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 enormous unrealized upside.
David George argues that despite Anthropic and OpenAI outpacing hyperscaler revenue growth, AI adoption across most enterprise functions remains under 5%, suggesting massive headroom for outcomes. ✦ AI generated
David George · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-29 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 1:53
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 1:53
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.
3:31And it turns out that like cost is going to hit us in the face and make them really important sooner than we thought. So, scale we've updated our priors to to get, you know, really pilled on this on this outcome thing, on the on the size of the prize, um and the scale. Um and you can see the early signs of it in the numbers. But basically
3:53almost no diffusion into the real economy. It's going to get great for all these other functions. By the way, what's happened in coding, you can kind of start to see it in some other white-collar jobs. So, like it's starting to happen in legal. Um, you know, the legal space is is you know, much smaller obviously than coding. Um, but you know, when the models get really good and the products
- ·Anthropic and OpenAI now add more monthly revenue than Meta, Google, or Microsoft.
- ·Most enterprise functions still sit below 5% AI diffusion.
- ·The disconnect implies enormous unrealized economic upside.
- ·Top AI labs are outpacing hyperscaler revenue growth.
- ·Yet real-economy diffusion remains tiny — under 5%.
- ·The gap between revenue generation and practical use is unusually wide.