Here's an idea for OpenAI: please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT and consider us your customers, and not as the "product" like Google does. As long as Google's real users are the advertisers, they will inevitably be worse than anyone who puts the quality of the search result as their product's primary objective.
I'm all for this, but just to give you an example:
I know someone who read a web forum. People wanted an ad free paid version for years, so he eventually added it at a cost of $15 per year. Most users balked at the price. 'Why did you add this if it was so expensive'?
Well it turns out he actually earned more revenue from advertising to frequent users. He was actually losing money on each person who paid, and it was still too expensive!
My point being: I think we might underestimate how much our attention is worth. Most people are not willing to pay as much to avoid an ad as an advertise would pay for you to view it.
From Kagi.com's pricing page [1]: "Kagi has no ads and is fully supported only by its users." At $10/month. (disclaimer: I haven't used it myself yet).
Does anyone have experience with Kagi or some background how they pull this off?
That's interesting. Do you have an idea at what price offering a sponsored free search engine would become profitable? $15 per year seems very low and I would be happy to pay considerably more than that.
A relevant factor is market segmentation - the average ad revenue is a bad target for such a price, since the people who are willing to pay $x/month for an ad-free version are the ones who are much more valuable to advertisers than the average.
People are building a lot of services off of their (paid) API using text-davinci-003 and a few others which have very similar capabilties.
I am hoping that ChatGPT will also become an API but using the existing ones its relatively trivial to build services. The main challenge for me is that the Codex API has a very tiny rate limit. But anyway text-davinci-003 is very similar in capabilities and output to ChatGPT.
I asked ChatGPT about a local notorious politician who was a machine-politics mayor who was a crook, racist and all around scoundrel.
ChatGPT used the local political party “hall of fame” to describe him as a progressive champion of human rights and good government. If I were Exxon, I’d pay a lot to be the source of knowledge for the AI.
Google has some transparency as far as the source. The AI gets to bury the source.
Are you certain that's true? An OpenAI dev said that individual user costs amount to pennies, if you charge them dollars then you're already covering rent.
