OpenAI's $500 billion valuation is based on the assumption they will have 2 billion - yes, 2 billion - paid-up users. www.wired.com/story/openai...
Replies
Do we know if “monetized users” includes users monetized through ads?
aug 20, 2025, 4:41 pm • 2 0 • view
It’s weird because right now there is no measured increase in productivity (except in certain niche examples) due to AI, AND the technology seems non proprietary (it’s a commodity). a monumental breakthrough that is understood well enough to be patented or have huge first mover advantage is needed
aug 20, 2025, 1:44 pm • 4 0 • view
People seem to be thinking this means I am in favor of these expenditures. I am not and think they are a boondoggle. Was trying to make the point that the current technological state falls short from paying off the investment by orders of magnitude. I doubt it will catch up.
aug 21, 2025, 4:34 am • 0 0 • view
Or... we could just accept that this is all unnecessary crap and turn our attention as a society to solving problems that actually matter. There are certainly plenty of them on our planet right now.
aug 20, 2025, 4:29 pm • 3 0 • view
Not sure what you mean by 'OR' when I was undermining the stated business case by explaining how the current environment in no way supports it. Not sure who you are angry at but I'm pretty sure it's not me.
aug 20, 2025, 4:34 pm • 0 0 • view
Not sure what you're getting at or insinuating by claiming that I'm angry. In your last line, you suggested that "a monumental breakthrough that is understood well enough to be patented or have huge first mover advantage is needed"... and I'm merely counter-arguing that we don't need any of this.
aug 20, 2025, 5:32 pm • 0 0 • view
They were talking about the business requirements to recoup the investment. I was saying what would be required (which is not on the horizon). Your response might have been appropriate to the OG post but not sure how it applies to mine.
aug 20, 2025, 11:18 pm • 0 0 • view
You said what was required to recoup the investment in a way that made it sound as though reaching that point would be a positive. Thus my response to you is perfectly appropriate. I'm arguing that none of this is positive and that they'll cook our planet before they reach that point.
aug 20, 2025, 11:41 pm • 0 0 • view
If you didn't mean for it to come off as a positive, you might wish to be more explicit about that in the future because it didn't read that way. And if you were being positive, well... my response to you just becomes even more appropriate. Have a nice day, though.
aug 20, 2025, 11:41 pm • 0 0 • view
You too. If you didn't mean to sound annoyed at _me_ then you might want to rethink as well. We can all live and learn.
aug 21, 2025, 12:42 am • 0 0 • view
I didn't say it was positive. I said what would be needed to accomplish that (which I think is impossible). I think the effort is wasteful and stupid. A dispassionate business analysis doesn't imply agreement or disagreement.
aug 21, 2025, 12:41 am • 0 0 • view
...I may have forgotten to pay my $10 a month Facebook and Google bills for the last 20 years. fuck
aug 20, 2025, 4:06 pm • 3 0 • view
This is crazy talk.
aug 20, 2025, 1:44 pm • 3 0 • view
This is why they’re trying to force it into everything, including but not limited to academic and healthcare settings. It’s to grow the user base without giving anyone a choice in the matter.
aug 21, 2025, 1:18 am • 0 0 • view
Investors are using ChatGPT to forecast ChatGPT revenues to drive further investment to make Chat GPT more powerful. Seems like Chat GPT is more self aware than the investors.
aug 20, 2025, 1:22 pm • 31 0 • view
Mister Chad G. Petey.
aug 21, 2025, 6:31 am • 2 0 • view
I cannot get over this number. That's more than the number of Catholics that exist. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi...
aug 21, 2025, 11:36 am • 3 0 • view
Or that's assuming massive amounts of advertising - given the reference to Facebook & Google who mostly monetise their users that way
aug 20, 2025, 10:22 am • 4 0 • view
aug 20, 2025, 1:23 pm • 1 0 • view
That was exactly what I picked up on. And not just like... traditional ads. I'm thinking query/prompt modification.
aug 20, 2025, 3:50 pm • 0 0 • view
Who the fuck is paying Google or Facebook 5 dollars a month?
aug 20, 2025, 12:08 pm • 5 0 • view
Every user. They all look at tons of ads. Ads are extremely valuable! That's why they use the term "monetize" and not "subscribe"
aug 20, 2025, 1:21 pm • 6 0 • view
Ok, that's definitely not the same thing as me spending money. Sounds like these dudes are making up numbers again.
aug 21, 2025, 1:19 am • 0 0 • view
Scrolling past ads and having to watch them before the chatbot answers your question (poorly) are different propositions. FB is there to fuck around and waste time on. ChatGPT is supposed to be a tool that helps people get shit done. If you use it to generate code or copy, ads are a dealbreaker
aug 20, 2025, 4:48 pm • 1 0 • view
Meh
aug 20, 2025, 4:51 pm • 0 0 • view
I honestly don't know what that meh means... Are you saying you'd be fine getting served ads by an LLM?
aug 20, 2025, 4:53 pm • 0 0 • view
More about the concept of chatGPT "getting shit done".
