Comment by runako

> If you discount R&D and "sales and marketing"

If you discount sales & marketing, they will start losing enterprise deals (like the US government). The lack of a free tier will impact consumer/prosumer uptake (free usage usually comes out of the sales & marketing budget).

If you discount R&D, there will be no point to the business in 12 months or so. Other foundation models will eclipse them and some open source models will likely reach parity.

Both of these costs are likely to increase rather than decrease over time.

> ChatGPT is already a new default "pane of glass" for normal people.

OpenAI should certainly hope this is not true, because then the only way to scale the business is to get all those "normal" people to spend a lot more.