how many paying ones?

If OpenAI wants to generate revenue by charging its users for services, this is a big deal. If, on the other hand, OpenAI wants to become like Meta or TikTok, then they don’t actually need to charge these users.

But latter model will not be easy. TikTok does very well, but their revenues are not enough to justify OpenAI’s expenses. Meta is very, very good at capturing value from users’ attention, but they are not going to give this market up without a fight. In general, I’m somewhat suspicious that the total addressable market for attention is not infinitely scalable. At the end of the day, the money comes from marketing budgets, and those marketing budgets scale with the amount of stuff being sold and, much less strongly, with the efficacy of the marketing.

There’s a theory that there is money to be made having at AI-like system that will actually buy things for the end user. Amazon tried very hard to make this work (in the Alexa division) and basically gave up. I’m not finding my breath for OpenAI, or for anyone else, to pull this off any time soon.