If I read the Apollo analysis (the one that claimed that the Fortune 500 minus the Magnificent Seven are not seeing productivity gains from AI) it's actually slightly misleading. It's looking at per-employee productivity. For the Fortune 493, that's been flat, for the Magnificent 7 it's been increasing.

The first missing thing is that most of the M7's revenue comes from things with high switching costs. It's a very long trailing indicator of their actual output. They can fail to improve their products for a relatively long time and not see a decline in revenue, but for all of this time they become increasingly vulnerable to market disruption and someone suddenly taking a big chunk of their market share.

The second missing thing is that these companies, whose revenue is more-or --less guaranteed over the short term, have all done significant headcount reduction over the periods that they looked at, partly trimming ZIRP and COVID over-exuberant hiring, partly to free up cashflow for investing in datacentres and GPUs. Reducing the number of employees while keeping the output roughly constant will eventually cause a decline in revenue but, in the short term, will show more revenue per head: their metric.

Finally, those revenue numbers are propped up by setting cash on fire. A company that spends $100B on capex for things that fail after 3-5 years, and uses it to drive a $10B revenue increase will see a revenue-per-capita increase, but is not in any way a sustainable business model.

All of these mean that their metrics look much better for the M7 than their fundamentals would reflect. And those are the companies that they're saying are the only winners.