“We have a tradition of first looking for uses, then finding ways to monetize them. » Jack Krawczyk, responsible at Google for the development of the chatbot Bard, thus explains the absence, for the time being, of any source of income for this conversational robot launched this Thursday, July 13 in France. If successful, adds the manager, the search giant will have a range of means available to make this competitor of ChatGPT profitable: targeted advertising, subscription, paid mobile application, sale by volume of activity. for businesses…
This anecdote shows that the business of generative artificial intelligence (AI) – capable of creating texts and images – is not stabilized. However, the choice of economic model will define the future of the sector.
Admittedly, the time when OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, presented itself as a purely non-profit project is long gone. Likewise, the CEO, Sam Altman, no longer says, as in a conference in 2019, that he “has no business model” And “will ask the AI” to create one for it… Since then, OpenAI has accepted more than 10 billion dollars of investment from Microsoft and questioned the publication of its AI models in “open access” (open-source).
Launched in a free version in November, ChatGPT set up a paid subscription in February at 20 dollars per month, which guarantees the service even in the event of congestion. OpenAI’s text and image generation models are also marketed as application programming interfaces for companies, which can integrate them into their services for a fraction of a cent per request.
Other actors try different models. For French LightOn, “the value is as much in the AI model as in everything that goes around it, to support client companies: deployment and refinement of the model, assistance with the written instructions to be given to the model”… The start-up charges a subscription. Its compatriot Mistral AI has not communicated a business plan, but also sees its future profitability elsewhere than in the AI models themselves, because it plans to publish these in free access.
A matter of sovereignty
The economic model of the sector will of course be crucial for the future of small players. How to start a chatbot profitable if a digital giant offers a free one at a loss? There is a risk of a form of dumping to capture shares of a nascent market, such as in video-on-demand platforms, cloud hosting or VTC… Prices set by market leaders will they cover their costs? In the long run, aren’t the prices likely to be raised, weakening the companies that would have built a service on an AI? Some also fear a potential economic dependence.
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