Andreessen's Olivia Moore: consumer AI's next wave isn't subscriptions

The interview comes at a moment of pessimism about the revenue picture for consumer AI, since OpenAI has moved back toward the enterprise this year, as the interviewer noted. Moore characterized that not as a pivot but as an expansion, since OpenAI is still launching a lot in consumer, and attributed the enterprise focus to the fact that almost all AI revenue so far has come from subscriptions and token usage, which is concentrated on enterprise and prosumer users.

The State of Markets report reminded readers that just 2.2% of U.S. households are paying for AI. Moore said she isn't sure she wants that number to rise, and is more interested in getting back to a world where the consumer is monetized in a way that isn't subscription dollars out of their own pocket. She argued it's easy in Silicon Valley, where people have high incomes and corporate cards, to prefer paying for a product, but most people would rather have free access with ads and then decide whether to subscribe.

On the marginal cost of AI services, which she said is still a lot higher than classic internet services like Facebook or Google Search, Moore pointed to ChatGPT's Go plan at $8 a month as evidence of improvement, and said it could mean cheaper models for consumer use cases and more consumer companies building on top of open-source models. The revenue-driving users today are doing coding and technical automation where they probably do need frontier intelligence, she said, but as more people build for consumers, where the model is not the product, lower-cost models may be used more often.

Moore wrote an article about a year ago called The Great Expansion on the blurring lines between consumer and enterprise. Pre-AI, she noted, companies like Canva were consumer-first and often took six or seven years to add teams or enterprise plans; now companies like Gamma, ElevenLabs, and Cursor start as consumer and within 18 months become majority-enterprise businesses. She said the whitespace categories are what she thinks the market needs to see entrants in over the next six months.