Right but OpenAI are for real making that prediction about their consumer revenue, which seems decidedly ambitious (considering that they are making nothing from their current phone placement). And they have said that they expect it to be quite a large share!
"OpenAI projects revenue will be divided nearly equally between its consumer and enterprise business units by 2030"
That it is so absurdly ambitious and so likely to run up against reality strikes me as really indicative of the quality of the envelopes these calculations are being sketched on.
The free Chinese models are always approaching frontier-level power. The cost to Enterprise to run these models is where Anthropic and OpenAI are competing against in the long run.
That's cool, but the enterprise is cheap. If you have any proximity to sales in the space you know that procurement and lawyers exist that have a full time job redlining purchase orders and agreements to the N-th degree. The enterprise will pay for something that will make them money or prevent them from losing it. But the enterprise isn't paying a premium and they know that.
Even within the Fortune 5 of the US if be surprised if any of them are paying more than $1B annually currently in total.
And then you can take the parent context into account. If they can just equip users with a slightly more expensive Mac and call their Dell rep to order a few thousand DGX Spark to handle the rest... Why would they risk their trade secrets and intimate details flowing into models that may or may not be trustworthy long term?
Most large enterprise have been burned by SaaS over the years in some way. I can't imagine there aren't architects in the large organizations that are truly weighing how to effectively use AI. And beyond that we're seeing more and more progress in SLMs and orchestration agents which become easier to run at scale on-prem.
> If you have any proximity to sales in the space you know that procurement and lawyers exist that have a full time job redlining purchase orders and agreements to the N-th degree.
I think so too (Enterprise), but I think its going to look different from "Pay subscription for access to a model from OpenAI/Anthropic/Google."
I don't think people will be doing business with the labs directly. "Enterprise AI" will be distilled down into purpose built products, with the model just basically being a generic commodity, and nearly irrelevant to the enterprises buying whatever these products are much like how I don't care if whatever SaaS was built in React, Vue, or some other framework as long as it works.
Ironically, for as much shit as they get about Copilot, Microsoft I think has the right idea for the long game they just suck at execution. Copilot is the tool, integrated into the rest of their enterprise stack, it doesn't care what the model is behind the scenes (they already offer you the ability to choose between different models).
That doesn't really bode well for the labs and their trillion dollar IPOs, because they are effectively reduced down to being a developer framework.
