I wonder if what we'll see instead is smaller startups replicating whole consumer value chains and replacing the whole industry at once.

On the B2B level, business is basically relationships, because you want to have a person that you trust who you can go to with any concerns about your multimillion-$ relationship. The relationships are the hard part, which is why the biggest department in any enterprise startup is sales, and requests from the salespeople usually dominate the feature roadmap.

But on a consumer level, most companies invest precisely zero in relationships, because it is far too expensive to build a relationship with 300M consumers who each pay you $50/year. The parts that matter are a.) building a brand image b.) delivering a "good enough" product and c.) doing it cheaply.

AI does extremely well at all 3 of those. It's great at generating fictitious but plausible-sounding content that makes you feel great about yourself. It's a passable approximation at explaining how things are made, enough that a small organization could probably deliver a good-enough product. And it replaces all of those pesky humans that require HR departments and legal employment contracts and sales relationships and customer service. A significant portion of the work in any industry is simply greasing the supply chain, making all those transactions that need to happen along the way happen. Vertically integrate and automate those and you could probably rebuild the industry in a much cheaper, more efficient way.

I think many people are thinking too small with AI, on the level of "how will this help me do a task?" or "how will this help my job?" or "how will this help improve my company by getting rid of jobs?" The real money is in "how will this revolutionize the industry by getting rid of all the other companies?" or even "how will this replace society so there is a fair playing field for new industries to get started?"