The better question is what if all LLM services stopped providing for free at all -- how many paid users would there then be?
Because 50 gigs is next to nothing, and you only need a rinky dink amount of compute to write files.
YouTube, on the other hand, is actually pretty expensive to operate. Takes a lot of storage to store videos, never mind handling uploads. But then streaming video? Man, the amount of bandwidth required for that makes file syncing look like nothing. I mean, how often does a single customer watch a YouTube video? And then, how often do people download files from Dropbox? It's orders of magnitude in difference.
But LLMs outshine both. They require stupid amounts of compute to run.
This is very similar to Uber which lost money for 14 years before becoming profitable, but with significantly more upside.
Investors see the growth, user stickiness and potential for the tech; and are throwing money to burn to be part of the winning team, which will turn on the money switch on that userbase down the line.
The biggest companies and investors in the planet aren't all bad at business.
You can if you're still growing. ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site on the planet yes, but it is still growing hundreds of millions of visits with every passing month.
They aren't turning a profit because they aren't monetizing the vast majority of subscribers in any way (not even ads). LLM inference is cheap enough for ads to be viable.