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Comment by dust42 | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI has 800,000,000 weekly users but only 20,000,000 are paying while 780,000,000 are free riding. Should they by accident under provision then they could simply remove the freebee and raise the prices for the paying clients. But that is not what they want.

IMHO the investors are betting on a winner-takes-it-all market and that some magic AGI will be coming out of OpenAI or Anthropic.

The questions are:

How much money can they make by integrating advertising and/or selling user profiles?

What is the model competition going to be?

What is the future AI hardware going to be - TPUs, ASICs?

Will more people have powerful laptops/desktops to run a mid-sized models locally and be happy with it?

The internet didn't stop after the dotcom crash and the AI wont stop either should there be a market correction.

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>OpenAI has 800,000,000 weekly users but only 20,000,000 are paying while 780,000,000 are free riding.

By itself, this doesn't tell us much.

The more interesting metric would be token use comparison across free users, paid users, API use, and Azure/Bedrock.

I'm not sure if these numbers are available anywhere. It's very possible B2B use could be a much bigger market than direct B2C (and the free users are currently providing value in terms of training data).

> How much money can they make by integrating advertising and/or selling user profiles?

I would say if executed well the revenue per user could be at least an order of magnitude more than Google search ads as the ads could be much more convincing and the information density is higher in chat.

If OpenAi starts charging money for it, I will stop using it..

800M people are not using chatGPT every week. Be a little less credulous.

I just thought about it, and honestly, from my surroundings of people aged 12-70s, across multiple continents, I can’t think of anyone who isn’t using some sort of LLM once a week.

American software engineer here, and I have only used LLM tools ~3 dozen times: tried at work a few times, and been unimpressed/actively frustrated; a few times to ask questions I would be normally survey blog posts about (social/lifestyle things); and the rest has been generating images with my kids.

But currently, aside from generating "creative media", I'd say I'm pretty much opposed to LLM tools. They have yet to demonstrate any value to me at work or with respect to the areas of research I am interested in, and given the kind of statistical mechanism that they are, I do not believe they are capable of doing so.

> aside from generating "creative media"

Interesting take, because I'm the opposite of it. My biggest use case is getting into a completely new topic, as it's the most frictionless starting point for most of the queries. Then I look around based on the rudimentary knowledge that I can gather from LLMs. However, I'm completely opposed to any sort of creative media created by LLMs and try to avoid it as much as I can (music, images, and etc.).

Also, it has become the natural workflow for me to throw bunch secondary priority work stuff to Claude and let it do its things, while I focus on the important stuff.

My point is, everyone finds a way to use it. Some are opposed to specific things, others are using other parts.

These takes feel like a failure compared to my daily usage, which is literally non-stop for ten hours a day. Want to construct a niche jq, curl, or find linux command? Can't remember the parameters for a function? Don't want to leave your terminal to search for something? ctrl+I and type in readable english.

I wonder if this is counting the "AI Summary" that is gratuitously included in a standard web search now?

That's the only AI I use anywhere near weekly. I have tried claude a few times, it was useless at helping me with my questions. I haven't really been back.

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