One of the problems of the Second Artificial Intelligence (AI) Winter (1987-1993) was that there was not enough data to go around. We did not yet understand the value of “Big Data,” and academia was working on models fueled by “Small Data.” However, now we have entered the era of “Bigger Data Than We Ever Imagined.” We are producing data on the order of exabytes. It is predicted that by 2020 we will use zettabytes. By 2024, yottabytes are in sight.
Hyperscalers are frantically expanding their clouds to meet the demands of the 21st century, and the whole planet will become one giant hard disk attached to, hopefully, a capable calculator. Exascalers, on the other hand, are concerned with “Fast Data”, the application of Big Data analytics to smaller data sets in near-real-time. They are racing beyond the petaflop to reach exaflop speed by 2021.
Both Big Data and Fast Data have already drastically reconfigured the landscape of the Financial Times Global companies by market cap.
In 2009, there were no information technology companies in the FT Global 500 top 5. However, a mere nine years later, all companies in the FT Global were information technology companies, which took over from big energy. Most importantly, all of these companies are in the process of pivoting towards AI. One of them is Tencent, the first Chinese information technology company to enter the top 5 (admittedly, this only happened for Q1. The company later lost its position after its earnings call in Q2).
However, a new data inflection point is coming, and it will be driven and influenced by the pressing need in healthcare. 2018’s FT Global top 5 has undoubtedly posed two questions: Which industries provide the most data, and which ones need the most speed? They all arrived at the same conclusion: medical and life sciences.
Because in medicine and life sciences, there are power laws at work that dwarf Moore’s Law. In the USA, health data doubles every 73 days, estimated to arrive at a hefty 2.3 zettabytes by 2020. This is a hockey stick scenario that the information technology companies cannot afford to miss. The 3 Super-A’s (Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple) all announced a ground-breaking restructuring of their divisions and far-reaching collaborations (ABC-Amazon, Berkshire, Chase) to jump on the “big and fast data” bandwagon. This could produce surprising ripples in which companies hit the top of the FT’s Global 500 list in the near future.
By 2020, some of the information technology companies won’t be information technology anymore but Life Technology companies, pointing their search and intelligence engines towards healthcare and life science. This poses a legitimate challenge to the current biopharmaceutical and healthcare companies with their dwindling intellectual property assets and lackluster efficiency of discovery. Interestingly, by Q3 of 2018, Facebook lost its spot to Berkshire Hathaway, a well-known investment company focused on reinsurance of the healthcare and life insurance industry. It is entirely possible that, by 2025, most of these companies that merge technology and healthcare could be mandated by antitrust laws to break up into information technology and life technology corporations.
However, the confluence of big and fast will also turn the tables and disrupt who owns what.
