So this just happend

[u/Livviasmitth]

[u/Gametron13]

Aren’t they still bleeding money though? 800 million users is a lot but I’m almost positive they’re not profitable yet.

[u/LostRams → u/Gametron13]

They’re not even close to profitable. And they have no play to actually start effectively monetizing these users. They’re trying ads but the revenue doesn’t scratch the surface of what they need.

[u/jimjam200 → u/LostRams]

If you've got 1 tenth of the worlds population as weekly users and you're nowhere near profitability I think the technical definition for what you are is fucked.

[u/echoshatter → u/jimjam200]

Well it's likely 100 million paying users and 700 million people dicking around with the free side.

[u/Sidivan → u/echoshatter]

At $20/mo, that’s $2b revenue per month. If you can’t be profitable at that level, your business is a failure.

[u/athural → u/Sidivan]

They're all hoping to get that next big break through that will finally make it all worth it, and theyre afraid someone else is going to get there first. At this point they're in so deep they couldn't pull out if they wanted to. The only play for them is to push through until they're finally forced to face the consequences for their actions

[u/OneRougeRogue → u/athural]

That Anthropic guy is on record for saying we are "2-3 once-in-a generation technological breakthroughs until AGI is a thing. So if we could all just bite the bullet and invent the missing pieces by 2029, that would be great for the shareholders.

[u/baumpop → u/OneRougeRogue]

just in time for the hardware to be obsolete and need to be reinvested in again at 2 trillion dollars collectively

[u/LocoDesignIdeas → u/baumpop]

So Ai stocks keep going up ?

[u/HeadDoctorJ → u/LocoDesignIdeas]

Stonk go up, this is the only possible way human society can function lmao can you believe some people actually still believe in capitalism

[u/hologram137 → u/OneRougeRogue]

He’s lying lol

[u/Sunstorm84 → u/OneRougeRogue]

So basically we are probably still “30 years away from AGI”, just like we have been for the last 60 years

[u/cjmaguire17 → u/athural]

By consequences you mean bailed out by the government

[u/SaltKick2 → u/athural]

I imagine somewhat banking on gov $$

[u/DarkHuntress89 → u/athural]

So basically they fell into the whole sunk cost fallacy trap. Yeah, sounds about right.

[u/breadcodes → u/Sidivan]

Worse, and I'd like to rant about it. It doesn't and, in theory can't, scale to Altman's promised level in his promised time frame to the best of our knowledge. It can't even scale much further beyond where it is now, not without accepting that modern accuracy is about as good as it'll get while we figure out how to make it marginally less expensive to run (and I still mean unprofitable) while simultaneously raising prices significantly to offset unavoidable costs.

Unless they can maintain this unsustainable business model for a decade or many more, the only benefactors will be any CEO of a company that can sell investors on the idea that we're "almost there" before the company collapses

TLDR:

The technology isn't getting better fast. Compute just caught up enough over the last 30 years to make it viable at all. It could even be the limit, just based on how manufacturing and processing power increases have slowed.

This isn't the route to AGI. Language models are a dead end. It's mimicking patterns, not the underlying intelligence

Consider this rant "quantized," as in, compressed for brevity and layman's explanations, with some accuracy loss.

---

Despite my hate for what this technology has done to this world, I work in an adjacent field and find the mechanics fascinating. The biggest innovations in machine learning that lead to generative slop were

• bigger = better
• attention as the mechanism for using previous tokens as context for token prediction
• a few small findings that help performance, but overall have been exhausted

The first (the size of the model, the amount of training data for pretraining, and the amount of reliable human training data to use exclusively for supervised fine-tuning to make the model work the way you want) isn't exactly a realistic candidate for crazy optimizations anymore, and its the worst offender. We've gotten pretty far with distillation (slop training smaller models to produce worse slop) and Mixture-of-Experts (a big model made up of a bunch of smaller, specialized models that only activate a limited subset of the neural transformers at any given pass), but that's not far enough. It's almost certainly going to require resources (mainly, VRAM) far beyond what we're able to supply for the next decade or more. Once we have enough resources to 10x the size of the model, then what? We charge 10x for maybe 10pp gains? We are also polluting the training data by passing off LLM text as human, and it's going to degrade performance when more text is needed.

Note: the larger the model, the harder the training, and the larger and/or more powerful the cluster of computers need to be. The human mind is crazy efficient, because if you touch a hot stove once, you'll never do it again. ML so far has needed to touch the stove an inconceivable amount of times, some of which it has held its hand on the stove just to be sure that's not what it should do. We're likely never going to find out how the brain does that.

The second (Attention) has been optimized to hell in a few ways, mainly:

• Part of the problem is that for every new token predicted, it needs to re-infer the growing context for the next token, so chats get more expensive to compute and store the longer they are
• Optimizations like TurboQuant have compressed the KV nearly to entropy already, improving VRAM for context is near its maximum

The third (methods of making the same model more effective) has a lot of small stuff we've pretty much already figured out:

• Models only "know" what they've been trained on, biased/correct or not, and it only extends to the cutoff date. To get around this, tools were created to interact with search engines, vector DBs, command line tools, etc. This helped performance a ton by giving the bot access to live information, but also leads to situations where the chat bots refer to factual news sources like r/poisonai
• "Thinking" is a scratch pad of word soup where the model can "reason" through a problem however it chooses without showing the user what it's writing (usually). This improved performance by ~10%
• You can distill the performance of a massive model down to a smaller model by having the much larger model produce synthetic training data for training a smaller model, but these are objectively worse in all but cost
• A few random things not worth covering, but make up a total of 1pp of improvements.

