Azeem Azhar

The amount that goes in online advertising and buying software is well over a trillion dollars a year, and it's already growing at 14% a year.

So I think part of the question is, how much could AI increase that growth rate?

And how much would it displace

existing companies who are not using AI.

And so there is a journey.

I think one of the big investment banks talks about a trillion dollars of revenue a year in 2030, which, you know, it's not a shoo-in, but it's not completely pie in the sky.

You know, it's somewhere in between.

Wow.

Well, I mean, that would be really grim.

It would be a little bit like

feudal Russia, only the Tsar is even richer and the serfs are even poorer.

So, I mean, when you paint it that way, without there being really significant policy interventions, you'd essentially have a giant vacuum cleaner in San Francisco sucking up all of the money in the

AI systems and even companies that are operating with their own products will be paying so much economic rent to the AI companies that they'll have the slimmest of margins, just like sharecroppers on a 17th century English farm.

And I think that that direction

absent any policy interventions, and if the technology worked out the way you described it, would probably be a direction that we would end up traveling.

Now, my bet is that the AGI vision won't play out the way people think it will.

I think it'll take much longer to get this technology in the economy.

I think...

It'll just be harder to get that robot that can do anything and everything.

And I also think that at some point, as we saw in Caledonia, Wisconsin, people would stand up and say, hey, we need to change this script.