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I think they are missing a few very significant revenue sources that likely going to grow beyond just simple enterprise user accounts for Chat GPT. I'll call o

I think they are missing a few very significant revenue sources that likely going to grow beyond just simple enterprise user accounts for Chat GPT. I'll call out two of them. Image, video, and other content generation is going to become more important and companies will be spending on that. We've seen some impressive improvements there. IMHO near term a lot of that stuff might start showing up in advertising and news content, the whole media industry is going to be a massive consumer of this stuff. And there's going to be a lot of competition for the really high quality models that can be run at scale. Five years until 2030 is a lot of time for some pretty serious improvements to land. Another area that the article skips over is agentic tools. Those are showing a lot of promise right now. Agentic coding tools are just the tip of the iceberg here. A lot of these tools are going to be using APIs. So API revenue is a source of revenue. There are applications across the entire IT industry. SAAS, legacy software, productivity tools, etc. Yes 207B is a lot of money. And there's no guarantee that OpenAI comes out on top "winning" all these markets of course and we can argue about how big these markets will be. But OpenAI does have a good starting position and some street credibility here. It's a big bet on revenue and potential here. But so is betting against all that and dismissing things. And there's a lot of middle ground here.

olelele 11mo ago
This sounds very similar to the Tesla stock value hype train. It’s all a gamble on the promise of tech that isn’t quite there yet.
- qwertox 11mo ago
  What I don't understand is how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output. He's known for not caring about privacy, so there's no real difference between buying a Tesla one or a Chinese one. Both will look and listen into your home and transfer as much data as possible to their true owners. He congratulates Jeff Bezos for New Glenn, and rightly so, but he's absolutely silent about the Chinese robots. One has to admit that they're already ahead of the US. This comes from a German who well recognizes how far behind Germany is in comparison to the US, in regards to any digital technology.
  - input_sh 11mo ago
    Oh that's easy: as soon as China gets good enough to compete at any market seen as vital, "the west" either makes up some nebulous national security threat to cut them off or imposes high enough import taxes to make the home-made versions cheaper in comparison. The same way "the west" has done it with cars, phones, and social media in recent years. There is no free market competition between "the west" and China, they're two completely separate markets for a reason. You're only allowed to cross that isle in a limited capacity, as soon as you get big enough to be seen as a legit threat, you're getting cut off. Works both ways, Tesla can sell in China, but they can't beat BYD. Apple can sell iPhones, but only because their market share is not big enough to matter.
    - qwezxcrty 11mo ago
      I'm not really against your point but I just quickly checked (and it agrees with my personal observation), iPhone have been the very most popular phone brand in China for many years and recently the market share grew beyond 25%. I would not say that's not big enough to matter.
      - input_sh 11mo ago
        You're confusing recent sales figures with overall market shares. Both Tesla and Apple use this neat little trick to their advantage, not just in China, but also in the EU and I'm sure in other places. They both sell only like 2-3 models at a time, always heavily preferencing one of them in marketing, and then use that to claim they have the "best selling phone in the market". Which is true, but is not the same as having that percentage of the overall market share as a brand. Nearly every Tesla sale is a Model Y sale, and nearly every Apple sale is an iPhone 17 sale. This does not apply to other brands such as BYD, Geely, Huawei, Oppo, (Samsung, Volkswagen,) where you can walk into a store and pick between about a dozen models targeting different niches. On top of that, Apple just started selling iPhone 17, so yes, if you Google it, you find out that they've "reached 25% of the Chinese market" and not realise that this is what happens every Q4 simply because that's when they start selling new models. That is not the same as having 25% of the overall market share at all. Overall, both Tesla and Apple are around fifth most popular brands.
wiether 11mo ago
> IMHO near term a lot of that stuff might start showing up in advertising and news content, the whole media industry is going to be a massive consumer of this stuff. One of the candidate for mayor of New York ran a whole AI video ad campaign. Half of the real estate listings have AI remodeled pictures. Probably a quarter of the printed ads I see each day are AI generated. It will only increase, but it's already here.
- wahnfrieden 11mo ago
  Real estate agents only use AI because it's cheaper than paying $70 CAD per image for human-made images. There's a cap on how valuable the AI generated images are.
  - badc0ffee 11mo ago
    The last time I sold a house, a professional photographer took some beautiful photos, gave the realtor like 60-80 and he picked 40 for the listing. He absorbed the cost of that with his commission. No way in hell did he pay $2800-5600 (I'm also in Canada) for those photos.
    - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
      I'm referring to virtual staging, not photography
KaiserPro 11mo ago
