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It reminds me what I said to somebody recently: All my friends and family are using the free version of ChatGPT or something similar. They will never pay (alth
by therealmarv 1y ago
It reminds me what I said to somebody recently:
All my friends and family are using the free version of ChatGPT or something similar. They will never pay (although they have enough money to do so).
Even in my very narrow subjective circles it does not add up.
Who pays for AI and how? And when in the future?
- delichon 1y agoSomeone is paying. OpenAI revenue was $4.3 billion in the first half of this year.
- lm28469 1y agoYou forgot that part: > The artificial intelligence firm reported a net loss of US$13.5 billion during the same period If you sell gold at $10 a gram you'll also make billions in revenues.
- boxed 1y agoReminds me of the Icelandic investment banks during the height of the financial bubble. They basically did this.
- dist-epoch 1y agoThat loss includes the costs to train the future models. Like Dario/Anthropic said, every model is highly profitable on it's own, but the company keeps losing money because they always train the next model (which will be highly profitable on it's own).
- emp17344 1y agoBut even if you remove R&D costs, they’re still billions of dollars short of profitability. That’s not a small hurdle to overcome. And OpenAI has to continue to develop new models to remain relevant.
- sseagull 1y agoOpenAI "spent" more on sales/marketing and equity compensation than that: "Other significant costs included $2 billion spent on sales and marketing, nearly doubling what OpenAI spent on sales and marketing in all of 2024. Though not a cash expense, OpenAI also spent nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based equity compensation in the first six months of 2025" ("spent" because the equity is not cash-based) From https://archive.is/vIrUZ https://archive.is/vIrUZ
- cyberpunk 1y agoHow the fuck does anyone spend 2 billion dollars on sales and marketing. I’ve seen the odd ad for openai but thag number seems completely bananas.
- jstummbillig 1y agoPeople are always so fidegty about this stuff — for super understandable reason, to be clear. People not much smarter than anyone else try to reason about numbers that are hard to reason about. But unless you have the actual numbers, I always find it a bit strange to assume that all people involved, who deal with large amounts of money all the time, lost all ability to reason about this thing. Because right now that would mean at minimum: All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors. Of course, there is a lot of uncertainty — which, again, is nothing new for these people. It's just a weird thing to assume that.
- lm28469 1y ago> All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors. It's like asking big pharma if medicine should be less regulated, "all the experts agree", well yeah, their paycheck depends on it. Same reason no one at meta tells Zuck that his metaverse is dogshit and no one wants it, they still spent billions on it. You can't assume everyone is that dumb, but you certainly can assume that the yes men won't say anything other than "yes".
- jstummbillig 1y agoAgain, this is not an argument. I am asking: Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong? This is not rhetorical question, I am not looking for a rhetorical answer. What is every important decision maker at all these companies missing? The point is not that they could not all be wrong, they absolutely could. The point is: Make a good argument. Being a general doomsayer when things get very risky might absolutely make you right but it's not a interesting argument – or any argument at all.
- coldpie 1y ago> Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong? Because of historical precedent. Bitcoin was the future until it wasn't. NFTs and blockchain were the future until they weren't. The Metaverse was the future until it wasn't. Theranos was the future until it wasn't. I don't think LLMs are quite on the same level as those scams, but they smell pretty similar: they're being pushed primarily by sales- and con-men eager to get in on the scam before it collapses. The amount being spent on LLMs right now is way out of line with the usefulness we are getting out of them. Once the bubble pops and the tools have a profitability requirement introduced, I think they'll just be quietly integrated into a few places that make sense and otherwise abandoned. This isn't the world-changing tech it's being made out to be.
- uniq7 1y agoThey will eventually get ads mixed in the responses.
- lm28469 1y agoI use it professionally and I rotate 5 free accounts on all platforms, money doesn't have any values anymore, people will spend $100 a month on LLMs and another $100 on streaming services, that's like half of my household monthly food budget
- freetonik 1y agoI'm sure providers will find ways of incorporating the fees into e.g. ISP or mobile network fees so that users end up paying in a less obvious, less direct way.
- ACCount37 1y agoThe cost of serving an "average" user would only fall over time. Most users rarely make the kind of query that would benefit a lot from the capabilities of GPT-6.1e Pro Thinking With Advanced Reasoning, Extended Context And Black Magic Cross Context Adaptive Learning Voodoo That We Didn't Want To Release To Public Yet But If We Didn't Then Anthropic Would Surely Do It First. And the users that have this kind of demanding workloads? They'd be much more willing to pay up for the bleeding edge performance.
- ____mr____ 1y agoAI companies don't have a plausible path to productivity because they are trying to create a market while model is not scalable unlike different services that have done this in the past. (DoorDash, Uber, Neftlix etc.)
- ninetyninenine 1y agoI pay. Like if they're using it to talk then they won't pay. But I use it for work.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- m-hodges 1y agoPeople said the same thing about Facebook. The answer: advertisers.
- dist-epoch 1y ago> They will never pay Of course they will, once they start falling behind not having access to it. People said the same things about computers (they are just for nerds, I have no use for spreadsheets) and smartphones (I don't need apps/big screen, I just want to make/receive calls).
- spyckie2 1y agoThe bet is that people will pay for services which are under the hood being done by AI.
- 9rx 1y ago> Who pays for AI [...]? Venture capital funding adding AI features to fart apps.
- tempodox 1y ago> Who pays for AI and how? The same way the rest of webshit is paid for: ads. And ads embedded in LLM output will be impervious to ad blockers.