And they're still burning billions with no end in sight.

Are they losing billions on training or inference? If their current products - ChatGPT and the API - are profitable ie the inference cost is less than they charge, they have a long term sustainable business.

With other providers giving away similar products for free (Google AI Studio, DeepSeek et al) right now, I'm not sure that counts as commercial success when it is not sustainable.

The same is happening in enterprise tier products, Copilot 365 is still an extra SKU to count while Google Gemini Advanced has been integrated into the Workspace offering (i.e. they actually force you for an upsell of ~20% per user license for something we didn't ask, but I digress). At least that's a better alternative that paying +20 USD per license.

Prices need to and will go down, and business models will have to change and they are already doing so. But I'm not sure if OpenAI is really ready for that.

Out of curiosity, I just downloaded DeepSeek.

I gave it an easy one, “How many of the actors from the original Star Trek are still alive”. It gave me accurate information as of its training cut off date. But ChatGPT automatically did a web search to validate its answer. I had to choose the search option for it to look up later info.

With ChatGPT even when it doesn’t do a web search automatically, I can either tell it to “validate this” or put in my prompt “validate all answers by doing a web lookup”.

Then I gave it a simple compounding interest problem with monthly payments and wanted a month by month breakdown. DeepSeek used its multi step reasoning like o1 and was slower. ChatGPT 4o just created a Python script and used its internal Python interpreter.

Then DeepSeek started timing out.

This is the presentation of “what are some of the best places to eat in Chicago?”

https://chatgpt.com/share/6799510f-f4a8-8010-b80d-100c95d36d...

It doesn’t show on the shared link. But in the app it gives you a map of the restaurants or you can choose a list.

I can’t share a conversation with DeepSeek (?). But suffice it to say, the interface wasn’t as good.

I’m not saying the underlying technology of DeepSeek isn’t “good enough”. But the end user product is severely lacking.

That doesn't make them profitable though. They spend billions.

I meant 10 million paying subscribers not 10 million dollars. I put the dollar sign there by mistake. That’s $2.4 billion in revenue and growing not counting API customers.

The question is whether ChatGPT (the product) and running thr API is profitable or at at least whether the trend is that cost are coming down.

Right, but they're still considerably more according to what I've seen.