Generative AI might end up being worthless
Generative AI has yet to deliver the productivity gains needed to justify its high operating costs, leading analysts to project a large revenue shortfall for major AI firms. Companies such as OpenAI are incurring substantial expenses per user query and are exploring advertising as a potential revenue source, though its effectiveness remains uncertain. Ongoing copyright disputes and licensing costs further threaten the profitability of generative‑AI ventures.
- ▪Current estimates suggest big AI firms face an $800 billion revenue shortfall.
- ▪Productivity gains from generative AI have been minimal and are largely confined to programmers and copywriters.
- ▪OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that even paid‑pro accounts lose money because each ChatGPT query costs the company millions.
- ▪OpenAI is considering adding advertisements to ChatGPT, but it is unclear whether ad revenue will offset the massive computing expenses.
- ▪Copyright lawsuits and costly licensing agreements are creating additional financial liabilities for AI startups.
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| Original publisher | The Conversation |
| Canonical URL | https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-might-end-up-being-worthless-and-that-could-be-a-good-thing-266046 |
| Publication time | Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:50:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-08T06:27:30.161Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-08T06:27:30.161Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ZoGo-j5Kq7lC |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cell phone with an image on a computer monitor generated by ChatGPT’s Dall-E text-to-image model in 2023 in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer) Generative AI might end up being worthless — and that could be a good thing Published: September 28, 2025 1:03pm EDT https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-might-end-up-being-worthless-and-that-could-be-a-good-thing-266046 https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-might-end-up-being-worthless-and-that-could-be-a-good-thing-266046 Link copied Share article Share article Copy link Email Bluesky Facebook WhatsApp Messenger LinkedIn X (Twitter) Print article In the rush to cash in on the generative artificial intelligence gold rush, one possible outcome of AI’s future rarely gets discussed: what if the technology…
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