Comment by dktp
11 hours ago
OpenAI is (was?) extremely good at making things that go viral. The successful ones for sure boost subscriber count meaningfully
Studio Ghibli, Sora app. Go viral, juice numbers then turn the knobs down on copyrighted material. Atlas I believe was a less successful than they would've hoped for.
And because of too frequent version bumps that are sometimes released as an answer to Google's launch, rather than a meaningful improvement - I believe they're also having harder time going viral that way
Overall OpenAI throws stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Most of it doesn't and gets (semi) abandoned. But some of it does and it makes for better consumer product than Gemini
It seems to have worked well so far, though I'm sceptical it will be enough for long
Going viral is great when you're a small team or even a million dollar company. That can make or break your business.
Going viral as a billion dollar company spending upward of 1T is still not sustainable. You can't pay off a trillion dollars on "engagement". The entire advertising industry is "only" worth 1T as is: https://www.investors.com/news/advertising-industry-to-hit-1...
Selling a bunch of $20 a month subscriptions isn’t going to make a dent in OpenAI losses. Going viral for a day or two doesn’t help.
Normal people are already getting tired of AI Slop