Comment by dahcryn

but cost is critical. It's been proven customers are willing to pay +- 20/month, no matter how much underlying cost there is to the provider.

Google is almost an order of magnitude cheaper to serve GenAI compared to ChatGPT. Long term, this will be a big competitive advantage to them. Look at their very generous free tier compared to others. And the products are not subpar, they do compete on quality. OpenAI had the early mover advantage, but it's clear the crowd who is willing to pay for these services, is not very sticky and churn is really high when a new model is release, it's one of the more competitive markets.