TechFlow news — 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 over 200 million weekly users in just a few years. He raised several thought-provoking questions:
Has anyone analyzed the average number of searches per user and revenue per impression for ChatGPT? If adopting an advertising monetization model similar to Google's, how might a business like ChatGPT perform?
Chen noted that some products with comparable user bases—such as the Firefox browser—achieved annual revenues close to $1 billion at their peak. If ChatGPT remains free to use, its monthly active user count could increase significantly.
He believes large language model (LLM) products have the potential to disrupt traditional search businesses and may achieve comparable monetization capabilities.
Chen also highlighted an important question: whether LLMs will increase overall search volume or simply capture market share from existing search engines like Google.
