alt Hacker News> OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly?
That's a bit of a strange spin. Their ARPU is low because they are choosing not to monetize 95% of their users at all, and for now are just providing practically limitless free service.
But monetising those free users via ads will pretty obviously be both practical and lucrative.
And even if there is no technical moat, they seem to have a very solid mind share moat for consumer apps. It isn't enough for competitors to just catch up. They need to be significantly better to shift consumer habits.
(For APIs, I agree there is no moat. Switching is just so easy.)
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There does seem to be a mind share mote, but all you have to do is piss off users a little bit when there's a good competitor. See Digg to Reddit exodus.
Which advertisers would risk having their product advertised by models that have encouraged kids to commit suicide?
> They need to be significantly better to shift consumer habits.
i am hoping that a device local model would eventually be possible (may be a beefy home setup, and then an app that connects to your home on mobile devices for use on the go).
currently, hardware restrictions prevent this type of home setup (not to mention the open source/free models aren't quite there and difficulty for non-tech users to actually setup). However, i choose to believe the hardware issues will get solved, and it will merely be just time.
The software/model issue, on the other hand is harder to see solved. I pin my hopes onto deepseek, but may be meta or some other company will surprise me.