I think there is something to be said about the value of bad information. For example, pre ai, how might you come to the correct answer for something? You might dig into the underlying documentation or whatever "primary literature" exist for that thing and get the correct answer.

However, that was never very many people. Only the smart ones. Many would prefer to have shouted into the void at reddit/stackoverflow/quora/yahoo answers/forums/irc/whatever, to seek an "easy" answer that is probably not entirely correct if you bothered going right to the source of truth.

That represents a ton of money controlling that pipeline and selling expensive monthly subscriptions to people to use it. Even better if you can shoehorn yourself into the workplace, and get work to pay for it at a premium per user. Get people to come to rely on it and have no clue how to deal with anything without it.

It doesn't matter if it's any good. That isn't even the point. It just has to be the first thing people reach for and therefore available to every consumer and worker, a mandatory subscription most people now feel obliged to pay for.

This is why these companies are worth billions. Not for the utility, but from the money to be made off of the people who don't know any better.

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jaennaet 3 days ago | parent [-]

But the thing is that they aren't even making money; eg. OpenAI lost $11 billion in one quarter. Big LLMs are just so fantastically expensive to train and operate, and they ultimately really aren't as useful to eg businesses as they've been evangelised as so demand just hasn't picked up – plus the subscription plans are priced so low that most if not all "LLM operators" (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) apparently actually lose money on even the most expensive ones. They'd lose all their customers if the plans actually cost as much as they should.

Apropos to that, I wonder if OpenAI et al are losing money on API plans too, or if it's just the subscriptions.

Source for the OpenAI loss figure: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1...

Source for OpenAI losing money on their $200/mo sub: https://fortune.com/2025/01/07/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-pro...

	▲	asdff 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		To lose 11 billion means you have successfully convinced some people to give you 11 billion to lose. And money wasn't lost either. It was spent. It was used for things, making people richer and buying hardware, which also makes people richer.