aug 20, 2025, 5:27 pm • 1 0 • view
My apologies, I must've been distracted when I typed that out. I meant "getting shitty things done"
aug 20, 2025, 5:34 pm • 1 0 • view
😂
aug 20, 2025, 6:34 pm • 0 0 • view
Chat GPT is a tool to make open AI money. I’m talking about you asking “plan me a trip in Greece” and it tells you to stay at a hotel that paid to get mentioned. Or you ask, “who should I vote for?” And whichever candidate has given more gets elevated. What prevents this from happening?
aug 20, 2025, 6:20 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah shit that's pretty insidious.
aug 20, 2025, 6:40 pm • 0 0 • view
I’m just imagining people asking grok who to vote for
aug 20, 2025, 7:05 pm • 2 0 • view
I can't remember if it was Iceland or Norway that had an election completely swung by everyone using a website that let you pick your positions then told you who to vote for, resulting in a minor candidate destroying everyone, but that happened, so it's a potential danger for sure.
aug 20, 2025, 7:28 pm • 0 0 • view
It's also why ad blockers (currently) exist. People don't like ads. The big companies that need to monetize users hate ad blockers & own enough legislators they might be able to do something about that Remember folks - if you're not paying for a product, you are the product
aug 20, 2025, 4:03 pm • 6 0 • view
one fourth of the world's population is going to pay for Google search but worse?
aug 20, 2025, 4:46 pm • 2 0 • view
Ah. I see someone is confusing a spreadsheet calculation with a business model again. Underpants>Question Mark>Profit!!
aug 20, 2025, 10:03 am • 29 1 • view
This is literally the episode of The Office where they realize The Michael Scott Paper Company is going to go bankrupt because their calculations for growth weren't correct
aug 20, 2025, 8:00 pm • 4 0 • view
Lol at comparing their customer base to people who use Google and Facebook, two websites that have notoriously been toiling for several decades now to find some way to monetize their services, which users continue to resist and thus the only viable revenue stream they have is "ads."
aug 20, 2025, 2:57 pm • 9 0 • view
They want a quarter of Earth's population as paid users!? What world are they living in?
aug 20, 2025, 2:31 pm • 2 0 • view
They want neofeudalism.
aug 21, 2025, 4:03 am • 1 0 • view
Is this before or after they build the Dyson sphere to power the data centers?
aug 20, 2025, 4:15 pm • 5 0 • view
aug 21, 2025, 9:10 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh we're in a BUBBLE bubble
aug 20, 2025, 11:38 pm • 6 0 • view
All users, everywhere.
aug 21, 2025, 2:40 pm • 0 0 • view
"I'm a Nigerian prince willing to help you invest at that level! But first..."
aug 21, 2025, 12:05 am • 0 0 • view
To paraphrase this exchange with Altman, "How will AI generate revenue?" "No clue, but the AI will figure it out for us eventually." www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQU...
aug 20, 2025, 2:52 pm • 7 0 • view
It doesn't say "paid-up" it says "monetizes", and then references Facebook. OpenAI is gonna serve ads inside the LLM results, especially the chatbots.
aug 20, 2025, 1:19 pm • 6 0 • view
ads aren't enough to pay for the cost they incur, its not profitable www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/...
aug 20, 2025, 3:54 pm • 5 0 • view
What bubble?!?!
aug 20, 2025, 2:33 pm • 0 0 • view
It's not like it matters. When they inevitably fall comically short of this valuation, they'll just boost the numbers with bots or simply by lying their asses off and investors will continue throwing money at them.
aug 20, 2025, 2:53 pm • 11 0 • view
That's what I was thinking too. Bots are the only reason Twitter and FB are still active/relevant imo
aug 20, 2025, 3:16 pm • 6 0 • view
Facebook is massively profitable, bots or not. You can make ad revenue from having bots count as views, but your agent found to get $5 a month from bot accounts buying subscriptions.
aug 20, 2025, 4:42 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah, Zuck never told advertisers to go fuck themselves. Not that it makes him a hero, by any means...he's still evil as fuck, but he's approaching things differently than Musk.
aug 20, 2025, 8:06 pm • 1 0 • view
Hence no strong backlash or massive protests against Zuck
aug 20, 2025, 8:09 pm • 2 0 • view
Bot use on most platforms is actually very low, only ticking up a little bit during election season. On Twitter, however, it makes up 75% of traffic.
aug 20, 2025, 8:04 pm • 5 1 • view
That makes perfect sense lol.
aug 20, 2025, 8:07 pm • 1 0 • view
$5 x 2bn users = $10bn a month. If this is ad revenue, it equals Facebook's. But users have only so many eye-minutes to take in ads (that they obviously don't want anyway). If they're watching ChatGPT ads, they're seeing fewer Facebook ads in turn. The cake isn't infinite.
aug 21, 2025, 7:15 am • 1 0 • view
So, VR headsets or google glass. Got it.
aug 20, 2025, 1:43 pm • 3 0 • view
1.5 billion of whom will be bots running on AI.
