When, if ever, will AI actually make money?

Keeping track of all developments in the AI ​​industry can be difficult, but it is helpful to keep two fundamental questions in mind: What is the potential size of the market for AI products? And who will benefit from it? Apoorv Agrawal, a venture capitalist at Altimeter Capital, said in a recent lecture at Stanford University, where he teaches a course on the economics of AI, that Alphabet reaches about four billion people worldwide through its Chrome browser, Android operating system and video-sharing service YouTube and generates revenue of about a hundred dollars per user per year, mostly through advertising. Agrawal estimates that Meta reaches about 3.5 billion people across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp and generates about seventy dollars per user per year. OpenAI recently claimed to have more than nine hundred million weekly active users, but according to Agrawal’s calculations, ChatGPT only generates about ten dollars per user per year. In an email…