Comment by tdeck
3 days ago
What you're paying for ChatGPT is not likely covering their expenses, let alone making up their massive R&D investment. People paid for Sprig and Munchery too, but those companies went out of business. Obviously what they developed wasn't nearly as significant as what OpenAI has developed, but the question is: where will their pricing land once they need to turn a profit? It may well end up in a place where it's not worth paying ChatGPT to do most of the things it would be transformative for at its current price.
[1]: https://www.fooddive.com/news/sprig-is-the-latest-meal-deliv...
[2]:https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/21/munchery-shuts-down/?gucco...
Looking at history, anything in its first few iterations costs insane and stay as luxury or is sold at massive loss. Once the research goes on for several years, the costs keep coming down first very slowly and then in avalanche . The question always remains to which one can continue “selling at a loss” long enough to last the point until the costs continue going down while people are used to paying standard price(see smartphones), or the product is so market dominant that competition does not have resources to compete and cost can be raised(see Netflix).
One very viable possibility is that the technology sticks around and does great things, but the first mover entities like OpenAI go out of business anyway because it's gotten cheaper to copy their work.
I paid money to Amazon for most of a decade before they had a profitable year.
You realize they had razor thing margins on purpose, right?
Of course.
Does that aspect differ from this other emerging market?
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