Open AI has a pretty robust and profitable business without Microsoft. In every enterprise I’ve been involved with over the last few years we have had some incredibly material and important use cases of OpenAI LLMs (as well as Claude). They aren’t spewing slop or whatever, they’re genuinely achieving valuable and foundational business outcomes. I’ve been a bit stunned at how fast we’ve achieved these things and it tells me that the AI hype isn’t hype, and that if we have done these things in a year, it’s hard to estimate how much impact the technologies will have in five but I think it’s substantial. So is our spend with OpenAI. Or rather, with Azure on OpenAI products. The only value from our experiences Microsoft offers is IAM - which is sufficient frankly.

Stability and Midjourney are also making money, but it’s largely with amateurs and people prototyping content for their own creations. A lot of single person Indy game developers are using these tools to generate assets, or at minimum first pass assets. I think a lot of media companies are producing the art for their articles or news letters etc using these tools. Whether this is enough, I don’t know.