Comment on ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on people saying 'please' and 'thank you', but Sam Altman says it's worth it

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blind3rdeye@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

My point was that “lose money on every prompt” would be true in a technical sense regardless of how much people were paying for a subscription. The subscription money is money in, and the cost of calculations is money out. It’s still money out regardless of what is coming in.

As for whether the business is profitable or not, it’s not so easy to tell unless you’re an insider. Companies like this basically never make a ‘profit’ on paper, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t enriching themselves. They are counting their own pay as part of the costs, and they set their pay to whatever they like. They are also counting various research and expansion efforts as part of the cost. So yeah, they might not have any excess money to pay dividends to shareholders, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t profitable.

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