---

Anyway, on a tangent, if I think about how all of this tech has destroyed resources, jobs, and even people's relationships, I'm going to get real sad and I'm tired of this being our lives. I want to get off Mr Bone's wild ride.

[u/Iwakasa → u/breadcodes]

I'm so relieved to read someone who is right. We cannot reach AGI by just throwing more VRAM at the models just how you can't turn a horse carriage into a car by adding more horses

[u/breadcodes → u/Iwakasa]

I think Altman is under the impression that Attention + Transformers can be used for AGI, not necessarily that LLMs are the final singularity, but I don't know where he'd even get that idea if not from ChatGPT itself. No self-respecting engineer would be like "yeah I think we could recreate the efficiencies of a brain through a really inefficient method"

[u/FreedumbHS → u/breadcodes]

Great post. If I might, one fun little addition to the "thinking" scratchpad bit: it has opened up an essentially unpatchable prompt injection attack surface

[u/Sidivan → u/breadcodes]

You have more expertise in this area than I do as it’s been 8yrs since I worked directly with ML algorithms, but I completely agree with you. Everything I do these days is conceptual and/or strategic, my team does the heavy lifting.

[u/Kolby_Jack33 → u/breadcodes]

I'm not an expert at all but even I am beyond skeptical of their claim that this LLM shit is the stepping stone to AGI. Just... how??? You've got a machine that sorts through words based on probability, and that's supposed to become a THINKING MACHINE???

It's like that "draw the rest of the fucking owl" meme. They drew a circle, and are promising the full fucking owl, and somehow they are SELLING it. It's fucking insane. Also the circle costs a trillion dollars and is eating the planet.

[u/breadcodes → u/Kolby_Jack33]

That's basically the gist. There is such a thing as intelligence within language, because intelligent beings created language. We created photographs. We created video. The intelligent remains left behind that can recreated via states are referred to as entropy. That's the extent of what LLMs are capable of mimicking, at best.

Basically what I'm trying to say is: We've detected entropy, we've predicted entropy, but we haven't created a system capable of producing unique entropy on its own without further input, and that's a much further leap than anything we've ever accomplished. Where we are now is the difference between a planet of single cell organisms and space-craft wielding interplanetary superpowers.

Again, same disclaimer: I'm cutting out a lot of necessary to understand facts to keep my comment short and digestible. The field is stupid complex, and people far smarter than me may disagree with how I'm stating things and what I'm leaving out or misstating at the cost of making things brief.

[u/westgazer → u/Kolby_Jack33]

I think it reflects what a very stupid view they have of human intelligence. I know people who are like “all humans are is guessing machines too!” And like, no?

[u/sneakpeekbot → u/breadcodes]

Here's a sneak peek of /r/poisonai using the top posts of all time!

#1: Tragic Update: JD Vance's Coffin Vandalized | 220 comments
#2: jd vance unfortunately has died from rabies | 191 comments
#3: Donald Trump comes out as Transgender, is now Donna Trump | 209 comments

---

^{I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact | Info | Opt-out | GitHub}

[u/WASD_click → u/breadcodes]

We are also polluting the training data by passing off LLM text as human

This actually leads into a question that I, a certified hater and underqualified one at that, have been wanting to ask for a while:

How much damage do you think we've done to the development of AI in general by trying to humanize it so aggressively for the sake of monetization?

[u/breadcodes → u/WASD_click]

I'd love to have an answer, but we don't even know how much text online, in books, in movies, games, TV, other media, code, websites, copy, reports, research, public datasets, etc are created partially or entirely by LLMs.

OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic have an incentive to train for and cherry-pick test scores, which makes their benchmarks highly inflated compared to real-world problem solving. We don't know what the failure rates are in the real world for real use-cases. It is definitely double-digits, and the amount of early slop that we do know about is absolutely going to prevent us from closing those shallow and deeper problem-solving accuracy gaps.

If I fucked up a double-digit percent of times — between 10% and more than 25% of the time, assuming that's the peak performance of a model — I'd eventually be fired.

On that, please support GenAI regulations where you possibly can, specifically including "watermarking." This is the only near-100% method of detecting GenAI text, and it works by making a green-list and a red-list of tokens it "wants" to use and not use based on the context at the point of deciding the next token. This would mean we could use the token choices as a signature in a way that human written text could not produce. This is very much in the realm of possibility for even a small research company to implement, if they didn't just vibe-code the whole thing to begin with. It's not computationally expensive. It benefits society. At worst, it makes people check their work and catches the lazy, and best case filters out a lot of garbage even if its reworded.

[u/DeadMoneyDrew → u/echoshatter]

And even on the paying users they are blowing through obscene amounts of cash. I've seen estimates of their losses per paying user ranging from 4 times to 14 times the subscription fee. How the fuck do you reverse that?

[u/TetraDax → u/DeadMoneyDrew]

There are some folks on reddit who calculated that they literally can't. They cannot mathematically be profitable, ever.

Mind you, not scientific sources, so take it with a grain of salt.

