Azeem Azhar

So if we get 100% of the market we're going after, our revenues will be a billion dollars.

And of course, no one gets 100%.

Now, that's obviously not true.

I mean, that market today is thought of to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

And Uber's revenues are much, much higher than a billion dollars a year because new technologies, new innovations, new customer propositions can expand markets.

But

just because they're expanding, it doesn't necessarily mean we know who's going to make money.

We don't know where the profits are going to lie.

And that's particularly true if we move down a layer from general innovations like Uber into general purpose technologies, which are diffused, they spread across the economy in interesting ways.

And it's not clear

whether it's going to be the inventor of the technology, the people who build it out, who will capture the profits or someone else.

If you think about the internet, the value accrued to downstream companies making the applications and to users like us who get an unpaid for consumer surplus from all the free services we've enjoyed for the last 20 or 30 years.

The value didn't really accrue to the people who laid the first fiber lines or built the first modems.

But that's not a common pattern.

I mean, if you look at the internal combustion engine, that took a completely different shape.

So the car companies over the decades captured most of the profits.

But the oil companies who are upstream and the finance companies who are enabling the purchases of the cars were not far behind in their share of the profit pool.

But both of those sectors enjoyed far better margins than the automarks.

We don't necessarily know with general purpose technologies where profit pools will lie, who will make the money.

AI makes it even harder because AI is not just a simple general purpose technology.