185 Consumer AI Monetization Possibilities = New Entrants & / Or Tech Incumbents? …The implications are still unfolding. For users (and developers), this shift is a gift: dramatically lower unit costs to access powerful AI. And as end-user costs decline, creation of new products and services is flourishing, and user and usage adoption is rising. For model providers, however, this raises real questions about monetization and profits. Training is expensive, serving is getting cheap, and pricing power is slipping. The business model is in flux. And there are new questions about the one-size-fits-all LLM approach, with smaller, cheaper models trained for custom use cases* now emerging. Additionally, traditional business moats are being disrupted. Look no further than Google. The company launched AI Overviews in May of last year – they sit above many Google search results. The company highlighted it had 1.5B AI Overviews MAUs as of 4/25…it’s notable that in the last few weeks, Google began adding advertisements to select AI Overviews. Will providers try to build horizontal platforms? Will they dive into specialized applications? Will one or two leaders drive dominant user and usage share and related monetization, be it subscriptions (easily enabled by digital payment providers), digital services, ads, etc.? Only time will tell. In the short term, it’s hard to ignore that the economics of general-purpose LLMs look like commodity businesses with venture-scale burn. *E.g., OpenEvidence