aug 20, 2025, 11:05 am • 40 0 • view
They don’t believe this one bit. It’s lies. Deception. Grift. If we had a functioning regulator…
aug 20, 2025, 2:35 pm • 2 0 • view
That says “monetized” so they are including ads.
aug 21, 2025, 11:13 am • 0 0 • view
And selling our innermost confessions to the Russians.
aug 21, 2025, 11:14 am • 0 0 • view
1/4th of the earths population as their user base? Child's play, I'm sure. There are a lot of suckers born every minute.
aug 20, 2025, 10:50 am • 21 0 • view
Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users.
aug 20, 2025, 12:59 pm • 0 0 • view
The way Facebook and OpenAI's services are used is extremely different. You are not getting half of India's population to use AI services in any reality. Nor are people in underdeveloped countries gonna pay $5USD/month for AI nonsense.
aug 20, 2025, 3:52 pm • 6 0 • view
bsky.app/profile/svun...
aug 20, 2025, 4:41 pm • 6 0 • view
Lol dude blocked me for being right
aug 20, 2025, 5:22 pm • 1 0 • view
There are countries where Facebook is basically the only accessible thing on the internet because they paid for their infrastructure.
aug 20, 2025, 2:01 pm • 2 0 • view
Yeah... They negotiated for 'Facebook Basics' to be zero-rated in many undeveloped countries to 'give more people internet access'. But it made them reliant on Facebook's digital infrastructure. Also, it's lack of moderation enabled pro-genocide propaganda to rapidly spread in 2016 Myanmar:
aug 21, 2025, 4:22 am • 1 0 • view
I guess if you include bot accounts, sure. Not just spam bots anymore, either, but also official bot “user accounts” (Surely the sign of a platform with billions of active human users, right…?) www.emarketer.com/content/face...
aug 20, 2025, 2:48 pm • 1 0 • view
Facebook is useful and has been around for 20 years.
aug 20, 2025, 1:23 pm • 0 0 • view
I've never found a use for Facebook.
aug 20, 2025, 1:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Well, I guess a couple of billion people disagree with you.
aug 20, 2025, 1:33 pm • 1 0 • view
and yet you accept their number. fwiw, i didn't think my lousy posts were actually viewed by hundreds of thousands of actual people on the other site either.
aug 20, 2025, 1:29 pm • 3 0 • view
And FREE. Kinda the key thing for MAUs.
aug 20, 2025, 3:51 pm • 1 0 • view
Facebook also doesn't charge users $5 a month
aug 20, 2025, 1:10 pm • 10 0 • view
They make double that per user.
aug 20, 2025, 1:15 pm • 1 0 • view
oh, well I'd love to see which ad company will be paying his company ~20 billion a year. they sound like a better investment than snake oil that'll need cold fusion to work at scale
aug 20, 2025, 1:21 pm • 7 0 • view
facebook had 164.5b total revenue in 2024. it would have to be 360b to make $10/user/month. 164 actually puts it under 5/user/month so a free service with like 20 yrs of brand recognition doesn't even meet the openai's paid service expectations
aug 20, 2025, 11:46 pm • 4 0 • view
I would really like to see the break down of that. (Hilariously the second Google hit for this question produces 12 billion monthly users - 1.5 times the number of people on Earth!)
aug 20, 2025, 1:06 pm • 22 0 • view
tbf, one "person" can be multiple "users" (their personal account and a business one, for example), but a lot of them are going to be bots, mass-produced scammers and other forms of junk
aug 20, 2025, 3:31 pm • 13 0 • view
Oh please, and how many of those "users" are not bot-farms, influencer "buy followers" accounts, or actual gov't-sanctioned propaganda accounts.
aug 20, 2025, 6:12 pm • 2 0 • view
No idea, perhaps you could do some research and tell me?
aug 20, 2025, 6:14 pm • 0 0 • view
Are you going to pay me for my time, energy, and internet use? I have bills to pay.
aug 20, 2025, 6:16 pm • 1 0 • view
You're the one who wanted to know the percentage.
aug 20, 2025, 6:24 pm • 0 0 • view
I was asking rhetorically. That's my bad, I forget every now and then, that things like this don't translate well without tone of voice.
aug 20, 2025, 6:30 pm • 3 0 • view
None of them are paying subscribers
aug 20, 2025, 1:24 pm • 6 0 • view
And?
aug 20, 2025, 1:29 pm • 0 0 • view
Not quite. This is monetization, which doesn’t require paying up. Could be ad revenue. It’s at least not galactically implausible.
aug 20, 2025, 11:59 am • 8 0 • view
it's very funny you think that 2 billion people will regularly use an ad-stuffed ChatGPT
aug 20, 2025, 2:35 pm • 38 0 • view
One reason people like it right now is that it just gives you the results straight up like Old Google.
aug 21, 2025, 11:15 am • 3 0 • view
I don’t. I’m just saying it’s not totally outside the realm of the possible.
aug 21, 2025, 11:24 am • 0 0 • view
Aaah, the good ol' corporations-subsidizing-other-corporations scheme
aug 20, 2025, 2:30 pm • 5 0 • view
Always a winner.
