But the ad-supported tier isn't free either.

I don't think the difference for a 12yo is $7.99 for standard with ads vs $17.99 for standard.

It's $0 vs any non-zero dollar amount.

Maybe you shouldn't be. The ad-hating paranoid HN user is not representative of the general population. Probably the exact opposite, in fact.

My wife and mother love ads, they are always on the hunt for the latest good deals and love discount shopping. When I tried to remove the ads on their computers or in the postal mail, they protested. I think they are far more representative of the general population.

I think what you're missing here is most OpenAI users aren't technical in the slightest. They have massive and growing adoption from the general public. The general public buy services, not roll their own for free, and they even prefer to buy service from the brand they know over getting cheaper service from somebody else.

H200 rental prices currently start at $2.35 per hour, or $1700 per month. Even if you just rent for 4h a day, the $200 subscription is still quite a bit cheaper. And I'm not even sure that the highest-quality open models run on a single H200.

Their cheapest tier is free, they lose money on that of course. And spend a lot of money training new models.

Anthropic has said they have made money on every model so far, just not enough to train the next model, which so far has been much more costly to train every generation. At some point they will probably train an unprofitable model if training costs keep rising dramatically.

OpenAI burns more money on their free tier and might be spending more money building out for future training (I don't know if they do or not) but they both make money on their $20 subscriptions for sure. Inference is very cheap.

nonsense for the public. they are Amazon, basically. they take the loss so the overall ecosystem ( x'D like with crypto ) can gain massively, onboard all kinds of target noobs, sry, groups, brutally prime users, discourage as many non-AI processes as possible and steer all industries towards replacing even those processes with AI that are not worth being replaced with AI, like writing and art.

of course there are a lot valuable use cases. irrelevant in the context, though.

the productivity boosts in the creative industries will additionally lower the standards and split the public even further, ensuring that if you want quality, you have to fuck over as many people as possible, so that you can afford quality ( and an ad-free life, of course. if you want a peaceful peripheral, pay up. it's extortion 404, 101 - 303 already successfully implemented on social media, TV and the radio ).

they don't lose. they make TONS OF FAKE MONEY everywhere in the, again, cough,

"ecosystem".

It's important to understand the Amazon part. The amount of damaging mechanisms that platform anchored in workers, jobbers, business people and consumers is brutal.

All those mechanisms converge in more, easy money and a quicker deterioration of local environments, leading to worse health and more business opportunities that aim at mitigating damage; almost entirely in vain, of course, because the worst is accelerating much quicker; it's easier money.

At the same time peoples psychology is primed for bad business practices, literally making people dumber and lowering their standards to make them easier targets. Don't look at the bottom to see this, look at the upper middle class and above.

It's a massive net loss for civilization and humanity. A brutal net negative impact overall.

I didn't say they wouldn't, I'm more skeptical about whether it's a sustainable business model. I mean sure gas stations and airports have ads, but nobody gives you gas or airfare in exchange for watching ads. It's a fraction of the revenue needed.

My point is that someone starting an airline can't get away with hopes and dreams about making bank on ads.