Noting that he observes markets with the eye of a "cultural anthropologist," veteran venture capitalist Chi-Hua Chien announced Tuesday that the greatest victors of the generative AI revolution will be established B2B companies successfully charging a 400% markup for basic arithmetic.
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Venture capitalist Chi-Hua Chien, known for spotting the Facebook wave early, told investors this week that the era of building foundational language models is over. Instead, he predicted the true windfall of the AI boom will go to legacy software providers who realize they can simply relabel 15-year-old database queries as "machine learning insights" and triple their enterprise subscription fees.
According to Chien's thesis, the companies that ultimately dominate the space won't actually sell artificial intelligence, but rather the psychological comfort of purchasing an artificial intelligence license for a product that still quietly runs on a standard SQL server.
The profound anthropological truth of the modern enterprise is that a chief technology officer will pay $40 a month for basic cloud storage, but they will happily pay $400 a month for the exact same storage if the invoice calls it a neural-net data lake.
Shares of enterprise giants like Oracle and Salesforce ticked upward following the memo, as markets responded favorably to the realization that their most profitable AI strategy might be keeping their 2018 supply-chain dashboards exactly the same while updating the font on their marketing materials to look slightly more futuristic.
"Thinking like an anthropologist means understanding fundamental human behavior," Chien reportedly wrote in a follow-up note to limited partners. "And human behavior dictates that Fortune 500 executives desperately want to tell their shareholders they bought AI, while desperately hoping the product they actually bought is just a reliable spreadsheet that won't write racist poetry to their largest vendors."