> Image, video, and other content generation is going to become more important and companies will be spending on that. We've seen some impressive improvements there. They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it. Like at the moment its great because its essentially free, but paying >200billion? Are we assuming that we can automate the equivalent of instagram, netflix/disney and whatsapp and make advertising revenue? I think the unmentioned pivot is into robotics, which seems to have actual tangible value (ie automation of things that are hard to do now) but still 200billion in r&d
- LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
  I would assume that generative AI will be able to make endless hours of personalized reality TV content that will hit a surprisingly large demographic. And then it can use recommendation algorithms to distribute that reality TV AI slop to all the people that might or might not want it in order to turn it profitable. Evidence: all the god-awful foreign reality TV on Netflix currently. It's a bit harder to replace Disney at this point, but give it 20 years. I'm bullish on AI slop on par with The Apple Dumpling Gang or Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo within a decade or so. Evidence: The rapid evolution of AI generated video in the past few years extrapolated into the future.
  - fatbird 11mo ago
    I keep thinking about how, 20 years, 3D printers became accessible for tech/price, and there was a lot of talk about how we'd all just print what we need (pretty much like in Stephenson's book Diamond Age), and you'd get rich selling digital patterns for material goods. Instead, we got the elevation of the handmade, the verifiably human created, typified by the rise of Etsy. The last 20 years have been a boom time for artists and craftspeople. I keep seeing AI slop and thinking that all this will do is make verifiably human created content more valuable by comparison, while generative AI content will seem lowbrow and not worth the cost to make it.
    - exasperaited 11mo ago
      Creative people are on the whole a lot better at keeping AI slop out of art and craft fairs than they have been with the lazier output of 3D printers, CNC, laser engravers and off-the-shelf resin mould art. It is as if the relatively unspoken feelings about the downsides of technologies as a gateway to art have been rapidly refined to deal with AI (and of course, even the CNC and laser engraver people have common cause). But I think it is fair to say that if they feel success, there will be a growing pushback against the use of 3D printers, eufyMake resin printing and CNC in a niche where hand tools used to be the norm. And speaking even as someone who has niche product ideas that will be entirely 3D printed/CNC cut/engraved, I don't really disagree with it. I am mostly not that kind of creative person (putting aside experimental photography techniques) and I see no reason why they shouldn't push back. The reality is that "craft" fairs are an odd mix of people who spent a lot of time refining their art and selling things that are the work of hours of expressive creativity and effort, and table upon table of glittery resin mould art and vinyl cut stencil output stuck on off-the-shelf products. I think AI might help people refine their feelings about this stuff they once felt bad/incorrect/unkind about excluding. It's a bit like the way the art photography market is rediscovering things like carbon printing, photosensitive etching and experimental cyanotype, and getting a lot more choosy about inkjet-printed DSLR output.
aprilthird2021 11mo ago
But there's fierce competition since no moat. How will generated images and videos avoid being a stock photo situation?
- jillesvangurp 11mo ago
  The moat is the infrastructure needed to run this at "Google" scale for the entire planet. So far only OpenAI and Google have managed to pull that together. It's just really hard to raise the hundreds of billions you'd need for that.
  - aprilthird2021 11mo ago
    If the moat is just infrastructure, there isn't really a moat then right? Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AliBaba all have similar cloud infra which could be utilized to provide this
rzerowan 11mo ago
The main thread through the case laid out has a fundamental flaw "assumes a spherical cow in a vaccuum" . There are cheaper/faster more open competitors out there doing as much as OAI and getting integrated in real product pipelines across the planet. Its not a Blueray vs HD-DVD situation (winner takes all and competition dies on the vine) or early Google vs Yahoo Search i would posit its more like bitkeeper vs git - and will probably eveolve into a git/hg/bazaar type situation. Costs will only keep dropping and the easiest/cost effective options will get faster uptake in the backend dev world where it matters.If im integrating a LLM and the whole field can kinda do the equivalent capex/opex will push the decision.
techblueberry 11mo ago
I think actually selling media is going to be tough. 1: you have to beat the current price point so people will use it, 2: it can’t be too cheap or you can’t make money. That mad market price point makes it hard to get right. The more content the fewer eyeballs, meaning the less value, meaning people willing to pay less. If it makes making movies a lot cheaper, then there’s a lot less money to be made. The thing about tech is it has to scale to meet tech valuations, and there’s a reason instagram basically gives content creation tools away for free.
conscion 11mo ago
These are all commodity use-cases though. Google, Meta, and Anthropic already all have competing products of equivalent quality and customer pricing is being driven down aggressively.

