Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tarsinge | Hacker News Reader

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I’m actually one of the people that continue to say even with this list they have no moat, because Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. can just embed a chatbot in their existing products or social network and make ChatGPT irrelevant overnight. Non tech users will chat through their browser, OS, Apps, website, that’ll be served by any model provider. The only moat of OpenAI is investor money to burn so that they can offer it for free.

Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.

What do you mean the can? All of those services have already done this, but they have not slowed ChatGPT down.

> Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses.

Nah, it's just one order of magnitude...

Also, they expect revenue to grow exponentially so it's 20 billions annualized by the end of the year. Last time I saw somebody talk about it, it was about half of it, and trending down.

Anyway, if they manage to take ~20% of the ads revenue from Google, they will be able to cover ongoing depreciation! That's the amount of money they need.

The problem is that inference is a whole different ballgame in terms of costs compared to a traditional SaaS model where each extra customer adds near zero in cost.

They may make it work but OpenAI is more akin to a traditional high revenue low profit business like for example a grocery store.

Thats why we are seeing the explosion of extra tools to try lock in business for higher value use cases and not fight on the margin.

In the UK, £1 of every £3 spent on groceries is in Tesco supermarket.

They have just under 7% gross margin on £70bn of revenue.

OpenAI are going to need to sell a lot of ads to pay that $300bn bill they have coming.

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