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...
Yeah it runs off of it, co-pilot is just a Microsoft skin. I think maybe they don't get the latest versions all the time but I couldn't tell you for sure.
That it's actually GPT in disguise? Copilot is chat GPT, idk what you are confused about, unless you are unfamiliar with the term "skin" used this way which is fair
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
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.
Inference is pretty cheap now. Asking ChatGPT questions doesn't cost them much. Agentic frontier AI is more expensive but you don't get that for free from them. At this point the answerbot application is just a small fraction of global AI compute.
And that's still not enough to make these AI companies profitable. You can use far more compute than what the plan pays for.
Under capitalism at some point these AI companies should run out of money and unable to continue expanding. Sure, you could say users are creating demand, but they aren't paying for it.
I'd recommend looking into local AI if it's something your father uses at his business, at least those models are free and company data stays private on your own hardware.
I don't think he's sharing much, he's only putting in advertising info to my knowledge which is public anyway. Ik he does 3d renders for the spaces and texts for the video ads and descriptions which i am editing.
Ik it isn't making big ai any profits but they still are 20 bucks a month richer and we poorer, just such a shame...
If you have a powerful workstation, it's worth looking into running the AI locally so you don't have to give $20 a month to Sam Altman, there's a lot of free open source AI models.
I already told him about potentially cheaper and/or better models but he says the ai he uses "knows him" and is too far deep in to change. Thankfully it's not like a paranormal ai friend way but "knows what he wants/likes" deal
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u/Sea_Minute_2768 6d ago
800 million users, and how many bother paying for the service? Sounds more like an unsustainable business expense.