According to TechFlow, a16z general partner Andrew Chen discussed the commercial potential of ChatGPT on social media. Chen pointed out that OpenAI's ChatGPT has reached an astonishing scale of more than 200 million users per week in just a few years.
He raised a few questions worth pondering: Has anyone analyzed ChatGPT's average number of searches and revenue per impression? How would a business like ChatGPT perform if it adopted an advertising monetization model similar to Google's?
Chen believes that some products with a similar user base (such as the Firefox browser) had annual revenue of nearly $1 billion at their peak. If ChatGPT were free to use, its monthly active users could increase significantly.
He said that large language model (LLM) products have the potential to become disruptors in the search business and may achieve considerable monetization capabilities. Chen also pointed out that it is worth thinking about whether LLM will increase overall search volume or just grab market share from existing search engines such as Google.