I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
This is literally the business model of most VC and public companies.