Where will AI's economic value accrue: concentrated in AI providers or spread across legacy industries?

Hussein Kanji · Jan 20, 2025 · hedged

AI model capability is commoditizing so fast that most of the value may end up as consumer surplus, with no single company skimming enough cream to become the big winner

Tools are getting very good and others build tools on top; a Chinese team replicated GPT-level capability on a fraction of the compute and publishes its methods; his dinner with Wayve's founder pointed the same way

Scope: says repeatedly he doesn't know where it goes; acknowledges OpenAI has real revenue and increasing returns to scale

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Marc Andreessen · Mar 30, 2026

AI will follow the same pattern and possibly an extreme version of it — the overwhelming majority of AI's value will accrue to users, not to the AI companies, so debates about who wins in AI are fights over the residual ~1%

The same consumer-surplus dynamic that governed the internet and smartphones applies to AI, and it is already happening; the value shows up like dark matter that nobody tallies up

Scope: 'might even be greater' than 99%; hyperbolic figure of 99.9999% offered loosely

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Avishai Abrahami · Jul 13, 2026

AI will let small businesses become far more efficient, grow faster and be significantly more profitable — and that shift arrives next year, not in five or ten years

A gym owner or personal trainer will be able to use AI to manage the business, upsell additional products and reach new customers at a much higher level

Scope: about SMB operations, not replacing customer support

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Fred Turner · Jul 18, 2026

He is bullish rather than worried about value concentration in AI, because AI will massively boost earnings in other sectors that have had no other path to earnings growth

In health insurance, everyone already has insurance and government business (Medicare/Medicaid) has become a money-losing business, so the only way to grow earnings without a worse product is efficiency — cutting the ~9% of premium spent on admin

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