aug 20, 2025, 2:51 pm • 2 0 • view
🤣
aug 20, 2025, 11:00 pm • 0 0 • view
No biggie, just 1/4 of the entire population of the world. Disregard that 44% of the world lives in poverty.
aug 21, 2025, 5:28 am • 1 0 • view
Predicting a quarter of the world will subscribe is quite optimistic Basically everyone in the world making over $10 a day would have to shell out $5 a month
aug 20, 2025, 4:27 pm • 2 0 • view
I look forward to the day Disney and Comcast eat OpenAI for dinner after they are done with their MidJourney appetizer.
aug 20, 2025, 4:04 pm • 0 0 • view
They learned nothing from WeWork.
aug 21, 2025, 3:09 am • 1 0 • view
That's at $5 a month while their lowest tier is currently $20. So it's also equivalent to 500m paid users at that tier. But they also have higher tiers, including enterprise customers, which pay higher rates.
aug 20, 2025, 12:47 pm • 1 0 • view
None of which are turning a profit, BTW!
aug 20, 2025, 1:42 pm • 2 0 • view
I don't have access to their financial statements, so I can't comment on their unit economics. My main question is how much they're spending on R&D to use up the revenue. But it's likely the same reason Amazon was unprofitable for a decade.
aug 20, 2025, 1:50 pm • 1 0 • view
Amazon were creating a lot of permanent infrastructure though - warehouses etc. data centres take longer to build, cost a LOT more to run, and all the chips wear or age out relatively fast. So it's not a one-off cost, it's a MASSIVE cost followed by still-huge running costs
aug 21, 2025, 11:36 am • 1 0 • view
Wait until ads get into the LLMs. Why use the term monetize and reference Facebook instead of just saying subscribe?
aug 20, 2025, 1:21 pm • 2 0 • view
‘Monetize’ means the free (or almost free) users become the product.
aug 20, 2025, 1:43 pm • 3 0 • view
Ads getting into the LLMs will wreck things, in my opinion. Luckily, there isn't much of a moat surrounding LLMs. You can download, fine-tune, and run a model on your own machine now, and this only gets easier as hardware improves and models get more efficient.
aug 20, 2025, 1:24 pm • 0 0 • view
People don't even have their email resident on their machines, I don't think they're going to host their own LLMs. I would bet on ads getting into LLMs at a similar rate that they infiltrated search results. Facebook succeeded because it was ridiculously simple. Fine-tuning a LLM? not simple
aug 20, 2025, 1:28 pm • 2 0 • view
All you need is one guy in your city willing to charge 10% less and it's gone. There is no moat anything can pop up. AI coops. Hobbiests who offer it for fun. Companies rolling their own internally. If it's something you only need a little know-how to do, it's not a viable business.
aug 20, 2025, 2:34 pm • 1 0 • view
If that’s true, I should short Meta and everyone else betting huge on AI. They’re getting people hooked. People hooked on a product are hugely profitable
aug 20, 2025, 4:27 pm • 0 0 • view
Tell that Microsoft's Office suite. It's a juggernaut in the corporate space (usually legacy companies), but everyone else is using google docs. Because it's free. It's not as good, but it's goos enough. That's OpenAI in the near future, except they don't have multiple revenue streams to on fall on
aug 20, 2025, 9:48 pm • 0 0 • view
That's why OpenAI has to be more of a product business in my opinion, rather than just pumping out raw models. And that's kind of what we're seeing. GPT-5 is a system that uses an LLM in its center, but has a bunch of tools ir can use
aug 20, 2025, 3:34 pm • 0 0 • view
This feels like a naive take. OpenAI has billions in capital. Looking at how Meta operates, OpenAI has the money to crush small competition on the large scale. No company wants to buy, spin up, and run/train their own LLM. I've sat in on those meetings. They want a service with a set bottom line.
aug 20, 2025, 3:58 pm • 1 0 • view
Nothing beats free. That's why google docs ate Microsoft Word's lunch. Google didn't bother selling Word and anyone who hangs onto the idea of selling an AI model is not going to be a business in the long run. It's too easy to spin these things up. The open models are good enough for most.
aug 20, 2025, 9:46 pm • 0 0 • view
You just made my point overall in the thread. Google is still profitable even though access to Docs is free. They extract their monetization in other ways than a subscription. Also, it took *Google* to take a chunk of market share out of MS. Not a couple people in a garage.
aug 20, 2025, 10:11 pm • 1 0 • view
Docs a neat funnel into Google's actual business which us advertising. OpenAI is calling AI its business. Good luck with trying to sell ads when it's competing against Google and others more entrenched in the market with a product anyone can replicate. That's what is meant by they have no moat
aug 20, 2025, 10:50 pm • 1 0 • view
ChatGPT isn't anywhere near market dominance where they can rely on brand power alone. Users don't care what AI thing they use. Anyone is capable of eating their lunch and we're already seeing the beginning of diversification in AI product use.
aug 20, 2025, 10:50 pm • 0 0 • view
Ah yes the average user is totally going to download their own LLM, configure and tune it and not just... click on the button on their phone. Real XKCD "Average Familiarity" vibes there.
