The Trillion Dollar AI Question
How will the industry make money?
Right now, generative artificial intelligence feels like an unnervingly good magic trick.
Every time I’ve messed with it, I’ve found it to be impressive, but not quite yet useful. Its output is, at the moment, too generic and inaccurate for me to actually rely on it for something that matters, but it’s easy to imagine a version of it that is quite capable.
If AI becomes genuinely useful — if these systems can sort through data, generate information, and even analyze the world around them the way their creators say they will — this industry will become one of the most important in the world.
If, that is, it can make money.
Remember, companies like Google and OpenAI aren’t developing these technologies because they want to help humanity out of the goodness of their hearts, nor are they doing this out of a spirit of pure scientific inquiry. They’re doing it for profit.
Right now, we’re in the part of the tech hype cycle in which wild amounts of venture capital are pouring into the industry. Check out this passage from a New York Times article from March:
Suddenly, Mobius — little more than more than four guys and a laptop — was valued around $100 million, an usually high number for a…