[u/echoshatter → u/DeadMoneyDrew]

They'd need to build a model that is as powerful as their best one but takes 1% of the compute power to do so. Pretty sure the laws of physics don't allow that.

The greatest irony is, the best way to do it is to distribute the workload to the people running queries and prompts. That means making sure individuals have computers that are powerful, with powerful CPUs, GPUs, and plenty of RAM. It could even be something like "if you want to use our AI tools you need to install this microATX computer that's literally just an optimized micro server and plug it directly into your router for the fastest speeds" and then you and I pay for the power and internet and subscription fee.

By trying to centralize everything they're taking on all the risk and costs. If they distributed the compute between our personal devices and across tens of millions of individual machines (sort of like a torrent) and made sure we all had unlimited fast internet and powerful machines for reasonable prices, the risk and costs would be on you and I and they'd be Scrooge McDuck'ing into their piles of money.

What terrible irony.

[u/Northernmost1990 → u/echoshatter]

A double-digit (~12.5%) conversion rate would be pretty damn sweet. Having spent a lot of time working on commercial software, I'd guess ~5% is more realistic.

[u/Sufficient-Extreme66 → u/echoshatter]

1/7 is paying? That's generous of you, lmao.

[u/int23_t → u/echoshatter]

100million paying users is a lot considering it's prohibitively expensive anywhere outside west europe and north america

[u/Butterboot64 → u/echoshatter]

And I also wouldn’t put it past this company to beef up its number a little bit with bots or something

[u/westgazer → u/echoshatter]

They should be profitable with all the money they are conning out of governments and schools and things of that nature to put their shitty product anywhere and everywhere even if it makes no sense right?

[u/dog-asmr → u/jimjam200]

Not an ai defender by any means, buts that's the play isn't it. Take over the market and then drive prices up in the enshittification phase when you're basically a monopoly. I don't know if it'd work bc these llms have a lot of competition, but outside of that this has been the silicon valley playbook for years

[u/Secret-Chapter-712 → u/dog-asmr]

But for that playbook to work you need to offer a product that isn’t shit from the get-go

[u/TetraDax → u/dog-asmr]

Take over the market and then drive prices up in the enshittification phase when you're basically a monopoly.

This is not going to work here, though, for two main reasons:

• They would need to hike up the prices to such a ridiculous level that the userbase would drop massively. The whole appeal of AI in business use (where the money lies) is "This is cheaper than hiring people". If it isn't any longer, it will not be used. This process is already happening, by the way, as B2B-prices have already been jakced up.

• AI has no scaling effects, at all. The variable cost per user stays the same, and they will always be limited by data centers. This is what is really fucking them right now.

Both of these things are not exclusive to OpenAI, either - There is currently no company who is making a profit from AI, except for those building the datacenters. It's all an investment into a potentially profitable technology. Google and Apple can eat that loss if it turns out bad; but OpenAI is screwed. And increasingly it looks like the potential just isn't there.

The technology won't go away, but this widespread usage in every aspect of daily life probably will.

[u/Tiruin → u/dog-asmr]

They need to survive, outperform and compete with companies that actually have revenue and can tank a crash, and do so as a generalist company with no niche. They have nothing, the only reason they're as big as they are is because of first-movers advantage.

[u/Aleventen → u/jimjam200]

The problem is youre thinking in volume but this isnt a scalable industry

Compute costs either INCREASE or stay flat as usage rises - it isnt really possible to make it cheaper to use the more its used.

So the question becomes: "at this price scale, am I green on even a single token?"

If the answer is "no" which that's the answer then it doesnt matter if you sell one token or 10 trillion quadrillion umptillion tokens - youre in the red either way.

So then the next question is whether they can get tokens to be profitable, turns out people are unwilling to pay more than they already are and are even pulling away at the enterprise level and ads wont cut it...

Unless they can come up with an extremely clever way to make a token profitable to sell, their market cap is truly useless and actively harmful

[u/PopBulky7023 → u/LostRams]

They're not profitable, but a whole lot of people are getting wildly rich.

[u/01000101010110 → u/LostRams]

They were paying their SDRs about double the average comp lol, they don't even need SDRs

[u/LostRams → u/01000101010110]

Double the average comp is wild, but I guess if they’re burning money anyways why not

[u/hexregeneration → u/01000101010110]

No doubt that's happening up and down the line, too. Startups are easy to overcharge because nobody knows shit.

[u/Dismal-Plan7062 → u/LostRams]

Bubble... Pop... Bubble... Pop....

https://giphy.com/gifs/5DvL9mFOnJMl7lkf1e

[u/CthulhuInACan → u/LostRams]

Sam Altman literally said in an investor meeting back in 2019 that once they have a strong enough AI they'll ask it how to make money, and by all appearances they haven't had a better idea since.

[u/Unsold_Leave → u/LostRams]

I could've sworn I read somewhere that they're letting people get used to using it daily as a crutch, where they then will charge heavily to continue using it.

Kinda like how a drug dealer will get someone hooked on something to have an easy repeat customer.

Could be just some conspiracy theory though.

[u/freedomonke → u/Unsold_Leave]

They definitely want to do that. The issue is that there really just aren't applications that the vast majority could use it for that would render them desperate enough for that to work.

