Our world is increasingly becoming AI-powered. So many things around us now has some sort of AI tech embedded in its system. A lot of people struggle with accepting this reality but history has taught us that every new tech with high revenue potential always gets scaled for extensive adoption.
Our recommendation systems are powered by artificial intelligence. Our search engines, our streaming apps, even our keyboards are AI-powered. With increasing reliance on AI comes the inevitable cost of a market opportunity.
Right now, AI companies stand as a central system to which future economies will run on, meaning that they effectively will command significantly economic influence.
As of today, the numbers are already in several hundreds of billions of dollars with projections to reach trillions soon.
This isn't news to a lot of people, but what may be news is OpenAI's plans to take a commission on AI-driven discoveries through its AI platform.
According to a report published on January 23rd this year, OpenAI looks to or is exploring potentially taking a percentage of future gains from customers using their AI tools, such as researchers discovering and developing new drugs that generates economic value.
Is this anti innovation?
OpenAI is underwater, this is common knowledge for most people and there's growing desperation to monetize it's AI products as much as possible.
It's already been reported or confirmed that ads are coming to ChatGPT and while that could potentially help generate income from non-paying users, which are mostly the mass consumers, there's still the need to reach profitability and a stage to be significantly scalable without complete reliance on raising new capital to fund operations.
Compared to competitors like Alphabet, OpenAI doesn't have a revenue source or existing assets that can support it's AI business. Alphabet has been building and running data centers for years with several millions in servers capacity.
There's more than the money advantage when it comes to Alphabet (Google), there's the assets and existing experience advantage, there's the data source advantage and also a broad ecosystem to which AI solutions can be blended into for extra revenue generation.
Notwithstanding, OpenAI's desperations to generate revenue is bringing us to something that will completely change how future economies function.
Remember that with growing reliance on AI, these companies become central to everything else. This brings us to an era whereas AI companies could be positioned as a system similar to app stores of today.
Just as Alphabet and Apple charge a commission on in-app purchases made through applications listed on their platform, OpenAI would be running a similar system where innovation through its AI tools pay a mandatory percentage back.
Like anything, when it comes to systems that control not just money but effectively access to products and services, this can turn into something that threatens the flexibility of businesses in the age of AI.
If too much is charged, then builders or businesses are discouraged, a commission model in this case is acting as a gatekeeping mechanism, where foundational model providers extract value from downstream creators and significantly centralize power.
There's bound to be friction with this model, and a lot of ethical concerns since we have to look back into how this affects broader economies being that AI is supposed to improve lives, not put another monthly service charge on everyone's bill.
I think that ultimately, competition is what will keep these companies in check. It's kind of promising that none of these running players will have significant single control over users seeing that most AI users are working across several platforms with no extreme reliance on one.
Maintaining this user habit could be key to ensuring that no one provider becomes a system of power with significant central influence.