Source: trust me bro
There are applied AI cos making 100-400M+ in just a few years of incorporation, does that count as financial gain?
Academia is currently 6-12mo behind the frontier of the industry due to secrecy and publication times, so any "long term" study, even for a year, would be out of date on arrival
code wrappers - cursor (special case), lovable, replit
part model part applied - perplexity, 11labs, cartesia, suno
applied branches of model labs - codex, claude code, deployment cos & fde teams
ai roll ups - thrive, longlake, some stealth ones
applied - cognition, sierra, fin, harvey, legora, glean
part data part applied - scale
Margins vary, but many of these companies' revenue are already a chunk higher than what was last publicly reported
Wouldnt be surprising to see some of them 2-5x rev in the next few years
The question is not whether companies are investing in AI, it's whether they're getting anything in return. Or, whether execs are just as anxious and confused about the story being sold as everyone else, taking the ludicrous amount of capital being put behind it as evidence that there's a "there" there, and hopping on the train out of pure FOMO and hedging, whether they're actually getting anything out of it at all.
If we start to see spend go down because projects fail and companies run the ROI calculation and determine it's not worth it, then ill stand corrected and happily admit that