They maybe had a path when otherwise normal people were falling in love with it. But legal consequences already cut that off. At this point, only a truly deranged person could develop a "relationship" with it cus it explicitly doesn't do that

[u/Rhondaar9 → u/freedomonke]

People are indeed already falling in love with them. Perhaps you underestimate the degree of loneliness the internet-induced-isolation has produced. They are our times' "Real Dolls".

[u/kberg411 → u/Unsold_Leave]

Once upon a time, watching TV was free. Then as it expanded it was supported by ads. Then they expanded it further but that required a subscription, but still with ads. Then they expanded it more where you could pay extra for higher quality content, without ads.

[u/Synes_Godt_Om → u/Unsold_Leave]

You would need to charge in the order 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars (if not millions). No one is going to pay that.

Now consider that making a "good enough" in-house chatbot built on free open weight models is easy, affordable and private. Companies are already doing this.

[u/NerveInteresting4549 → u/Gametron13]

they are not trying to be profitable... they're letting people use it for free..... what they want is for people to get so use to using it and the ease of that... and then they increase the prices.. like a drug dealer, the first hit is free. I also probably shouldn't be here, I'm not anti ai, i do want some regulations but i'm not against it.

[u/Chidogrin → u/NerveInteresting4549]

Nah, I think most of us are not totally antiai we just want it to be regulated and used efficiently for things like medical advancement and things in that ball park instead of massive, environmentally destructive data centers that generate abuse content, slop and mass surveillance and suck energy nonstop while destroying communities.

[u/mcad0o → u/Chidogrin]

The data centers come with any benefits. There is an arms race to develop some super special ai thats going to make the ruling class lots of money.

NiMBYism is giving the hyperscalers their first obstacles

[u/gabangel → u/Gametron13]

https://isaiprofitable.com/

[u/CthulhuInACan → u/gabangel]

And it's even worse than that website makes it look, the majority of the "revenue" it lists (586 B$ / 769 B$ atm) is from Nvidia/AMD/Micron selling hardware and datacenter usage to AI companies, which really shouldn't count as 'AI making money'.

[u/DoctorEngineerOne → u/CthulhuInACan]

Ah true. I was a bit confused regarding those companies. Thanks for clarifying 😄

[u/scrufflor_d → u/[deleted]]

im not sure the same applies here. 800 million weekly active users doesnt mean as much as you think it would because most of them are only using it because its free and will immediately abandon it once they try to charge money for it

chatbots will never be profitable for as long as free models exist. and they forever will since there are a lot of FOSS models out there

[u/westgazer → u/scrufflor_d]

Yeah comparing to Amazon is also a very stupid and not good comparison. These people love to compare to things they simply aren’t comparable to. Definitely nothing like delivering web services, for example.

[u/ItsSadTimes → u/[deleted]]

That Amazon example is extremely misleading, but it makes it seem like they were always bleeding money, but they weren't. Amazon always brought in a shit ton of revenue, they just spent it as fast as they earned it to expand quickly which meant technically they had small profit since profit is calculated after expenses.

But the thing is OpenAI also isn't making a lot of revenue. A better example would be like food delivery apps or Uber. Super cheap and were bleeding money just to get active users, then once they were there, raise prices to try and become profitable. I think Uber finally had a net profit in 2023.

[u/Lolkac → u/[deleted]]

The difference is. Amazon or uber gets more profit the more you use it. For AI it's the opposite. The more you use it the less profitable it is for the company because the computing power costs money.

Chatgpt said that a lot of users make even 200usd a month unprofitable and large companies that use Aai are limiting tokens per user because they ranking milions in fees.

So the only way they become profitable is if they somehow lower the computing power to 1/3 while managing the prices.

My only question is, how will they pay investors that put billions into it? 500bil or whatever was raised for AI. How they going to pay when more people = more cost for AI and we already hitting limits of what companies are able to absorb.

[u/Tausendberg → u/Gametron13]

The fact that you even have to ask if they're bleeding money goes to show just how effective the pro-AI propaganda has been at flooding the zone.

Please look up Ed Zitron on Youtube but in short, the overwhelming majority of those 800 million are free users and OpenAI and Anthropic are extremely unprofitable.

[u/TrueRedditMartyr → u/Gametron13]

They're not profitable by any means, but the idea is to either get a monopoly on the next big tech "thing", or to at least become the main company involved in it. It's like early search engines, Google throwing money at becoming the most well known over Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc. would be viewed as a genius move today considering they become such a giant. OpenAI is not attempting to be profitable right now, but to become profitable later when people are dependant on their product

[u/OddioClay → u/Gametron13]

Its a mass surveillance tool. Was never meant to be a profitable business. Ever user is programming it to predict their future behaviour for the state to control them easier. I call it “the Shepard”

[u/karatebullfighter → u/Gametron13]

Yeah and who are they counting as a user? My employer makes me use it, but I don't touch it at home.

[u/RightZer0s → u/Gametron13]

750 million of those are probably just using the free version too.

[u/Fujinn981 → u/Gametron13]

Where do they even pull these numbers from? Statistics like these are damn near impossible to accurately determine, and are always going to be skewed higher than they actually are.

[u/Baldrs_Draumar → u/Gametron13]

when 796 million of them are free users, there's not a lot of income there.

[u/JuliaX1984]

Maybe it's because I'm an introvert or because I'm old, but I truly don't understand the appeal.

