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Comment by martinflack | Hacker News Reader

You say that, but Google Search is still free after decades, whereas you can pay ChatGPT $20/mo for a membership right now.

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I say it because I don't think enough people are going to pay for LLM/GPT services for investors to get what they consider a sufficient return on their investment. I'm pretty sure no "pure AI" company is anywhere near a track to profitability as of yet, and there is only so long that VCs will be comfortable with that. (And while there might be AI "true believers" who don't much care about the profit horizon, ask OpenAI's board how that worked out for them last week.)

If only Google offered the option to pay in return for no ads and other junk. But they would say it does not scale; they can't count that low. So people are flocking to chatGPT.

I suspect that by doing so they'd indicate just how much each user is worth to them in ads.

I suspect that folk who opted into this would be the ones getting lots of ads (hence the most valuable.)

If Google said "you can opt out for $99 a month" you'd freak out. But you're probably worth that (or more).

People aren't really flocking to ChatGPT though - not yet. Not at Google Scale. It's not like my mom will pay $20 a month when she just uses Google for free...

Given that I've moved to Kagi and chatGPT how much are they making off me now? They should have disrupted themselves when they had the chance.

Sure some are moving. There are always some moving. But despite the HN bubble effect its a tiny sample.

Plus folk moving now are folk who'll move back later when they get disgruntled there. (No disrespect.) First movers are not the loyal customer base. Movers gotta be moving..

(I say this as a general rule not making an assumption about you personally.)

It's like even everyone "left" Facebook for google+.

Person 1: "They figured out how much they could make off you and it was more than what you would pay."

Person 2: "Well, they pissed me off so I left completely and now they make nothing off of me."

Person 1: "They already knew you would move so they figured out they would make nothing off of you in the long run!"

Person 2: "..."

My churn would appear as a loss in their lifetime value model, so it would be detected by a long-term experiment. And I am reasonably confident they are performing long-term experiments for such things.

On the other hand, Google does exactly that with YouTube?

Good on them! I meant for search. They have other paid services.

Partially. They still harvest your data from YouTube to try to manipulate you with ads on other websites.

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