> I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.
For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI.
They don't sell their models to individuals only but also to companies with most likely different business and pricing models so that's an overly simplistic view of their business. YoY their spending increases, we can safely assume that one of the reasons is the growing user base.
Time will probably come when we won't be allowed to consume frontier models without paying anything, as we can today, and time will come when this $30 will most likely become double or triple the price.
Though the truth is that R&D around AI models, and especially their hosting (inference), is expensive and won't get any cheaper without significant algorithmic improvements. According to the history, my opinion is that we may very well be ~10 years from that moment.
Not sure where that math is coming from. Assuming it's true, you're ignoring that some users (me) already pay 10X that. Btw according Meta's SEC filings: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... they made around $22/month/american user (not even heavy user or affluent iPhone owner) in q3 2023. I assume Google would be higher due to larger marketshare.
For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI.
That ain’t happening.