![XKCD cartoon: [Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars. Cueball: And quartz, of course. Ponytail: Of course. [Caption below the panel] Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hstzydtnwyvh5cbjpzsnzkni/bafkreieikmvuvpb3ip2hugpb3hlhdz2y6ydd5xourylww7iwcpimiqicv4@jpeg)
aug 20, 2025, 3:56 pm • 2 0 • view
Yeah, but also a company like DeepSeek can just blow up your business model for fun if yuu get too exploitive. Harder with social media since it requires a network effect.
aug 20, 2025, 4:09 pm • 0 0 • view
Five bucks is half what Facebook and Google charge? Huh? Zero divided by two only equals five if you've asked ChatGPT to work it out for you!
aug 20, 2025, 9:39 pm • 1 0 • view
And if a million people bought my book, I'd be a millionaire :D
aug 21, 2025, 5:32 pm • 0 0 • view
As they sunset working technologies and gatekeep the few remaining options, this may well become a reality. #WorstTimeline
aug 20, 2025, 1:14 pm • 2 0 • view
If 2 billion people give me $250 each, I'll have $500 billion! That's pure profit!
aug 20, 2025, 10:42 pm • 0 0 • view
Sure, pick the vegetable with about the quickest spoiling rate, great example
aug 20, 2025, 6:56 pm • 2 0 • view
Simply start farming tomatoes on an industrial scale
aug 20, 2025, 4:17 pm • 0 0 • view
Dude clearly has never grown tomatoes.
aug 23, 2025, 12:58 pm • 1 0 • view
sold too early! Plant those 3.9 million plants, take the new tomatoes ,and do it thrice over, and you get 1.5 trillion tomatoes. Make tomatoes the new currency. You are the world's first tomatillionaire.
aug 21, 2025, 12:47 am • 4 0 • view
that post would have been pure genius if it had been an intentional joke
aug 20, 2025, 8:07 pm • 6 0 • view
...that guy is serious? He really thinks this is possible? Does he really think that since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, since before written history, that no one thought of this before?
aug 20, 2025, 8:39 pm • 8 0 • view
I'm not a huge fan of farmers as a class but I really really want to see this chucklefuck go up to one of them and try to explain that the reason they aren't rolling in infinite money is because they don't have that sigma male grindset. I expect manure will be involved in the final result.
aug 20, 2025, 8:48 pm • 5 0 • view
YEP.
aug 20, 2025, 8:54 pm • 0 0 • view
as an actual fruit farmer that one always cracked me up. im like. ok what about the other tomato farmers. you think they will just stare at me as i plant tomatoes. and where is all the land for me to plant tomatoes in? what if i can't buy any land with soil i can use to grow tomatoes? so ignorant.
aug 20, 2025, 11:02 am • 200 0 • view
You don't need soil, just plant the tomatoes!!! The other farmers will stare in awe, incapable of moving due to your superb work ethics!!
aug 20, 2025, 5:07 pm • 4 0 • view
If you plant them on mirrors, you double your yield. Pro tip.
aug 20, 2025, 5:15 pm • 6 0 • view
Damn, look at these sigma moves!
aug 20, 2025, 5:44 pm • 2 0 • view
While I’m positive he has never thought about the logistics even once, I think if pressed, he’d suggest land is like data storage in that it become exponentially more efficient over time. 6 months from now you’ll be able to grow a million tomatoes in like 4 square feet. I call it tech bro Lysenkoism
aug 21, 2025, 3:13 am • 3 0 • view
I’m no expert but I’m fairly certain tomatoes have an expiration date as well. I’m sure it’s possible to shift a million of them through the Dollar Tomato Store (which magically exists) before they spoil though.
aug 20, 2025, 1:25 pm • 75 0 • view
haha. I’m a tomato sauce magnate now. (canning is free right?)
aug 20, 2025, 10:59 pm • 2 0 • view
At least the birds and bugs will have a good time eating all those tomatoes.
aug 20, 2025, 1:39 pm • 45 0 • view
The birds will pay with seeds! More seeds means more plants means more profit! It’s an infinite money machine!
aug 20, 2025, 1:41 pm • 42 0 • view
I work in stockfeed, and that tweet gets funnier and funnier the longer I've been in the agriculture industry. No thought at all about the input costs: land, nutrients, water, labour, transport, storage, quality control. Confidence and stupidity are quite the combination.
aug 20, 2025, 4:31 pm • 19 0 • view
And on top of all that, the idea that people will pay $1 for one tomato.
aug 20, 2025, 4:34 pm • 12 0 • view
That's about the going rate in Australia, if we're talking hydroponic or vine-ripened. But either of those options create a whole new set of challenges and costs. Sorry for stepping on your salient point, I'm just upset thinking about how fucking expensive tomatoes are at the moment :)
aug 20, 2025, 5:37 pm • 1 0 • view
That's less than the cost of an heirloom tomato here in the Philly suburbs. I wouldn't pay a dime for a "standard" tomato that's durable enough to ship to a regular grocery store.
