a16z Partner: LLM-type products have the potential to become disruptors in the search business

Golden Finance reported that a16z general partner Andrew Chen discussed the business potential of ChatGPT on social media. Chen pointed out that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has reached an astonishing scale of over 200 million users per week in just a few years. He raised several thought-provoking questions: Has anyone analyzed the average search frequency and single display revenue of ChatGPT? If a monetization model similar to Google’s advertising is adopted, how might businesses like ChatGPT perform? Chen believes that some products with similar user bases (such as the Firefox browser) had annual revenues close to $1 billion at their peak. If ChatGPT is offered for free, its monthly active users could increase significantly. He said that large language model (LLM) products have the potential to disrupt the search business and may have considerable monetization capabilities. Chen also pointed out that it is worth considering whether LLM will increase the overall search volume, or just grab market share from existing search engines like Google.