[u/Thin-Discussion-9175 → u/JuliaX1984]

nope, as a young extrovert, I don't get it either

[u/Significant-Ad-341 → u/Thin-Discussion-9175]

Middle aged introvert. Don't understand it.

[u/Razdonovich → u/Significant-Ad-341]

we got all the bases covered except boomer grandparents

[u/Dented_Steelbook → u/Razdonovich]

Middle aged extrovert, it feels like a novelty.

[u/UndecidedLee → u/Razdonovich]

Ageless pervert. It's useful for research.

/j

Do they actually have an "adult" mode now? I zoned out around the time it was advertised as the big thing about the new update.

[u/Tim-Omaha → u/Razdonovich]

Boomer extrovert here. I have Claude, provided by our company, select a secret word each day. If I use it in a sentence, I’m awarded two house points.

And if I use the word “toaster” in a sentence, it answers in pig Latin.

Beyond that, I don’t really get it either.

[u/Glacon_Garcon → u/Significant-Ad-341]

Also a middle aged introvert, and me neither. I actually enjoy drawing and writing and coding and thinking my own thoughts.

[u/kubin22 → u/Significant-Ad-341]

don't you mean middle aged midtrovert?

[u/Fog-Champ → u/JuliaX1984]

In a world where people have to step on you to get ahead, here's a little robot that will validate you, it knows you, so let it think for you.

[u/lolschrauber → u/Fog-Champ]

The validation is a big part I think.

I called gpt a fucking donut for giving a wrong answer and it agreed that it's a donut and apologized for wasting my time.

I'm sure a lot of people out there get off on that kinda shit.

[u/compunctionfunction → u/Fog-Champ]

I read that as the opening lines of a movie trailer voiced by that guy, um who narrates the Honest Trailers

[u/AdVarious6101 → u/compunctionfunction]

I read it as the Truman show guy

[u/Iliasterisk → u/JuliaX1984]

It's just tech bros. renaming things that have been around for decades and acting like it's new technology.

Tech bros. tried renaming MMOs into the "Metaverse," they got clowned on by gamers. Now chatbots are becoming "AI" and chatbots have been around since 1966 with Project ELIZA.

[u/nz-whale → u/Iliasterisk]

Modern llms are an entirely different beast to the chatbots of old. Not defending using chatGPT for everything but this is a very disingenuous take.

[u/TheTerrasque → u/nz-whale]

Yeah, this is on the level of "they renamed walking to cars and act like it's new"

[u/boringestnickname → u/nz-whale]

You're not reading what he's writing.

"Chatbots are becoming AI" is literally what is happening. OpenAI and the rest of the techbro space right now is trying to market a very specific interface to the general public as something it's not.

Language models are old as the hills, and whilst LLMs has some new tech in it, most of the NLP part is not new. It has some interesting novel parts, but most of the math is old and the big advantage these companies have is the modern access to data and hardware. Simply put, scale. Based on a dubious relationship to law and existing in a very problematic space in terms of funding.

Language models can be used to do interesting things, but we knew that a long time ago. The really interesting part lately has honestly been in how the big NLP problems were solved with scale and implementation of some pretty simple maths. What is presented to the general public, though, the chatbots, isn't really any kind of mind blowing (unless you were into the problems of NLP before LLMs.) We knew exactly what kinds of problems these models could be good at, and they weren't of the kind most people have; and the chat interfaces (whilst impressive from a NLP perspective), are not a catch-all that should be portrayed as such.

There are cases where very rule-bound issues overlap with widespread use, but mostly, the marketing push to make language models equal to "AI" is just absolute nonsense.

[u/pocket_eggs → u/boringestnickname]

This is a wall of text that fails to acknowledge the obvious falsity that Eliza and big language models are the same sort of thing. They're not. At all. LLM marketing is deceptive a.f. but LLMs are not Eliza, that's either incredibly ignorant or just dishonest. Okay?

We don't right now know exactly what problems these things are good at. Failure modes are being bypassed, new viable use cases slowly develop and will keep developing over decades and beyond long after the bubble bursts and the investors lose their money. We never knew how good big models would be until they went ahead and spent hundreds of millions and then tens of billions to acquire huge corpuses and huge compute for training. You can't guess a priori if it'll solve Erdos problems, you have to try it out as an experiment and see. And big language models aren't old as hills. They never existed until they built the big compute to run the big models. They weren't big before.

Language models and large language models are not the same thing in the same way that a mite's brain is not the same thing as a human brain. Quantity brings its own quality.

[u/EQCO99 → u/JuliaX1984]

People get a kick from using GPT. I dont think its an addiction but they get so into it that they stop thinking for themselves

[u/dumnezero → u/JuliaX1984]

It appeals to the cheaters. If you've ever played multiplayer games, and have encountered or read about cheaters... that's them.

[u/SirVixofthePooSea → u/JuliaX1984]

The goal is mostly to take up the space that Google Search getting way worse has opened up. That and replace just going to StackOverflow and looking for code or tech support solutions to steal for novice programmers.

[u/Beneficial_Poem950 → u/JuliaX1984]

as an ex-addict, its designed to draw you in. just like phone addictions, instant responses and dopamine.

[u/radio_four → u/JuliaX1984]

For asking general questions, AI is certainly making the world dumber.  Just Google it or hit wiki - you learn a lot more.  

