For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI.
That ain’t happening.
Time will probably come when we won't be allowed to consume frontier models without paying anything, as we can today, and time will come when this $30 will most likely become double or triple the price.
Though the truth is that R&D around AI models, and especially their hosting (inference), is expensive and won't get any cheaper without significant algorithmic improvements. According to the history, my opinion is that we may very well be ~10 years from that moment.
EDIT: HSBC has just published some projections. From https://archive.ph/9b8Ae#selection-4079.38-4079.42
> Total consumer AI revenue will be $129bn by 2030
> Enterprise AI will be generating $386bn in annual revenue by 2030
> OpenAI’s rental costs will be a cumulative $792bn between the current year and 2030, rising to $1.4tn by 2033
> OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn
> Squaring the first total off against the second leaves a $207bn funding hole
So, yes, expensive (mind the rental costs only) ... but forseen to be penetrating into everything imagineable.
None of these companies have proven the unit economics on their services
[1]: https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re..., https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...
[2]: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
it's a AI summary
google eats that ad revenue
it eats the whole thing
it blocked your click on the link... it drinks your milkshake
so, yes, there a 100 billion commercially viable product
If users just look at the AI overview at the top of the search page, Google is hobbling two sources of revenue (AdSense, sponsored search results), and also disincentivizing people from sharing information on the web that makes their AI overview useful. In the process of all this they are significantly increasing the compute costs for each Google search.
This may be a necessary step to stay competitive with AI startups' search products, but I don't think this is a great selling point for AI commercialization.
To thunderous applause.
