New Delhi, April 17 -- Sam Altman, the chief executive officer (CEO) of OpenAI, said at a finance conference in October 2023 that he and his "CEO friends" were running a betting pool on when the first one-person billion-dollar company would be created thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

He didn't divulge their identities nor their precise predictions. But if anyone's bet fell within two years of that day, they lost. Those with a longer time horizon might still like the odds of it happening sooner rather than later. The trajectory is clear: unicorn headcounts are shrinking, according to new data from PitchBook.

Yet whether this can be attributed to the vaunted productivity gains of AI is a more complex question. The sales pitch is th...