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.

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aurareturn 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Google search is free to use too. So is Instagram. Facebook. Whatsapp. All of these have ads.

OpenAI says they're very profitable on inference.

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KaiserPro 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So do all their competitors.

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shaky-carrousel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All 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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bing 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.