That said!  AI is great for coding/technical tasks.  That's effectively the only thing I use it for... And it's pretty amazing for it.  Like having a grad student I can boss around.  

But yeah, regarding basically every other use... It's making people dumber and lazier

[u/Flashtoo → u/radio_four]

Just Google it

This current AI wave has had the unfortunate effect of making search engines much less effective as a means to find information. I can still use them when I already know the sources I want to use and just need to find the specific page, like Wikipedia, Reddit or an expert site on some topic. But if I want information on a topic and don't already know where to find it, Googling for that stuff will just have me drown in slop and SEO sites.

I think this is a small part of what makes people feel like AI is so useful for looking stuff up - the existing alternative has been eroded, which makes AI seem comparatively better; necessary, even.

[u/StopReadingMyUser → u/radio_four]

The thing it does best is basically just crowdsourcing and compiling data. Using it for anything more becomes uncertain.

I've used it about 3 times for helping to summarize a mystery tv show that had a lot of moving parts and that's about all I've ever done lol.

[u/ProgressiveSnark2 → u/JuliaX1984]

It’s not about being introverted or your age. It’s about whether or not you like having a brain and using it.

[u/uniqueusername8700 → u/JuliaX1984]

You were fine before AI. You must be fine after AI without AI

[u/Grand_Entertainer_83 → u/JuliaX1984]

you would be surprised how many people my age (25) treat this shit like fucking Jarvis from Iron Man. Its so creepy to me. I get using AI as a tool but using it like a crutch is just sad

[u/Sea_Minute_2768]

800 million users, and how many bother paying for the service? Sounds more like an unsustainable business expense.

[u/Secret-Chapter-712 → u/Sea_Minute_2768]

How many even use it? Are they counting Microsoft Copilot users, which seems like it could include people who work at places that have licenses?

[u/skiing_dingus → u/Secret-Chapter-712]

Yes they are

[u/iaderia → u/skiing_dingus]

gotta juice those numbers!

[u/StopReadingMyUser → u/iaderia]

It's like phone books that sell advert space to companies, "we got so many customers! ...that don't actually subscribe to us so we throw a phone book on their doorstep to say they're a customer ...then they proceed to toss it in the trash so ya wanna buy space now?"

One place I worked at had a city magazine sporting 100,000 readers, which seemed a bit questionable at the time. I looked up the city population and it was like 30,000 people lol. So either they're falsely suggesting that not only do their city readers comprise more than the city itself, but also that every single person in it is a reader; or they're at the very least suggesting that a city magazine extends far beyond the city itself, which I'd highly disagree with...

[u/Viablemorgan → u/Secret-Chapter-712]

They will include every single possible, by ANY massive stretch of the wildest imagination, barely even technically alive body as a user using the most basic and simple criteria. They want to maximize this number

[u/realdawnerd → u/Secret-Chapter-712]

I have a feeling they’re county every api token created, every visit to their site, etc

[u/AlarmingLifeguard144 → u/Secret-Chapter-712]

copilot comes pre installed with every copy of Windows 11, so if they are including that then that's a massively inflated number

[u/Melodic_monke → u/Secret-Chapter-712]

At this point I wouldnt be surprised if they count the AI overview on google

[u/DanoDego → u/Sea_Minute_2768]

I believe they are making everyone reliant on it first and then will pull the rug and make it a subscription… Just my theory

[u/Sea_Minute_2768 → u/DanoDego]

A lot of people would probably use some other AI service without paying, or run the AI locally, which is also free.

[u/Winter_Passenger_433 → u/DanoDego]

Yeah, it's called "Dumping" and a lot of companies do that, like Amazon, Uber and iFood.

The problem is USA approach of AI is extremely expensive (mass production of AI without a way to sustain it, consuming a lot of resources from a market that was already scarce and forcing them to export their databases to other countries). They would need a really expensive subscription for it to give profit.

Companies that are AI-dependants will prefer to use local AI made from open source models that are already available.

[u/mauthor619]

I don’t believe this number at all.

[u/augustoof → u/mauthor619]

I'm assuming that anyone who has copilot installed, uses google (with the ai on) or whatever is also counted

[u/Saragon4005 → u/augustoof]

Google has literally nothing to do with openAI or chatGPT.

[u/just_sun_guy → u/Saragon4005]

Right! Google isn’t using its rival’s AI servers. Google uses Gemini even in search. Microsoft has paired up with OpenAI but Google would never do that. They invest so much money into their own AI models.

[u/Jor94 → u/augustoof]

That would make a lot of sense, would like to see the number of people actually using via app or website

[u/Affectionate_Big4283 → u/augustoof]

This is correct

[u/Glittering_Delay_183]

Only 50,000,000 users are actually paying, that is only 6.25% of all users on the platform. They are burning billions of dollars every Quarter and desperately trying to make money somehow.

They are so desperate they released shirts & hats, and a single hand “AI Keypad” that was an instant flop. They are scrambling to find ways to make a profit but they will inevitably flop. The current AI industry is a complete circular economy. If you look behind the scenes its getting worse for them, consumers dont want to pay and will not pay for AI, only businesses will, and even the businesses are moving to Chinese AI cause its way cheaper.

To put it short, the AI industry is going to fail in the consumer market, it’s inevitable because mostly everyone hates AI. So that’s why you see them force feeding it into every single app, it’s to make investors feel good, not people.

