🎙 We held the first Lecture Club call on Stanford MS&E 435: Economics of the AI Supercycle.
Thanks to everyone who attended — there were about 80 people, and the discussion was lively and at times contentious. Specifically: we caught a couple of "uninvited guests" on Zoom — I will enable the waiting room and password for the next meeting to prevent this from happening again.
Here are some thoughts highlighted by the participants:
• Mikhail — the current monetization of AI looks like "we're reinventing the wheel again": advertising and subscriptions. The marketing budget in the world is limited — new growth is only possible through autonomous agents replacing employees.
• Alexander — what if the triangle doesn’t flip? Apps earn only about ~30% gross margin, ChatGPT is deeply unprofitable, advertising will undermine trust. Plus, there's an open question: how to show ads to an agent, not a human?
• Sergey — real monetization is already on the horizon: Agentic Commerce. ChatGPT is biting into Amazon and TikTok Shop through the Agentic Commerce Protocol — 5–15% from each transaction. It’s surprising that Amazon hasn’t yet released Rufus as a standalone app.
• Svetlana (an economist at Amazon) — each previous upheaval of the pyramid required a new monetization model (license → ads → SaaS). A new one for AI is not yet visible — hence all lectures feel like fortune-telling.
• Mika — "not all the work is knowledge work". A large part of the story is about physical AI: robots and interaction with the world. And advertising in the AI era will likely be nothing like the current contextual banners.
• Pasha — there are not 3, but 4 levels in the pyramid: model sellers through API (OpenAI, Anthropic) — a separate layer, not applications. And the future is salaries for agents, not software subscriptions.
• Ira — a counter question: will users buy a subscription to avoid ads? How does this work in YouTube Premium?
• Kostya — the cost of inference is falling, open models are readily available. "Middle" providers with decentralized infrastructure will emerge. Money is in agents: SaaS + agent as the new face of services.
📺 Recording of the call:
https://youtu.be/4oawuoWhYmg
📆 Next meeting — Monday, May 11, 10am ET / 5pm MSK
📍 Registration on luma: https://luma.com/ilz7seef
To watch — Lecture 2: Silicon, The GPU Economy
🎥 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4faCRNl9Bi4
Additional materials:
• Acquired: Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npBC3R-dOr0
• Jonathan Ross (Groq): "OpenAI & Anthropic will build their own chips. Will NVIDIA reach $10T?" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfIK5LFGnlk
Discuss in the chat: @rvnikita_blog_chat
