> It's not free if you have paying clients. No early stage start-up has revenues covering their expenses. But in fact you're right, it's not even “free”, it's

> It's not free if you have paying clients. No early stage start-up has revenues covering their expenses. But in fact you're right, it's not even “free”, it's “investor-subsidized” market research. > You're still doing market research for OpenAI. Just because you aren't using their model doesn't mean they can't copy your UX. Prompts are not viable trade secrets after all. Prompt aren't viable trade secret, but fine-tuning datasets and strategies, customer data[1], customer habits, user feedback, etc. are. And if you're using OpenAI, you're giving all that to them. Also, given their positioning, they cannot address any use-case that involve deploying your model inside your customer's infrastructure, so this kind of market research is completely irrelevant for them. [1]: And don't get fooled by wordings saying that they don't train on customer data, they are still collecting much more info that what you'd like them to. For instance, even just knowing the context size that users like to work with in different scenario is a really interesting data for them, and you can be sure that they collect it and adapt to.