alt Hacker News> The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users.
There is no way that number is an accurate reflection of the number of actual human users of their service. I could believe they have 8-900m bot/fraud accounts in their databases, maybe, but not real users.
I suspect I am one of those 1bn users by their metric. I have an account, and I sometimes query it. I also query Claude and Gemini. I have zero loyalty, if I run out of tokens on one, I will just pick up the conversation on another provider. Perhaps I am using them wrong, but the amount of babysitting I have to do anyway, I don't find it that tedious to stay on the same topic during a swap.
There's no way I would spend $200 a month on any of them, not even $20 considering how few 'tokens' you get. I can see how these tools would be useful to my workflow, but I cannot use them as they are priced 100x too high for me to be reliable.
I have a feeling that would be true for the vast majority of these AI tool users. I really am not sure how these companies are supposed to become profitable. But SV is a bit insane that way.