The 2025 State of AI Report has arrived, painting a picture of an industry being fundamentally reshaped by “The Squeeze.” This is a critical, intensifying constraint on three key resources: the massive-scale compute (processing power) required for training, the availability of high-quality data, and the specialized human talent to build frontier models. This squeeze, the report details, is accelerating a consolidation of power. It favors the “hyperscalers”—the handful of large technology corporations that can afford to build their own power plants to run their data centers. For leaders in global health and humanitarian action, the report is essential reading. However, it must be read with a critical eye. The report’s narrative is, in many ways, the narrative of the hyperscalers. It focuses on the benchmarks they dominate, the closed models they are building, and the resource problems they face. This “view from the top” is valuable, but it is not …
