Who Will Become The First AI Billionaire?

The AI boom is likely to continue, so one obvious question is who will benefit — and how much? As far as artificial intelligence is concerned, early pioneers won't get particularly wealthy relative to how it changes the world. This may be deflationary for entrepreneurs, but it's good for consumers.

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AI will make money, but it will be difficult to capture anything close to its full potential. The only way to truly transform a system is for it to become freely available across a wide range of sectors.

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In the early days of the internet, the most successful entrepreneurs did not earn huge fortunes — but the most successful social media entrepreneurs have. There was no easy way to profit from the internet even in 1992 if you were convinced it would be huge. When printing presses were invented, early inventors, like Gutenberg, did not become rich nobles.

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In this sense, we should ask the obvious question: Are current manifestations of AI more like the internet or social media? They appear to be somewhere in the middle based on what we've seen so far.

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In a similar vein, how many people have really left Twitter for Mastodon? This is because Facebook benefits from network effects, which means that you want to be able to connect with friends and family.

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This advantage seems to be lacking among the major AI companies. I can still communicate with you — through other media — using OpenAI's ChatGPT, and you can do the same with Anthropic's Claude. Through a third-party intermediary, it is even possible to connect two services via text.

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There is likely to be one AI service that is better than the others for many of the purposes we are trying to solve. The best hardware, the best talent, and the best management can be found in these companies. The competition will come from companies offering lower-quality services at a lower price (but still good). With Baidu, Google, and Anthropic releasing LLM products, the market is already flooded with LLM services. However, AI image generation is still in its infancy.

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As far as economics are concerned, Salesforce might be the dominant AI company. Business and institutional software giant Salesforce has a huge market share, and its products are incredibly popular. In spite of this, the company's valuation is $170 billion as of this writing. Although that's no small sum, it's not nearly as high as other tech valuations of $1 trillion.

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A private valuation of $29 billion has been given to OpenAI, the current market leader. There are plenty of companies worth far more than these - but you might not have heard of them. Its valuation is almost ten times higher than that of OpenAI, a biopharmaceutical company with a value of $271 billion.

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In other words, none of these factors indicate that AI will fade away. Rather than slipping into a few people's workflows, AI will permeate the entire economy. Workers and consumers will all be wealthier as a result. As AI spreads and replicates, profits will be limited for the major AI companies of the future.

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As a result of its ubiquity, AI may decline in value, at least from the point of view of the market. There is a sense of speculative fervor almost palpable in the AI boom that has yet to peak. AI developments have been well received by the stock market. After Buzzfeed announced last month that AI would be used for content generation, its shares soared 150% that day. With all the competition BuzzFeed faces, does that really make sense?

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In order to fully understand when the AI revolution has arrived, you must first see a decline in the prices and valuations of those technologies. In the end, AI may have the most significant impact on its users, not its inventors or investors.

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