OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministers' Meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that artificial intelligence will lead to the largest wave of entrepreneurship and small business generation seen in the commercial world.

He stated that those who previously lacked capital, could not afford experts, or struggled with new sciences or complex supply chains can now succeed with AI. He mentioned that while regulatory paths may differ across countries, the necessity to "must use" AI is non-negotiable, as economic growth and national income are too significant to ignore. He described this as putting intelligence and education in a bottle and expressed a willingness to promote the entire industry rather than just his company.

He also outlined future usage prospects: in a few years, token consumption could reach hundreds of billions, with the highest users potentially reaching trillions. The meeting was hosted by the U.S. and targeted G20 members. Altman cited the fact that in 2023, people used the still immature ChatGPT to support businesses that would not have been possible otherwise as evidence that the boom has already begun.

This statement is a projection, not a completed global trade statistic. Computing power, electricity, and regulation still pose hard constraints. OpenAI itself is still in a high-investment expansion phase, with its business model extending from subscriptions to enterprise and transaction gateways.

Writing the necessity for national adoption as "non-negotiable" directly connects model capabilities to industrial policy discussions. The audience at the venue was ministers rather than developers, within the G20 framework.

In market mechanisms, the buyers are governments seeking new enterprises and tax bases in their countries, while the sellers are platforms providing models and cloud computing power. The driving forces are the overlapping of policy windows and capacity competitions. Funding flows from sovereign and corporate budgets to data centers, chips, and application layers. Beneficiaries are U.S. companies that can package intelligence as exportable tools, while those under pressure are economies with insufficient computing power or those that choose to remain closed, as well as traditional intermediary positions replaced by automation.

Source: Public Information