”The company reports over 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, though only about 50 million of those are paid subscribers.”

With so many free models available the ai companies are going to struggle to convert active free users to paid.

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dtnewman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They won't try to. ChatGPT is already starting with ads, which is potentially far more profitable (as evidenced by the fact that the most profitable company of all time makes 90%+ of their revenue through ads).

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Barrin92 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>as evidenced by the fact that the most profitable company of all time makes 90%+ of their revenue through ads

the biggest reason for this is that the digital ad market is a duopoly (charitably a triopoly if you count Amazon in), if all of the LLM companies start to go into ads that's going to be a much more competitive market for ad buyers. It's not going to be so straight forward when both customers and merchants have ten different places to go.

Also not to forget that ChatGPT has zero moat, unlike social Facebook and Google.

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quantumwannabe 4 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s why I don’t understand why Google’s stock has gone up so much recently. They already have maximum market share of digital ads; they can only lose share to competitors like OpenAI. The only way they can make more money is through paid subscriptions.

	▲	Shitty-kitty 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When buying something thru an ad they share the commission. With A.I, they keep the commision.

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JimTheMan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

None of the free models offer anything even remotely close to the output you can get on a relatively inexpensive model.

I think that AI is going to become just another utility people pay to stay relevant. Same as their internet, electricity or gas.

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9eLeven 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sonnet 4.6 is free and works really well for coding for me from just pasting `tree` and `cat` output directly in the chat window on claude.ai

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nemomarx 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Will they do it at utility / commodity prices though, or the inflated costs we see now?

	▲	JimTheMan 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's a good question. I think there's an assumption that current costs, which are high, will remain high. Most of that seems to be going to model development, rather than model operation, which is the product we all use. To me the most likely option will be, that development slows and prices rise somewhat, as they can't keep burning cash forever. But I'm willing to pay a little bit more, considering how powerful the tool is.

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shimman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The free models are good enough for any work (very little) that benefits from LLMs.

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GHanku 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> another utility people pay to stay relevant

I'm guessing that might be so in certain professions, but I would expect the employer to pay for that. For the rest of us, it seems unlikely. At least for me, I don't have a need of a device to generate text for me. And I bet most people are are in the same boat as me.

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whalesalad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Crazy that they have 50 _million_ paying subscribers and are still losing money.