> What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's?

The advertiser based business model for those companies makes your question/thought process here problematic for me. Historically speaking Google and "Meta" (Facebook) were primarily advertising provider companies. They provided billboards (space and time on the web page in front of an end-user) to people who were willing to buy tht space and time on the billboard. The "free access" end-users would always end up seeing said billboards, which is how they ended up "paying" for the service.

So most of Meta/Google end-users were "paying" users. They were being subsidised by the advertising customers paying for the end-users (who were forced to view adverts). The end-users paid with interruption to the service by an advert. [0]

In that context it feels a little like you're comparing apples to dave's left foot, as OpenAI hasn't had that with advertising ............ historically [1].

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[0]: yes ad-blockers, yes more diverse revenue income streams over the years like with phones, yes this is simplified yadayada

[1]: excluding government etc. ~bailouts~ investments as not the same as advertising subsidies, but you could argue it's doing the same thing

Yes -- but both Google and Meta didn't start off as an advertising company - they started off providing a service a lot of people liked, and then eventually added ads to it. My assumption (somewhat implicit, admittedly) is that there's no reason OpenAI couldn't do the same. I can understand why that might be controversial, though.

But honestly, if OpenAI can't figure out ads given all their data and ability, they deserve to fail. :P