becausecurious

1. "OpenAI has told investors it expects to reach $125B in revenue by 2029 and $174B by 2030. OpenAI expects to serve 3B monthly active users by 2030, with 900M DAUs." (from sacra.com; original source seems to be theinformation.com, but it is behind a paywall). 2. FAANG performance in 2024 (source: ChatGPT): 1. Apple — $391B net sales 2. Amazon — $638B net sales 3. Alphabet (Google) — $350B revenue 4. Meta Platforms — $164.5B revenue 5. Netflix — $39B billion revenue 3. Therefore, OpenAI expects to reach revenue comparable to Meta—or roughly half of Alphabet’s—within five years. 4. YC's request for startups suggests existence of capable AI agents replacing entire industries: "Instead of selling to the dinosaurs, you could make them extinct." 5. 3 & 4 contradict each other. I am surprised why the projection is so low assuming there are AI agents replacing entire industries. My hypotheses: 1. The AI progress is expected to slow down and capable AI agents are not coming in the next 5 years, thus, existing industries are not replaced by AI agents. Basically in (4) YC is shooting far into the future. 2. Agents are coming, but there will be multiple providers and OpenAI captures only a small part of this market. 1. Another version of this - OpenAI only captures API infrastructure part of it, but the rest is captured by smaller companies applying OpenAI's API in their own niches. 3. Capable agents are coming soon & OpenAI will be the main provider, but OpenAI's revenue is growing exponentially and it just takes time to overtake rest of FAANG. However, based on ChatGPT research, it took FAANG companies 5-10 years to get to a first year with $1B+ revenue & for OpenAI it was 8-9 years, so nothing substantially different here.