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Comment by wtfHN26 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that OpenAI talking about developing AGI.

But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.

For all the advancement we have made in technology from the 90s web, social networks, mobile apps, ,AI Chat bots - the business model that almost all of them will eventually resort to is Ads.

We need some new breakthroughs in monetization side of things.

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It's happening because 99% of their use cases don't require AGI to answer. It's just regurgitating web content. Which is lucky, because they don't have AGI anyway.

The business case is the same: minimize your costs. All they have to do is dumb down the model so its cheaper to run.

Maybe they charge a price that covers the cost of the service + a little profit.

this is exactly what they do, if you pay for your account, you don't see ads

That doesn't scale in the world of capitalism. Because you need to increase revenues year after year and there are only so many people willing to pay. So you either keep increasing the price (and that has a limit) or you find other ways to monetize and the current meta seems to be pay + ads.

As of November 2025, no ChatGPT tier is profitable, not even the $200 a month one:

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-lose...

That's what a business would do if they were getting a loan from the bank instead of ravenous VCs that will pay their legal fees and settlements when theyget busted for training their models on copyrighted content, as long as they IPO within a reasonable timeframe.

> But the only revenue model that they still can come up with is Ads.

What are you talking about? They have paid plans and a pay-per-token API like everyone else.

The ads are for the free tier and the new $8/month low-cost plan.

I mean thats the problem, right? Nobody has a better idea. If you do, then use it and win the AI war.

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