Sam Altman is a bullshitter. A liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it. A bullshitter doesn't care if something is true of false, and is just using rhetoric to convince you of something.

I don't doubt that it is true that they lose money on a 200 subscription because the people that pay 200 are probably the same people that will max out usage over time, no matter how wasteful. Sam Altman was framing it in a way to say "it's so useful people are using it more than we expected!", because he is interested in having everyone believe that LLMs are the future. It's all bullshit.

If I had to guess, they probably at least break even on API calls, and might make some money on lower tier subscriptions (i.e.: people that pay for it but use it sparingly on a as-need basis).

But that is boring, and hints at limited usability. Investors won't want to burn hundreds of billions in cash for something that may be sort of useful. They want destructive amounts of money in return.

The mentioned didn't require the sort of R&D AI does.

And this isn't something that will go away anytime soon. OpenAI for instance is projecting that in 2030 R&D will still account for 45% of their costs. They think they'll be profitable by that time, or so they're telling investors.

And none of those companies lost anywhere near as much money as "AI" is currently, and will continue to do. Just because they become profitable 5 or 10 or 15 years from now does not mean that they will be able to pay off the hundreds of billions to trillions spent getting them there anytime soon. And for what? AI slop ruining every fucking thing while heating the planet ever faster? Sounds like a great future we have ahead with "AI".