I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Between the burn rate and the lawsuits and the need for more compute, there's a ton of pressure on them right now.
(typically the ~entire general public chooses the ads: see how ad-supported products beat paid in virtually every generation of tech)
Why do random HN commenters have to come up with a business model for free LLM usage? If LLMs are so great, they should not need to offer a free tier at all. Surely word of mouth would make people line up around the block to snatch one of those highly coveted subscriptions.
But word of mouth can also say "this other provider (eg. google) is free and allows more usage" as the market matures. Google has a bigger pocketbook due to their ad income.