There's a kind of reverse money making thing going on with ChatGPT that I haven't seen articulated.
Never ever forget that every time you use chatGPT, you are making chatGPT smarter.
Right now, chatGPT is not priced for how much value it provides to you; it's priced based on how much value you provide to them. Because every time you use it, you are providing high-quality human feedback to the model.
It has already read the entire internet. So where does it get more content? For that, it needs you to use it. So why isn't it free? Better yet, why aren't they paying you?
Having you pay has several advantages:
I) By paying for it, you prove to openAI that the data you provide is more valuable, simply by the fact that you are willing to pay. Sort of like the counter-intuitive fact that if you pay to avoid ads, you are a much juicier target to advertisers. Not paying is valuable -- you're still a human after all -- but paying is even more valuable, because the people who pay provide qualitatively different data. They provide the type of data that has economic value. You can tell, because they pay! So this helps you improve your model far more than just giving it away for free, because you can treat human feedback from paying customers differently than human feedback from non-payers.
II) By paying for it, there is a paper trail that allows openAI to audit their customers. For spam or malicious use purposes. This helps OpenAI fulfill their safety mission.
III) By paying for it, you offset their inference costs.
I is HUGE. It's more important than II (which is, itself, more significant than III). For any AI company, their competitive advantage lies in the dataset. What is the dataset for a chat model? The humans who use it!
Engineering is important, and what OpenAI has shipped is obviously impressive. But it's not like nobody is capable of making an LLM inference frontend. The model? They may have some tricks that they're doing, but at this point, everyone knows how to make a GPT (bard, llama, ...)
Feedback is THE advantage that OpenAI has over everyone else. Feedback is THE advantage that MidJourney has over StableDiffusion. Feedback is THE most important differentiator for any company in this space. Those who have high quality human feedback (paying users) will win. What's the best way to get high-quality feedback? Make people pay.