Comment by manmal
16 hours ago
Unless you're using an enterprise plan or pay per token, you're not hurting their business at all by cancelling. The consumer plans are heavily subsidised.
16 hours ago
Unless you're using an enterprise plan or pay per token, you're not hurting their business at all by cancelling. The consumer plans are heavily subsidised.
Cancelling is the only language these companies understand.
Even Disney couldn't ignore the mass cancellations after dropping Kimmel and Disney+ bearly turns over a profit.
I think their consumer plans are gross margin positive but OpenAI has ~50M paying subscribers driving >$10B in revenue.
Realistically, you need at least ~1M subscribers to cancel to make this painful.
But I suspect this will get drowned out in the face of other news.
This is ultimately about drawing moral lines, isn't it? In that case it wouldn't matter if it hurts their business or not.
It will hurt in future funding rounds if their subscriber metric is stalling or going backwards, regardless of how many of those subscriptions are profitable.
Does it matter? These AI companies need to be able to prove that users are willing to pay at all, even if they're not paying a profitable amount of money. If investors see that they're dumping money into something that's not selling, why continue to do so?
There is value tied to free users, but also, not sure I want my work and data in a product that’s OK with DoD mass surveillance and I’m not sure my customers would want their data pumping through it either.
AI companies seem to be growth companies whose whole point seems to be that they are okay with extreme amounts of losses/lack of profitability so long as they grow a lot.
If you back down from using Chatgpt, you throw a wrench in their growth numbers.
I would consider training data could have important info as well and to be honest, with their circular financing, Nvidia <-> openAI with GPU's being the main cost (and given that OpenAI isn't facing the Ram crisis heck it created the ram crisis by pre-ordering 20%) and recent deals, money isn't an issue to them for some time now. Growth is.
You are also forgetting that OpenAI is planning to add ads in which case you would be the product, its better not to discourage anyone who wishes to cancel perhaps.
Other commentators have made some good points as well and I used to think the same thing as you but I do think that cancelling might make the most sense.
That or if you want to cause maximum damage, trying to burn the most tokens that you physically can asking random things to burn OpenAI's money but remember that the model still takes energy requirements so you'd be wasting energy for something quite pointless.
IMO, it might be better to cancel/not use OpenAI.