Comment by famouswaffles

>Right, which is just not very impressive giving how much money they are burning

They are not burning that much money right now.

>I disagree, they lose massive amounts of money on every query.

Both google and Altman confirm the fact that a median LLM query is no more expensive than a google search. Beyond that, we have multiple third parties with who offer profitable access to open source llms and others. Inference is cheap, there's no doubt about it. They lose money because they have hundreds of millions of weekly active users that are not monetized in any way (no ads, nothing).

>Google, Meta, et al. could trivially overthrow OpenAI in my view.

If they could, it would have happened. Both of these players are stuffing their clones in front of billions of users (android and all of meta's apps), and neither have dented Open AI's growth or relevance. ChatGPT is still the undisputed leader in the consumer llm space. Gemini is a very very distant second, and the rest might as well not even register.

There's a reason edge and bing usage is still minuscule despite microsoft having a chokehold on consumer laptops/computers and setting those as defaults. People need to understand that you don't unseat a leader just by copying them. They wish the could trivially overthrow Open AI, but they actually can't.

>I also think ads are a dead end. Consumers absolutely will not tolerate advertisements in their LLMs.

People have said that about Netflix and countless services that introduced ads. Instead, it quickly became Netflix's most popular tier. The Implentation has to be really obnoxious before people actually care about ads.

>No student is going to submit an essay which has obvious hints towards Bose making the best speakers. No programmer is going to write code that embeds a Java runtime because Oracle paid for OpenAI ad space. No artist is going to publish art that just so happens to contain lots of references to Coca Cola.

I'm sorry but you are making up problems that don't need to exist. You are essentially imagining the llm equivalent of obtrusive pop up ads and I have no idea why. Of course chatgpt won't be doing any of these, that's ridiculous.