Lots of negative comments here. OpenAI has to make a move, they are not profitable and have massive costs and debt. I think this one of the least bad moves, given all data that they have on users. They could have monetized their data so much more, and sooner.
I think it's damning that they possibly have the most advanced AI on the planet right now, unfiltered, no guard rails, and as much compute as they could possibly want for deep reasoning and inference, and despite that, the best move they could make was enshittification.
I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Between the burn rate and the lawsuits and the need for more compute, there's a ton of pressure on them right now.
> How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise?
Why do random HN commenters have to come up with a business model for free LLM usage? If LLMs are so great, they should not need to offer a free tier at all. Surely word of mouth would make people line up around the block to snatch one of those highly coveted subscriptions.
That is happening, and they are one of the fastest growing products of all time in revenue.
But word of mouth can also say "this other provider (eg. google) is free and allows more usage" as the market matures. Google has a bigger pocketbook due to their ad income.
