In that reality they can drama all they want now, nobody really cares anymore.
Imagine when OpenAI has their 23&me moment in 2050 and a judge rules all your queries since 2023 are for sale to the highest bidder.
The use-cases for LLMs seem unexplored beyond basic chatbot stuff.
I would think entire industries could reform around having an LLM as a first pass on data, with software and/or human error checking at significant cost reduction over previous strategies.
The software behind Facebook as an app wasn't particularly unique, yet it eclipsed the competition. The same could be said for Google. Google didn't even have any real lock-in for years, but it still owned consumer mindshare, which gave it the vast majority of search traffic, which made it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
ChatGPT is in a similar position. The fact of the matter is, the average person knows what ChatGPT is and how to use it. Many hundreds of millions of normal people use ChatGPT weekly, and the number is growing. The same cannot be said of Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, or the various open source models.
And the gap is massive. It's not even close. It's like 400M weekly ChatGPT actives vs 30M monthly Claude actives.
So yes, the average Hacker News contrarian who thinks their tiny bubble represents the entire world might think that "nobody cares," in part because nobody they know cares, and in part because that assessment aligns with their own personal biases and desires.
But anyone who's been paying attention to how internet behemoths grow for the past 30 years certainly still cares about OpenAI.
I remember the search engines of the time and Google was a quantum leap.
ChatGPT is even more revolutionary but whatever Google is now, once it was brilliant.
This means that they're stuck with more expensive monetization plans to cover their free tier loss leader, hence the $200/mo Pro subscription. And once you're charging that kind of price to try to make ends meet, you're ripe for disruption no matter how good your name recognition.
You would think existing megacaps would be all over any new market if there is a profit to be made. Facebook's competition was basically other startups. That said, Google seems to be dropping the ball almost as bad as Yahoo.
But sure, if there's absolutely no way to make money from consumer AI then that will also make it hard for oai to win the game.
But it turns out that with enough funding, you can prioritize growth over profit for a very long time. And with enough growth, you can raise unlimited funds before you get to that point. And going this route is smart and effective if you want to get to a $1T valuation in under a decade.
So yeah, ChatGPT's margins might not be as high as Facebook's. But it doesn't really matter at this point, they're in growth mode. What matters is whether or not they'll be able to turn their lead and their mindshare into massive profits eventually, and while we can speculate on that, it's far too early to definitively say the answer is no.
First, queries from users can be combined and fed into servers in batches so that hundreds of queries can be concurrently served by a single node. Second, people aren't on and asking ChatGPT questions every second of every day. I'd guess the median is more like ~single digit queries per day. Assuming average response length of 100 tokens and throughput of 50 tok/s at batch size 50, that's 25 QPS or 2.1M queries per day, or 420k users served per node at 5 queries per user per day.
Now, a single 8xH100 node is a lot more expensive than $5/mo, so you're directionally correct there, but I'd wager you can segment your market aggressively and serve heavily distilled/quantized models (small enough to fit onto single commodity GPUs, or even CPUs) to your free tier. Finally, this is subject to Huang's Law, which says every 2 years the cost of the same performance will more than halve.
This isn't correct at all. Google's search engine was an important stepping stone to the behavior that actually gave them lock-in, which was an aggressive, anti-competitive and generally illegal effort to monopolize the market for online advertising through acquisitions and boxing out competitors.
It really was only possible because for reasons we decided to completely stop enforcing antitrust laws for a decade or two.