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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

Is this wild speculation the material for creating bubbles?

FTA:

"Walmsley adds that he’s heard venture-capital investors speculate that the market for generative AI applications could be as large as $1 trillion. He notes that the world has over one billion knowledge workers; OpenAI charges $42 a month for the professional version of ChatGPT. If you assume every one of those people gets two accounts—one general, and one specialized—you get close $1 trillion."

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What about assuming every one of those people gets 1 trillion accounts

That kind of "well if we as a single company manage to take over this entire sector that's a $XX Billion/Trillion dollar market" is how the tech world evaluation has been completely broken. It's part of what drove Tesla stock to the insane valuation it's still not coming down from, "well if self driving ever delivers they could take over the car, bus/public transit AND taxi businesses at the same time!" without even demonstrating a real hands off autopilot.

I especially like the entirely random factor of two thrown in there -- everybody will get two accounts because why?

Lol I know, like let's just 2X the TAM here for zero reason

It's OK speculation, but the economics is bad. If everyone is willing to pay for ChatGPT, the price is clearly far too low. The optimal price for a product is almost never the price where the audience is 100% saturated.

That's even worse because that's saying the trillion dollar industry were every knowledge worker pays $84 a month for ChatGPT accounts is the bottom end of the range.

I think the 168$ per knowledge worker will be paid by the companies instead, with some free excepmtions like university/school programms to get the kids hooked into the tech

how about one knowledge worker charging a $trillion and then going home with it?

Well, if I owe my bank 1 million dollars, I have a problem. If I owe the bank 1 billion dollars, the bank has a problem.

ChatGPT just absolutely can't ever own the market. It only works by siphoning off the intellectual output of humans. There will be a tipping point where it's just going to recycling it's own output until it's content becomes like "blurry JPEG of the internet" as the New Yorker put it. It can still be extremely valuable in some niches and even opening up new market opportunities that maybe didn't exist before, but it really just can't overtake any markets without eating itself.

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