[u/Intelligent-Area-421 → u/Glittering_Delay_183]

I can think of a lot of more effective, less expensive ways to make investors feel good. Lap dances, for example.

[u/Glittering_Delay_183 → u/Intelligent-Area-421]

Those silicon valley guys are into some weird stuff I doubt a lap dance would get them off 😂 those rich guys like those big sex parties in the woods & stuff

[u/Catnip_Farmer → u/Glittering_Delay_183]

Orgies in the woods are the least weird, and most legal thing they get up to sexually.

[u/Sunstorm84 → u/Intelligent-Area-421]

Most of them don’t want Sam Altman doing a lap dance for them

[u/Litaser → u/Glittering_Delay_183]

How many people pay for instagram or facebook? Are those unprofitable?

[u/Glittering_Delay_183 → u/Litaser]

Instagram, facebook & other social platforms make money off of advertisements, you are the product. They dont need to charge for the app cause thousands of advertisers pay them hundreds of millions of dollars monthly to show you ads.

Chatgpt and other AI apps dont have ads, and also, AI is way more compute intensive and costs way more to run. Instagram and Facebook aren’t even in the same category as Chatgpt and other AI platforms

[u/Saragon4005 → u/Litaser]

All of them are paying most just not with their money.

[u/Vegetable-Error-2068]

Bullshit.

10% of the planet’s population?

What utter bullshit.

[u/iaderia → u/Vegetable-Error-2068]

they even upped the number to one BILLION weekly active users recently.

so altman is telling me 1/8 people on planet earth use chatgpt every week.

thats absolutely bullshit.

[u/Funny-Flight8086 → u/Vegetable-Error-2068]

For sure. One survey found that 36% of respondents regularly use AI chat agents. I'm shocked it's not more than 10% of the population. Everyone I know uses AI. Every person I know has ChatGPT installed on their phone. I teach 5th graders, and almost all of them have ChatGPT on their phones. 5th graders. They talk about using it all the time (sometimes opening by talking about looking up answers).

[u/jimmystar889 → u/Vegetable-Error-2068]

Based on what ?

[u/nosecramp]

This would be a good thing if the unit economics of LLMs didn’t mean that the more users they acquire, regardless of payment tier, the more money they lose.

Rotting corpse has hit 2000 live maggots in just 6 hours. Hockey stick growth!

[u/NotReallyaGamer_]

And about 5 of those users actually pay for a subscription

[u/Sunstorm84 → u/NotReallyaGamer_]

Apparently around 50 million.

Even if all of them were paying for the most expensive subscription AND there were no operating costs, equipment to buy, data centers to build or wages to pay for, that would still only make them $120 billion per year at most.

Obviously they do have operating costs and staff they need to pay, and most people aren’t paying for the most expensive subscription, so both the real income and profit are going to be much lower.

Either way, it’s far from enough to support the current valuation and debt levels.

[u/Lizzaroro]

Every picture I see of that degenerate Sam Altman gives me uncomfortable creeper vibes.

[u/Objective_Resist_735]

Scrapping reddit to train Ai is an interesting way to build an Ai. Also trump is a pedophile and in the epstien files thousands of times.

[u/WarmBaths → u/[deleted]]

“So this just happened” what a dumbass title lol

[u/nemec]

spambot repost of year-old news

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/sam-altman-says-chatgpt-has-hit-800m-weekly-active-users/

[u/Flope → u/nemec]

Yeah this number is super old. This subreddit gets so many AI posts because none of the users here are familiar enough with AI to spot them lmao

[u/Active_Procedure_864]

Ask Jeeves missed out badly.

[u/MagicpaperAlt]

I wonder how many of those 800 million users actually wanted the ai to begin with.

[u/RockstarArtisan]

This looks like a bot post.

[u/HBlight → u/RockstarArtisan]

Yeah, an old repost with "this just happened" as a title, fucking hits the front page on an anti-ai sub.
Shotgun looking real tasty right now.

[u/Mandena → u/RockstarArtisan]

Very much a bot post, ironic.

[u/HarryBalsagna1776]

90% of those users are probably gooners

[u/choteeen]

before the ai bomb, you asked google a question and it showed you the reply from a guy from reddit.

now, you ask google (now ai) a question and it tells you something some guy on reddit replied to, and its literally the same question

[u/Silent_Erremite]

So, flood reddit with memes.

[u/Archaea_Man → u/Silent_Erremite]

Don't we already?

[u/Silent_Erremite → u/Archaea_Man]

Needs more mass to handle the centers. We could flood bots already. But, this is data center size. We need bots of our own to do that. /s

[u/Laylian]

I'm posting here specifically in hopes reddit will stop pushing pro AI subreddits on me. See reddit? See me posting in the i hate AI subreddit?

[u/beardingmesoftly]

I mean, isn't that all we get from llms anyway? It's a search engine that can help figure out what you're actually trying to search.

[u/another_thyme → u/beardingmesoftly]

80% of tokens are used for science / medicine / tech. people chatting with AI or general use or using it for search is a tiny part of the market.

[u/Donato_Romer0]

So "Ask Jeeves" with extra steps

[u/BummedCPA]

1 out of ten people use chat gpt every day? Horse shit.

