this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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One way to interpret this is "ha, people consider AI worthless!"
However another way to interpret this is the same way users view everything on the web, from social media to journalism and media streaming: this should be free and they should use my data and advertise to me instead, consequences/enshittification be damned.
The key difference being that AI is a much, much more expensive product to deliver than anything else on the web. Even compared to streaming video content, AI is orders of magnitude higher in terms of its cost to deliver.
What this means is that providing AI on the model you're describing is impossible. You simply cannot pack in enough advertising to make ChatGPT profitable. You can't make enough from user data to be worth the operating costs.
AI fundamentally does not work as a "free" product. Users need to be willing to pony up serious amounts of money for it. OpenAI have straight up said that even their most expensive subscriber tier operates at a loss.
Maybe that would work, if you could sell it as a boutique product, something for only a very exclusive club of wealthy buyers. Only that model is also an immediate dead end, because the training costs to build a model are the same whether you make that model for 10 people or 10 billion, and those training costs are astronomical. To get any kind of return on investment these companies need to sell a very, very expensive product to a market that is far too narrow to support it.
There's no way to square this circle. Their bet was that AI would be so vital, so essential to every facet of our lives that everyone would be paying for it. They thought they had the new cellphone here; a $40/month subscription plan from almost every adult in the developed world. What they have instead is a product with zero path to profitability.
I'm patently against subscriptions but am currently paying for ChatGPT plus. I'm also that girl who's installed other models on some decently beefy machines and have compared/contrasted. While I also don't think AI is going to be everything to all people and that it has very specific applications, I'm literally the target audience and I've found ChatGPT to be superior in everything except math/complex problems/coding. That's what I've got Mixtral for. ^_^
Thank God someone else has a well-thought-out well-reasoned interpretation of all of this. And the same use case as me. Cheers, Internet, friend. 🙌