They're almost certainly making a profit on subscriptions.
Right, but they are also certainly looking to make higher profits overall by avoiding having to pay for large amounts of (confidential and/or private) training data. Most of what they have would never be for sale either.
Seems smart.
i mean openai basically said as much, no? it's free for all so that they can train the models better and get real world interaction data.
Yes, Altman called it the data flywheel in 2022.
yeah, but in 2026 the interaction data of the average user isn't adding much to training. only the really exceptional users.
They can filter for the exceptional users, but the data flywheel is also about getting access to private codebases, not just the interaction in the chat.