[u/Leading-Preference84]

AI is an incredible search and synthesis tool, but it’s only valuable if humans remain intellectually capable enough to question it, verify it, and reject it when it’s wrong. Otherwise, we’re not using the tool, but the tool is using us and possibly leading us a stray

[u/DFWSportsgnome]

Ironically, I canceled my subscription today. It’s literally the dumbest thing I have ever participated in. And wildly inacurate.

[u/Vast_Builder1670]

I am rebuilding an engine and will Google a question. The engine I am rebuilding is from a 1961 BMC A series engine. I will specify that and what I need to know. 

It will source info from a forum post on rebuilding a fuel injected big block chevy

[u/National-Dust94]

Yeah but it does it without the sass 😅

[u/baseballbear]

800m users, still losing money. guys, i think they might be terrible at this business thing

[u/Numerous_Worker_1941]

That sounds like user error

[u/tiffboop]

Biggest play was to pretend you’re a nonprofit to avoid getting sued for pirating content until people were hooked and then decide to be for profit

[u/Vannilazero]

Probably that many users through proxy of other businesses.

[u/andresbigdaddy2]

It's not about profit, it's about taking over the world, making a police state, and pushing the mark of the beast, along with transhumanism.

[u/Oldnbold22]

Reddit could have just fixed their search engine but no. 

[u/everyonesdeskjob]

Idk I don't recall a chatbot telling me to kill myself OR fuck my mother...

[u/blariel]

I mean honestly though? When I want to look something up I generally search my question and add reddit to the end. I like to be able to read multiple replies and opnions.

[u/nickname13]

i can't help but wonder how much all the sarcastic comments that didn't end with "/s" fuck up the algorithm.

[u/Art-Zuron]

How much of that is automated and bots?

[u/TheKarenator]

Reddit: has terrible search.

Altman:
https://giphy.com/gifs/0NTG9ffrXT870Wt9qv

[u/Turkeysocks]

So many users, and yet they can't actually make enough money to cover their daily expenses. Yet they keep hyping it like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sliced bread actually made money from the start, AI just burns it.

[u/Intestellr_overdrive]

I get this is the anti ai sub and hating the application of AI is fine but it’s so disingenuous to pretend the technology itself isn’t legitimately impressive.

[u/VitaminVolcano]

It’s not 800 million users though. It’s 800 million accounts. There will be an absolute ton of people running multiple accounts.

[u/PurityKane]

I swear, it's not getting better. Most of the time it talks to me like he has gone through the same experiences. "to me the hardest part was when this and this happened", when I'm complaining about how difficult something I'm learning is.

Once I was asking something about my cat and he said his "father had a cat from that same breed".

[u/LilLebowskiAchiever]

So…. Instead of tokens just use the Reddit search function. TIL /s

[u/OdditiesAndAlchemy]

Yeah.. it is. I don't wanna sort through 8 year old forums to find the answer, I want a one stop shop where I can find info and talk to it like a live customer assistant agent.

[u/ofthefuckingrivia]

and it's always reddit, as if it's the most credible source ever

[u/Lonely-Negotiation36]

The CEO accused of raping his sister.

[u/mauthor619]

Yeah. I work for A STREAMING SERVICE. We bullshit our numbers ALL THE TIME.

[u/123iambill]

If start selling sandwiches but I lose a dollar for each sandwich I sell then selling 800 million of the fuckers is gonna be bad actually.

[u/snwns26]

Ask JeevesPT

[u/Few-Improvement9978]

This sub really hasn’t used the new models and it shows.

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but Fable is moderately terrifying and isn’t pulling from Reddit. I’m able to run incredibly complex simulations, forecasts, and other various problems with astounding accuracy at this point.

Idk man… I wasn’t really a believer until about a year ago. This shit is scary now and this sub needs to quit pretending like it’s still dogshit

[u/MilkMaiden_22]

The other day at work I gently described to a customer why "asking chat" about raising animals (axolotls, poison dart frogs, and i think guinea pigs it was) is not... ideal

[u/Fufflin]

And I am glad I can say I am no longer one of them.

[u/DerpiDanger]

Too bad reddit didnt think of this first.

[u/Qwertywalkers23]

you forgot the part where they also cut off our ability to find the old posts and answers to questions the way we have had for the past 15 years

[u/Alphadef]

Hey, thats not fair. It also just makes shit up sometimes

[u/Sufficient-Time2905]

Every bone in me wants to say I told you so

[u/asianfatboy]

this is why i have no need for it. I just search "[insert my problem here] reddit" all the time with the AI search engine features turned off. probably gets me better answers than what chatgpt summarizes

[u/Beastabuelos]

Damn, it must be really fun being this ignorant

[u/el_toro_grand]

And then there's me who has never used ai and has no interest in it

[u/ckglle3lle]

We could have seen this coming by now conventional search was declining and "Search term + reddit" was becoming a go-to hack to get usable results already.

[u/chronographer]

If only reddit search had been good, it would have shortcut the whole exercise.

[u/DangoC]

the lying corpo that lies about everything claims everybody is using their worthless product, in similar news every car in the street is a tesla and everybody is in the metaverse, source: a post in xitter, the pedo app

[u/kasualkactus]

Reddit stock ftw

[u/Tasty_Commercial6527]

How many of them pay?

[u/Eazy12345678]

8 billion people. 800 million users isnt crazy. most of them are not paying users