It's an insane number considering how little they monetize it. Free users are not even seeing ads rn and they already have 4.5B revenue. I think 100B by 2029 is a very conservative number.
If they junk up the consumer experience too much users can just switch to Google who, obviously is the behemoth in the ad space.
Obviously there's money to be made there but they have no moat - I feel like despite the first mover advantage their position is tenuous and ads risk disrupting that edge with consumers.
I am not.
> The free tier is enough for me to use it as a helper at work, and I'd probably pay for it tomorrow if they cut off the free tier.
You are sort of proving the point that thid isn't crazy. They want to be the dealer of choice and they can afford to give you the hit now for free.
Why would you pay if you can use a competitor for free?
ChatGPT is far and away my favorite for quick questions you'd ask the genius coworker next to you. For me, nothing else even comes close wrt speed and accuracy. So for that, I'd gladly pay.
Don't get me wrong, Claude is a marvel and Deepseek punches above its weight, but neither compare with stuff like 'write me a sql query that does these 30 things as efficiently as possible.'. ChatGPT will output an answer with explanations for each line by the time Claude inevitably times out...again.
edit: believe it was Fidji Simo et al.
https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/openai...