[highwaylights]

It's like YouTube and Android I would think, but similarly, they didn't have a road forward independently.

YouTube was burning a fortune on hosting costs and being sued out of existence when Google bought them. Android didn't have a monetisation path at the time, because the Play Store did not yet exist.

I suspect the same is true of OpenAI currently. They've got some great technology, but are spending a lot of money servicing free queries right now, and don't really have a route to selling their product to the world and building revenue yet.