artificial intelligence for use in the financial services industry. TWG Global also includes investments in sports, media and entertainment franchises, such as the controlling interest in the Los Angeles Dodgers, Premier League club Chelsea, the Professional Women's Hockey League and — through TWG Motorsports — ownership of several auto racing teams including Cadillac Formula 1. Beyond business, Walter and his wife, Kimbra, have founded or contributed to various philanthropic organizations, including the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation, the Academy Group, Chicago Beyond and OneGoal.
