The same advertising dollars powering the AI boom could be its undoing. Human Ventures Executive Chairman Joe Marchese warns that Google, Meta, and Amazon are essentially funding their own potential disruption, with OpenAI's latest browser launch accelerating what could become an existential crisis for the trillion-dollar ad tech ecosystem.
The irony is almost too perfect. OpenAI's new AI browser just launched, and the very companies whose business models it threatens are the ones writing the checks that make it possible. We're witnessing something unprecedented - tech giants funding what could become their own obsolescence.
Joe Marchese, Executive Chairman at Human Ventures, just laid out the paradox in stark terms through a CNBC op-ed. The numbers are staggering: a Harvard economist estimates that 92% of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 came from AI investment. But here's the kicker - most of that investment flows from advertising profits that AI itself could obliterate.
Google's search engine marketing remains "perhaps the greatest business model of all time," according to Marchese. Meta's engagement-driven advertising runs a close second, while Amazon's retail media network generates a disproportionate share of the e-commerce giant's profits. These three companies, worth trillions combined, derive most of their value from advertising. And they're all pouring those profits into AI infrastructure at "a level the world has not seen outside of War Time spending."
But AI doesn't just optimize these advertising models - it threatens to replace them entirely. "AI will, without question, change how people search (Google), shop (Amazon) and are entertained (Meta)," Marchese writes. Direct answers without web clicks. AI-assisted shopping that bypasses traditional discovery. Infinite personalized content that doesn't need algorithmic feeds.
The defensive nature of this spending becomes clear when you consider the attackers. While Google researchers wrote "Attention is All You Need" - the seminal paper that launched transformer-based AI - it was OpenAI and Microsoft that turned it into a competitive weapon. Neither depends heavily on advertising revenue, giving them freedom to disrupt without cannibalizing their own business.
