Assuming you're talking about the free ChatGPT product, it's important to consider the value of the training data that users are giving them.

Beyond that, they are making a lot of money from their enterprise offerings (API products, custom partnerships, etc.) with more to come soon, like ChatGPT for Business.

Oh no, they're going belly up in 20,000 days! (i.e. $10B / 500k) Compute is going to keep getting cheaper and they're going to keep optimizing it to reduce how much compute it needs. I'm more curious about their next steps rather than how they're going to keep the lights on for ChatGPT.

$500k/day for a large tech company is absolutely peanuts. Open.AI could probably even get away with justifying $5M/day right now.