olelele 11mo ago

This sounds very similar to the Tesla stock value hype train. It’s all a gamble on the promise of tech that isn’t quite there yet.

qwertox 11mo ago
What I don't understand is how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output. He's known for not caring about privacy, so there's no real difference between buying a Tesla one or a Chinese one. Both will look and listen into your home and transfer as much data as possible to their true owners. He congratulates Jeff Bezos for New Glenn, and rightly so, but he's absolutely silent about the Chinese robots. One has to admit that they're already ahead of the US. This comes from a German who well recognizes how far behind Germany is in comparison to the US, in regards to any digital technology.
- input_sh 11mo ago
  Oh that's easy: as soon as China gets good enough to compete at any market seen as vital, "the west" either makes up some nebulous national security threat to cut them off or imposes high enough import taxes to make the home-made versions cheaper in comparison. The same way "the west" has done it with cars, phones, and social media in recent years. There is no free market competition between "the west" and China, they're two completely separate markets for a reason. You're only allowed to cross that isle in a limited capacity, as soon as you get big enough to be seen as a legit threat, you're getting cut off. Works both ways, Tesla can sell in China, but they can't beat BYD. Apple can sell iPhones, but only because their market share is not big enough to matter.
  - qwezxcrty 11mo ago
    I'm not really against your point but I just quickly checked (and it agrees with my personal observation), iPhone have been the very most popular phone brand in China for many years and recently the market share grew beyond 25%. I would not say that's not big enough to matter.
    - input_sh 11mo ago
      You're confusing recent sales figures with overall market shares. Both Tesla and Apple use this neat little trick to their advantage, not just in China, but also in the EU and I'm sure in other places. They both sell only like 2-3 models at a time, always heavily preferencing one of them in marketing, and then use that to claim they have the "best selling phone in the market". Which is true, but is not the same as having that percentage of the overall market share as a brand. Nearly every Tesla sale is a Model Y sale, and nearly every Apple sale is an iPhone 17 sale. This does not apply to other brands such as BYD, Geely, Huawei, Oppo, (Samsung, Volkswagen,) where you can walk into a store and pick between about a dozen models targeting different niches. On top of that, Apple just started selling iPhone 17, so yes, if you Google it, you find out that they've "reached 25% of the Chinese market" and not realise that this is what happens every Q4 simply because that's when they start selling new models. That is not the same as having 25% of the overall market share at all. Overall, both Tesla and Apple are around fifth most popular brands.

wiether 11mo ago

> IMHO near term a lot of that stuff might start showing up in advertising and news content, the whole media industry is going to be a massive consumer of this stuff. One of the candidate for mayor of New York ran a whole AI video ad campaign. Half of the real estate listings have AI remodeled pictures. Probably a quarter of the printed ads I see each day are AI generated. It will only increase, but it's already here.

wahnfrieden 11mo ago
Real estate agents only use AI because it's cheaper than paying $70 CAD per image for human-made images. There's a cap on how valuable the AI generated images are.
- badc0ffee 11mo ago
  The last time I sold a house, a professional photographer took some beautiful photos, gave the realtor like 60-80 and he picked 40 for the listing. He absorbed the cost of that with his commission. No way in hell did he pay $2800-5600 (I'm also in Canada) for those photos.
  - wahnfrieden 11mo ago
    I'm referring to virtual staging, not photography

KaiserPro 11mo ago

> Image, video, and other content generation is going to become more important and companies will be spending on that. We've seen some impressive improvements there. They are assuming that people _want_ automated content enough to pay for it. Like at the moment its great because its essentially free, but paying >200billion? Are we assuming that we can automate the equivalent of instagram, netflix/disney and whatsapp and make advertising revenue? I think the unmentioned pivot is into robotics, which seems to have actual tangible value (ie automation of things that are hard to do now) but still 200billion in r&d

LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
I would assume that generative AI will be able to make endless hours of personalized reality TV content that will hit a surprisingly large demographic. And then it can use recommendation algorithms to distribute that reality TV AI slop to all the people that might or might not want it in order to turn it profitable. Evidence: all the god-awful foreign reality TV on Netflix currently. It's a bit harder to replace Disney at this point, but give it 20 years. I'm bullish on AI slop on par with The Apple Dumpling Gang or Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo within a decade or so. Evidence: The rapid evolution of AI generated video in the past few years extrapolated into the future.
- fatbird 11mo ago
  I keep thinking about how, 20 years, 3D printers became accessible for tech/price, and there was a lot of talk about how we'd all just print what we need (pretty much like in Stephenson's book Diamond Age), and you'd get rich selling digital patterns for material goods. Instead, we got the elevation of the handmade, the verifiably human created, typified by the rise of Etsy. The last 20 years have been a boom time for artists and craftspeople. I keep seeing AI slop and thinking that all this will do is make verifiably human created content more valuable by comparison, while generative AI content will seem lowbrow and not worth the cost to make it.
  - exasperaited 11mo ago
    Creative people are on the whole a lot better at keeping AI slop out of art and craft fairs than they have been with the lazier output of 3D printers, CNC, laser engravers and off-the-shelf resin mould art. It is as if the relatively unspoken feelings about the downsides of technologies as a gateway to art have been rapidly refined to deal with AI (and of course, even the CNC and laser engraver people have common cause). But I think it is fair to say that if they feel success, there will be a growing pushback against the use of 3D printers, eufyMake resin printing and CNC in a niche where hand tools used to be the norm. And speaking even as someone who has niche product ideas that will be entirely 3D printed/CNC cut/engraved, I don't really disagree with it. I am mostly not that kind of creative person (putting aside experimental photography techniques) and I see no reason why they shouldn't push back. The reality is that "craft" fairs are an odd mix of people who spent a lot of time refining their art and selling things that are the work of hours of expressive creativity and effort, and table upon table of glittery resin mould art and vinyl cut stencil output stuck on off-the-shelf products. I think AI might help people refine their feelings about this stuff they once felt bad/incorrect/unkind about excluding. It's a bit like the way the art photography market is rediscovering things like carbon printing, photosensitive etching and experimental cyanotype, and getting a lot more choosy about inkjet-printed DSLR output.

aprilthird2021 11mo ago

But there's fierce competition since no moat. How will generated images and videos avoid being a stock photo situation?

jillesvangurp 11mo ago
The moat is the infrastructure needed to run this at "Google" scale for the entire planet. So far only OpenAI and Google have managed to pull that together. It's just really hard to raise the hundreds of billions you'd need for that.
- aprilthird2021 11mo ago
  If the moat is just infrastructure, there isn't really a moat then right? Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and AliBaba all have similar cloud infra which could be utilized to provide this

rzerowan 11mo ago

The main thread through the case laid out has a fundamental flaw "assumes a spherical cow in a vaccuum" . There are cheaper/faster more open competitors out there doing as much as OAI and getting integrated in real product pipelines across the planet. Its not a Blueray vs HD-DVD situation (winner takes all and competition dies on the vine) or early Google vs Yahoo Search i would posit its more like bitkeeper vs git - and will probably eveolve into a git/hg/bazaar type situation. Costs will only keep dropping and the easiest/cost effective options will get faster uptake in the backend dev world where it matters.If im integrating a LLM and the whole field can kinda do the equivalent capex/opex will push the decision.

techblueberry 11mo ago

I think actually selling media is going to be tough. 1: you have to beat the current price point so people will use it, 2: it can’t be too cheap or you can’t make money. That mad market price point makes it hard to get right. The more content the fewer eyeballs, meaning the less value, meaning people willing to pay less. If it makes making movies a lot cheaper, then there’s a lot less money to be made. The thing about tech is it has to scale to meet tech valuations, and there’s a reason instagram basically gives content creation tools away for free.

conscion 11mo ago

These are all commodity use-cases though. Google, Meta, and Anthropic already all have competing products of equivalent quality and customer pricing is being driven down aggressively.