Sam Altman is not shy with his claims.
Before going into this article, I will state that I am not writing about the validity of this forecast. Altman didn't say that OpenAi was definitely going to be a $100 trillion company. He did, however, mention, that it could be possible.
Why this is important is that it shows the potential of what is possible. artificial intelligence is going to be the greatest wealth producer the world has ever seen. This is going to make the computer age look minor in comparison.
To put it in perspective, right now Microsoft is the most valuable company at $3.1 trillion while Apple comes in at $2.9T.
Basically, this is a 33x over the largest companies in the world right now.
It is unclear if Altman was operating from the premise that "winner take most".
Even within the chatbot realm, there are plenty of competitors. Most Big Tech companies are involved. We have Google, Amazon, Meta, and Elon Musk all participating.
So who is going to be the winner?
What happens if all of these are winners? We know that it is unlikely for any of these companies to go away anytime soon. They are all flush with data. Processing is being added and each is tied to LLM development.
If this is not a winner take most situation, we can presume that AI will generate hundreds of trillions in value. This is how big it can become.
Many want to correlate AI to the Internet.
This is something that doesn't quite line up. The Internet is a network, operating under different characteristics. Here we see things such as the network effect in place.
AI is more akin to computing. In fact, it can be thought of as next generation computing.
It deals with data, processing, and the input/output workflow. This is no different than what we see on the semiconductors in our laptops. The difference is the "rules" they operate under.
Our phones or PCs do not have predictive capabilities. With AI, we are looking at a system that looks for ways to predict what is needed next. This is a major change.
That said, how much is the Internet worth?
There are no concrete answers to this question since there are many ways to tRY and calculate it. Needless to say, the overall value is into the tens of trillions of dollars.
Going to something even more basic, how much is computing worth?
To be honest, this is a figure that would be impossible to calculate. How can we put a figure on the societal impact on computers? Consider the difference in life today as compared to the 1950s. While there are many reasons for this, a large part of it is due to computing.
Just consider the fact that a new car has, at a minimum, dozens of different computers in them.
Most of our entire world is run on computing. If we look at the $100 trillion global economy, how much of it is tied, in some form, to computing? Is there much that is not affected? Perhaps there are some services such as house cleaning that might not be affected but even that likely has computerized scheduling.
In other words, we are probably looking at hundreds of trillions generated over the years in economic output. Naturally, this is not a direct market cap value of the companies.
Nevertheless, the next generation could see that. Might we see a $100 trillion company at some point?
Time will tell. If there is a field that could drive it, AI will do that.
