How Investors Think AI Will Actually Make Money

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

You might say that the biggest AI startups are led by professionally unreliable narrators, who theorize about the future of their companies — and their industry, and humanity in general — with a variety of clear but sometimes conflicting biases. This can make it somewhat hard, from the outside, to figure out which vision investors are banking on, beyond a general fear of missing out: Mass labor automation? AI-assisted research? Mainstream...