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Comment by bunnybomb2 | Hacker News Reader

I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?

Are they really that much in debt/trouble?

The difference between investors/users and new-investors/paying-users is so large and wide that I could both walk AND roll around on it.

What if they just forced everyone to pay $5 to use chatgpt? No free tier

(I have no MBA)

then every casual user would switch instantly to Gemini, or the most convenient alternative

You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!

(I have no MBA either)

At this point why forcing people to use the service, if you can forcefully extract these eyeballs and then sell them directly to advertisers in large enough jars?

This kills their sales funnel.

My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.

A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."

They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate

they raised a ton of money but they spend it almost as fast as they can raise it. in any case they need real revenue if they want to ipo

Most of OpenAI‘s users are using the free tier, and have little incentive to change that.

They lose billions a month

Each user costs them money

the investors want their money to make more money

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