aug 20, 2025, 5:46 pm • 0 0 • view
Sure, rub it in. I'm picturing you posting this from a bathtub full of ripe mini-romanos that you're flame-roasting over a pile of smouldering hundred-dollar bills, you sonofabitch.
aug 20, 2025, 5:51 pm • 1 0 • view
I live in Brandywine territory. They're not cheap, but they're plentiful from the Amish farms. They're also huge, so you better have a lot of sandwiches or salads right away! I like them for caprese salad with local fresh mozzarella. The Philadelphia region is a foodie paradise.
aug 20, 2025, 6:00 pm • 0 0 • view
I live in Australia. The produce is generally good, but might as well be made of gold at the price we pay. "Truss tomatoes" aka hydroponic tomatoes sold on the vine cost between $3-5/lb here. Heirlooms are closer to $8/lb. You can buy Australian wine in Philly cheaper than I can at the vineyard.
aug 20, 2025, 6:11 pm • 1 0 • view
Sheesh. I would hope everyone who has a yard grows their own? I expect if the various subsidies given to farms here were suspended (just waiting for the shitheads in charge to do it), our food prices would shoot up. Prices do rise and fall seasonally here.
aug 20, 2025, 6:17 pm • 0 0 • view
There are a couple of months of relief when every second house in the Italian neighbourhoods put up their signs "si vendi pomodoro per salsa" and I can grab amazing romanos for cents on the dollar.
aug 20, 2025, 6:21 pm • 1 0 • view
It's the hallmark of someone who never set foot in a grocery store or farmer's market and doesn't cook. In SF back in the mid 2010s, you could buy an entire flat of tomatoes (end of season in Sept. to be sure) for $10. They were DAMN good too. I used to can them and cook with them all winter.
aug 20, 2025, 8:05 pm • 3 0 • view
You plant them in a Dyson sphere, obviously.
aug 21, 2025, 3:41 am • 2 0 • view
These bozos confidently talk about entire professions as if they have the baby logic of Animal Crossing
aug 21, 2025, 2:39 am • 12 0 • view
Lmao when ChatGPT always makes errors with its sources and can't ever get a timeline correct.
aug 20, 2025, 8:19 pm • 0 0 • view
Hope it comes to pass that they don't get to steal the work of others and their entire business model crumbles.
aug 21, 2025, 5:41 am • 2 0 • view
Couldn't this be said about most stocks? Investors inflating price for retail to buy the pump, short back down and eventually buy out an ownership position leaving fractional shares only for the plebs retirement accounts.
aug 20, 2025, 9:40 am • 8 1 • view
Tulips.
aug 21, 2025, 12:31 am • 1 0 • view
To be specific, it says "monetizes each user", nothing about a subscription. I can easily see a world where OpenAI sells query injection "ads" to people. You put in your query, and the "ad" injects "Work in BlamCo Mac & Cheezus into your answer. Make the answer feel like part of the user query".
aug 20, 2025, 3:48 pm • 6 1 • view
I'd use an LLM to help generate code or content for my professional website if it was injecting paid advertising into the output. Sorry, I mean, "not a fucking chance I'd use an LLM to help generate code or content for my professional website if it was injecting paid advertising into the output"
aug 20, 2025, 4:52 pm • 3 0 • view
I hear you but if it was subtle enough... Or if you are a vibe coder and know nothing about coding... How would you know?
aug 20, 2025, 5:24 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh sure, no argument from me that this would work on plenty of folks, but you'd only need one person to catch it. In Australia we had a scandal some years ago over a couple of high profile talk radio stars doing op-eds that were, in reality, undisclosed paid ads. It didn't go well for those involved
aug 20, 2025, 5:29 pm • 0 0 • view
At the end of some outputs, it asks you relevant-ish questions like “Would you like me to make an outline” or “Can I make a comparison matrix” etc - it’s a short walk from that to tagging “How about you go make some Totino’s™️ Pizza Rolls®️ while I whip up an org chart for you, champ?” onto the end.
aug 20, 2025, 4:24 pm • 2 0 • view
Or like... "Always frame your answer in a way that is actively beneficial to/endorses policy from Candidate X running for Seat Y" or whatever. And we know that can happen because Grok does it (poorly).
aug 20, 2025, 4:33 pm • 3 0 • view
There's another reason... Suppose I sold you 20% of my 1M usd co for 200k. I don't *give* you my shares, that's not how it works. The company clicks its fingers and *creates* 200k shares so now there are 1.2m shares. Now I go to sell someone else 40%. When the pie grows again, your slice will ...
aug 20, 2025, 10:03 am • 17 0 • view
....shrink proportionally. Unless I value the company at 2M then for the 400k I want, I only have to create 200k shares. You are diluted much less. OpenAI will face rebellion from their shareholders because it NEEDS 500m to survive so to avoid massive dilution and rebellion it NEEDS
aug 20, 2025, 10:07 am • 11 0 • view
...a crazy high valuation. Otherwise it will have to print so many new shares that the earlier investors will own a tiny slice of the company.
