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Anthropic and OpenAI are already adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft, yet AI's actual diffusion into the real economy is still under 5%, implying outcomes ahead will be extraordinary.

David argues that despite Anthropic and OpenAI already outpacing hyperscalers in monthly revenue growth, AI has diffused into less than 5% of the real economy, meaning the eventual outcomes will be extraordinary. ✦ AI generated

David · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-29 · original ↗

starts at this moment · 1:28

Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft. They are already at that scale of revenue getting added and actual diffusion of this technology into the real economy is tiny. It's like less than 5%.

verbatim transcript · starts at 1:28

Transcript · around this moment

1:08before that was sort of you know, a sort of like nebulous promise in the enterprise, but we probably were contextualizing it around things like the cloud you know, in software companies and in productivity enhancement. And then on the consumer side, you know, you could think about AI companies like a consumer business, like you know, how many users they have and and what the price is and how big that can get. And by the way, I

1:28think that's going to be much bigger than people expect to, which we could which we could talk about, but as of November, I think all of our priors shifted around what is actually going to happen in the enterprise. But just maybe to contextualize what's happened since then basically, Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft. They are already at that scale of

1:53revenue getting added and actual diffusion of this technology into the real economy is tiny. It's like less than 5%. >> Yeah. >> Now, within coding and in tech-forward companies, yes, it's it's much more advanced. Um but as it relates to every other function in the enterprise, um you know, full sort of utilization of the capabilities, we're nowhere right now. So, if you pair that up with the fact that they're already getting

2:20bigger, you know, in terms of revenue added than the hyperscalers, and you're at less than 5% diffusion into the economy, I think the outcomes are going to be extraordinary. Um so, the thing that we've started to try to look at to gauge, you know, what can possibly happen, like what's the upper bound, is enterprises are going to have to pay for this somehow. >> Yeah. >> And so, if you just look at the Fortune

2:43500 or the S&P 500, they're actually pretty close. Um it's they generate like 2 trillion of profit per year at the collective. >> Um and I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of those two companies is doing 200 billion of revenue run rate by the end of this year. >> Yeah. >> Not to mention people using open source, other vendors, so like you can add even more on top of that. So, we're already

3:09talking about like a 10% profit, you know, into the Fortune 500. And so, I think the upper bound is going to be where the dollars going to come from. And one of the implications, you know, like to buy this stuff. Like and um you know, one of the implications of this is we had all these theories why open source and local were going to be really important.

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