AI industry hits $110B revenue, scaling 3x faster than the internet

The generative AI industry is growing at an unprecedented pace. According to Exponential View research, revenue reached $110B in 2025 and is projected to hit $175B — scaling 3x faster than the internet. The industry now adds $1B in revenue every two days, compared to 180 days in 2023, with quarterly growth holding at ~35% for over a year. Every 10% drop in token price boosts usage by 12–18%, and global token volumes have crossed 30 quadrillion per month. Importantly, agents now consume 1,200x more compute than chat, signaling a shift from conversational AI to autonomous action. AI is also restarting U.S. electricity growth after 16 years of flat generation, with data centers expected to account for ~55% of new demand by 2030.

OpenAI introduced the GPT-5.6 Preview family, featuring three models: Sol (flagship), Terra, and Luna. The system card highlights stronger cybersecurity and biosecurity testing, new safeguards, and a limited preview before broader rollout. Separately, a practical guide by Sebastian Raschka shows how to set up local coding agents with open-weight models, connecting them to harnesses like Claude Code or Codex. The guide emphasizes checking RAM usage at long contexts, measuring prefill/decode tokens per second, and assessing tool-calling capabilities — making local AI development accessible for real work. Andrej Karpathy’s famous “build from scratch” philosophy also resurfaces, now ironically executed via AI-generated code using Claude Opus 4.8, which can teach deep learning in 3 weeks with just 9 prompts.