aug 20, 2025, 10:08 am • 11 0 • view
And everyone invested NEEDS that valuation to be true, because they’re instantly screwed by the pyramid scheme if it ever drops. Once a critical mass of millions of brainwashed consumers own stock, it becomes too big to fail, and only destroys society and the economy instead of itself until it dies
aug 20, 2025, 9:24 pm • 7 0 • view
And the smart early investors have chosen to sell their stakes to the late investors and run. Welcome to late stage capitalism.... Where 1 in 5 startups succeed but all investments need to return 20%.
aug 20, 2025, 9:58 pm • 6 0 • view
I have the impression that Musk’s main innovation is weaponising this process such that he’s unassailable in his companies. The people who could fire him can’t risk the catastrophic devaluation, so… he stays. I guess the likes of Altman are running a similar operation. Investor/board lock-in.
aug 20, 2025, 10:45 pm • 3 0 • view
Muskrat owns more than 50 of SpaceX and Boring Company... He can do what he pleases with them.... :/
aug 21, 2025, 12:12 am • 2 0 • view
And the board is a revolving door because the prior regime sold out one by one as they realized the trap they were in. The newer blood becomes slowly more dogmatic as reasonable voices leave. This is a good theory, how could we assess the data to draw it out further?
aug 20, 2025, 10:47 pm • 1 0 • view
OpenAI's worth 300 squintillion dollars. Pretty soon, it'll be worth 500 gazillion dollars. Better hop in now while the technology is so promising and definitely not a nuisance before we have 2 bajillion users. Buy now. 400 fucktillion user dollars. Invest in the agentic Jira SAAS agile open source.
aug 21, 2025, 1:11 am • 1 0 • view
They really think 1 in 4 people on the whole planet are gonna pay for this?
aug 20, 2025, 10:21 pm • 3 0 • view
there are about 2 billion gmail users, so it's not totally unrealistic, if you assume ChatGPT dominates the market (which is far from given)
aug 20, 2025, 11:44 am • 0 0 • view
Gmail is free. Imagine trying to convert all those users to paid subscribers.
aug 20, 2025, 11:51 am • 12 0 • view
good point!
aug 20, 2025, 11:52 am • 1 0 • view
I'm not sure there's been any company ever with 2bn paid users. Free, yes; but paid? This would be an incredible feat of... market power, I guess?
aug 20, 2025, 2:27 pm • 0 0 • view
That’s hilarious.
aug 20, 2025, 10:55 pm • 1 0 • view
Hey does this company have any costs? Just wondering!
aug 20, 2025, 5:02 pm • 2 0 • view
Lol
aug 20, 2025, 1:22 pm • 1 0 • view
These ridiculous shell games are so funny. Almost like every tech valuation is just a pump-and-dump scheme with cooperative press. And a million wannabe techbro marks desperate to be left holding the empty bag.
aug 20, 2025, 3:14 pm • 7 1 • view
This isn’t that outlandish honestly
aug 20, 2025, 10:01 am • 0 0 • view
It's 1/4 of the earths population. A fool and his money are soon parted.
aug 20, 2025, 10:52 am • 7 0 • view
That's something like 25% of world population. You're right, it's not outlandish - it's delusional.
aug 20, 2025, 11:00 am • 9 0 • view
Google's ratio of free to paid users is something like 1000 to 1....
aug 20, 2025, 10:04 am • 11 0 • view
And this is approximately one subscription per household across the planet.
aug 20, 2025, 12:44 pm • 2 0 • view
That’s a $5/mo monetization, not just paid subs, so they’re averaging what Google is getting selling your eyeballs and data. This guy is assuming OpenAI is going to have other monetization schemes, not that they’ll get 2 billion paid users
aug 20, 2025, 11:41 am • 0 0 • view
Google have a huge advantage in the space as things move to AR. OpenAI underpinning access to things to take advantage of a platform for $5 might work. I say this as I pay for two services just to store photos 😭
aug 20, 2025, 10:18 am • 0 0 • view
Microsoft office is at 365 million paid users, be for real
aug 20, 2025, 1:11 pm • 4 0 • view
Making $5 from a user paying or selling users data is not that off. Google and meta do it presently
aug 20, 2025, 1:50 pm • 0 0 • view
i think they're already accounting for data sale and adding $5 from the user themself
aug 20, 2025, 1:52 pm • 2 0 • view
OK, I've thought Sam Altman was a moron for a while but now I think I was overestimating his intelligence by a factor of 10. He really is an idiot. No way people are going to pay for this shit. It LITERALLY MAKES STUFF UP THAT IS NOT TRUE. It's not going to cure cancer if it MAKES STUFF UP.
aug 20, 2025, 8:01 pm • 0 0 • view
JFC we have found the mother of all pyramid schemes
aug 20, 2025, 7:06 pm • 3 0 • view
3D TVs. Everyone will want one.
aug 20, 2025, 9:48 am • 133 0 • view
Not as much as they're going to want to wear Google Glass while living in the Metaverse.
