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OpenAI has close to 1 billion users which are mostly free users and will switch provider the moment OpenAI start charging them or adding ads. Which they will, a
by shaky-carrousel 10mo ago
OpenAI has close to 1 billion users which are mostly free users and will switch provider the moment OpenAI start charging them or adding ads. Which they will, as OpenAI themselves said they are losing money even with 200$ subs. So that amount of users is pretty meaningless.
- aurareturn 10mo agoGoogle search is free to use too. So is Instagram. Facebook. Whatsapp. All of these have ads. OpenAI says they're very profitable on inference.
- shaky-carrousel 10mo agoAll of these have ads. And none of these have an equal value alternative. OpenAI, Claude, Deepseek, Mistral, Gemini, are mostly the same to a regular user.
- aurareturn 10mo agoBing is mostly the same. Kagi is mostly the same. Yahoo, Yandex, etc. It's 2025. Hardly any difference. There were tens of search engines in the 90s and 2000s that were generally mostly the same. Yet, Google still won and owned nearly all search monetization. Search was even easier to switch. At least ChatGPT has memory. Most chat apps are the same as Whatsapp. All of them are free too. "Ask ChaGPT" is the equivalent to "google it" in 2025.
- shaky-carrousel 10mo agoHah, no, not by far. Bing, Yahoo, Yandex are way worse than Google. Saying anything different is delusional. The comparison with WhatsApp feels like trolling. WhatsApp has a network effect...
- array_key_first 10mo agoNo those are all significantly worse products, or at least were for a long time. I don't think OpenAI has anything close to a moat. They don't even have a short fence.
- KaiserPro 10mo ago> OpenAI says they're very profitable on inference. Great, but they need to burn billions on advertising, freemeium, and mostly R&D for new models.
- aurareturn 10mo agoSo do all their competitors.
- rurp 10mo agoGoogle and Microsoft have immense money printing machines. They can lose many billions of dollars for years and be fine as a business. OpenAI, not so much.
- aurareturn 10mo agoSure OpenAI can. They are the most well funded private company in history. Everyone wants to invest in them. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft are public companies and their stock can drop and their shareholders can force them to exit.