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Everyone could raise and build a search engine or social network. Many did and none of them dethroned Google or Facebook.

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Google can offer their services for free for a lot longer than OpenAI can, and already does to students. DeepSeek offers their competitor product to ChatGPT for free to everyone already.

I don't think that's accurate. They're within the range of profitability on inference today and that's before theyve started selling ads.

On what basis do you say they're within the range of profitability on inference today? Every source I see paints a different story based on their own bias.

Ed Zitron has a bias and a narrative differing from OpenAI's bias and narrative: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

Sam Altman said they were.

Your article has 5 billion in inference cost vs 4.5 billion in revenue. That's within the range of becoming profitable.

You seem to have misread the article (which is not mine by the way), which makes the point that inference costs and revenue seem to scale with each other.

Social networks have network effects, the value comes from other people on the network, not the platform itself.

True enough, until it turns out that 90% of the people are AI bots.

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