aug 20, 2025, 10:46 pm • 1 0 • view
The genius that I am, I saved the glasses from the movie theater rather than returning them and now I live my whole life in 3D. Its awesome.
aug 20, 2025, 11:49 am • 106 2 • view
I laughed out loud from this. Good one.
aug 20, 2025, 1:55 pm • 16 0 • view
Blockchain 3DTVs on the metaverse with a side order of NFTs
aug 20, 2025, 1:15 pm • 12 0 • view
Shut up and take my Crypto!
aug 21, 2025, 1:31 am • 0 0 • view
Maybe not the best comparison, at least 3D TVs still function as TVs. ChatGPT doesn't even function right as a calculator.
aug 20, 2025, 7:22 pm • 6 0 • view
We bought one. My husband was convinced this was going to be the next thing. It was a good TV otherwise. But it cost $1700. We used it about 4 times for 3D. It came with a copy of Alice in Wonderland 3D (the Tim Burton movie which is AWFUL). A waste of $500-700 over a equivalent 2D TV at the time.
aug 20, 2025, 8:07 pm • 0 0 • view
I still want one...
aug 20, 2025, 8:02 pm • 0 0 • view
like at least 3d tvs function completely as advertised
aug 20, 2025, 8:02 pm • 0 0 • view
isnt it cool how rich people can be wrong over and over and over, but if a poor person makes a single mistake their life is over?
aug 20, 2025, 6:06 pm • 15 0 • view
It’s betting on a promise. Bets and promises are notoriously… *GOOD* investments … Just like Ponzi schemes and Beanie Babies.
aug 20, 2025, 5:42 pm • 3 0 • view
Half the rate of [free to use, ad driven sites]
aug 20, 2025, 6:30 pm • 0 0 • view
Thing people keep missing about this (admittedly absurd) number: can they support that many users? How are they planning to build and pay for the infrastructure to support that many users? *One user* costs OpenAI way more than for a standard website or social medial platform.
aug 20, 2025, 4:09 pm • 5 0 • view
Can even the planet support it at that scale?
aug 21, 2025, 7:11 am • 1 0 • view
Only if we build a Dyson sphere around the solar system.
aug 21, 2025, 2:57 pm • 0 1 • view
Their Agentic program was featured on live stream a month ago. Right in front of the CEO It took 20 minutes to make a map of MLB stadiums, completely wrong & one was in the middle of the fucking ocean. Seconds after showing it on the live stream, the CEO said “amazing work”
aug 20, 2025, 11:37 am • 86 1 • view
The worst part is that there are people out there who will see this and think it's the greatest thing ever made.
aug 20, 2025, 3:13 pm • 0 0 • view
Famously, there are no baseball teams on the east coast.
aug 20, 2025, 4:11 pm • 3 0 • view
no one plays baseball in new england lol
aug 20, 2025, 9:52 pm • 2 0 • view
Yep looks good for WI and MN picking up like 4 more franchises
aug 20, 2025, 10:25 pm • 2 0 • view
While the map is bad enough alone, the spreadsheet is it’s own nightmare. Good luck with your wallet for all the flights youll have to take to pull off runs like LA > Seattle > San Fran > San Diego > Sacramento > LA > Texas > Washington > NY > Baltimore > Toronto > Boston > Houston 🤦♂️
aug 28, 2025, 11:30 am • 2 0 • view
On the plus side, lots of time to hit the multiple stadiums in Wisconsin
aug 28, 2025, 1:26 pm • 1 0 • view
Brewers farm system on display!
aug 28, 2025, 1:46 pm • 1 0 • view
"Heckuva job Brownie!"
aug 20, 2025, 8:06 pm • 2 0 • view
To me, this is the definitive clip of him. Would be easy to talk about working to reduce fail rate, ironing out wrong answers, etc. But he doesn’t do that. They are basically saying “Isn’t it amazing the car can fly across the ocean!”
aug 20, 2025, 11:47 am • 50 2 • view
The Theranos CEO got thrown in jail for a similar degree of exaggeration. But these are white guys, so maybe no one cares...
aug 20, 2025, 5:55 pm • 14 0 • view
He'll get killed by the billionaires he lied to. No one who actually suffered or lost money will get justice.
aug 21, 2025, 9:03 am • 1 0 • view
Does their justification involve including anyone who gets served AI anywhere? Like is someone an "OpenAI user" if they visited a site that has a ChatGPT widget in the corner?
aug 20, 2025, 6:51 pm • 0 0 • view
That's what I'm reckoning, seeing AI getting forced into everything anyway. Use Excel, Word, make a pdf? AI user. Then it comes down to which AI.
aug 21, 2025, 7:50 pm • 0 0 • view
lol lmao even
aug 21, 2025, 8:46 am • 1 0 • view
Ahahahahhahahahah 😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹
aug 20, 2025, 2:25 pm • 1 0 • view
aug 20, 2025, 5:14 pm • 1 0 • view
To them the delulu is the solulu.
aug 20, 2025, 2:41 pm • 5 1 • view
just have 25% of the world's population as paying users, bing bong so simple
aug 23, 2025, 9:30 am • 1 0 • view