Tourism and travel is 10% of global GDP, or about 10 trillion dollars. And it's not the only sector where translation between languages is a benefit. However, I am not sure that the trillions of dollars of value from LLM translation in the coming few years will translate into trillions of dollars of income for the AI companies.
Commercial grade translation between dozens of languages would take enormous amounts of disk space.
But we'll see. Text editing tools are included on all digital devices, yet companies pay for commercial solutions like MS Office. Cameras and basic image editing tools are included on all smart phones, yet there are millions of advertising agencies around the world. And so on.
LLM frontier companies are more akin to infrastructure like chips and airplanes and the internet than applications built on top of it. There will be products built on top of them that generate revenue.
eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that. In the case of frontier companies the moat is even smaller with dozens of players competing. LLMs will become a low-cost commodity. You meanwhile can make billions building applications using them though.
