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Comment by jocaal | Hacker News Reader

> I'm a paid subscriber of open AI, but it's really just a matter of convenience. The app is really good, and I find it's really great for double checking some of my math.

That right there is why they are valuable. Most people are absolutely incompetent when it comes to IT. That's why no one you meet in the real world uses ad blockers. OpenAI secured their position in the mind share of the masses. All they had to do to become the next google was find a way to force ads down the throats of their users. Instead they opted for the inflated bubble and scam investors strategy. Rookie mistake.

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The mind share openAI has is next to none.

The reality is they're a paid service, and even if they 10x their prices they're still in the red.

Consumers do actually care about price. They will easily, and quickly, move to a cheaper service. There's no lock in here.

There is talk of 800 million weekly users or whatever. But real question to me is how much actual disposable income they have or willingness to spend it on expensive AI subscription.

Not true, for the non tech crowd ChatGPT is the AI. There are a few people using Grok or Gemini, fewer outside the coding crowd would know anthropic

This is just not true. They don't even know what an OpenAI is, they just know what chat is. It's a chat window.

You make another chat window and you're golden.

Ok make one and show us your market share. I’m talking about mind share and ubiquitous. Who’s going to your talk.ai no one.

I said everyone knows ChatGPT you responded about OpenAI

It's a chat window, it's already ubiquitous.

The downside to making a zero-effort product is that consumers can easily just switch to something else with no thought. ChatGPT has literally nothing that makes it unique.

Almost a 3rd of users use ad blockers

https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

And just because you have users doesn’t mean it’s easy to create a profitable ad business - ask Yahoo. Besides we still don’t know how much inference costs. But there is a real marginal costs that wouldn’t be covered by ads. They definitely couldn’t make enough on ads to cover their training costs and other costs.

And adding ads into the responses is _child's play_ find the ad with the most semantic similarity to the content in the context. Insert at the end of the response or every N responses with a convincing message that based on our discussion you might be interested in xyz.

For more subtle and slimier way of doing things, boost the relevance of brands and keywords, and when they are semantically similar to the most likely token, insert them into the response. Companies pay per impression.

When a guardrail blocks a response, play some political ad for a law and order candidate before delivering the rest of the message. I'm completely shocked nobody has offered free gpt use via an api supported by ad revenue yet.

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