[imgabe]

Why would OpenAI want users to be in longer conversations? It's not like they're showing ads. Users are either free or paying a fixed monthly fee. Having longer conversations just increases costs for OpenAI and reduces their profit. Their model is more like a gym where you want the users who pay the monthly fee and never show up. If it were on the api where users are paying by the token that would make sense (but be nefarious).

[jll29]

> It's not like they're showing ads.

Not yet. But the "buy this" button is already in the code of the back end, according to online reports that I cannot verify.

Official word is here: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11146633-improved-shoppi...

If I was Amazon, I wouldn't sleep so well anymore.

[spacebanana7]

Amazon is primarily a logistics company, their website interface isn’t critical. Amazon already does referral deals and would likely be very happy to do something like that with OpenAI.

The “buy this” button would likely be more of a direct threat to businesses like Expedia or Skyscanner.

[Cthulhu_]

At the moment they're in the "get people used to us" phase still, reasonable rates, people get more than their money's worth out of the service, and as another commenter pointed out, ChatGPT is a household name unlike Grok or Gemini or the other competition thanks to being the first mover.

However, just like all the other disruptive services in the past years - I'm thinking of Netflix, Uber, etc - it's not a sustainable business yet. Once they've tweaked a few more things and the competition has run out of steam, they'll start updating their pricing, probably starting with rate limits and different plans depending on usage.

That said, I'm no economist or anything; Microsoft is also pushing their AI solution hard, and they have their tentacles in a lot of different things already, from consumer operating systems to Office to corporate email, and they're pushing AI in there hard. As is Google. And unlike OpenAI, both Microsoft and Google get the majority of their money from other sources, or if they're really running low, they can easily get billions from investors.

That is, while OpenAI has the first mover advantage, ther competitions have a longer financial breath.

(I don't actually know whether MS and Google use / licensed / pay OpenAI though)

[piva00]

> Their model is more like a gym where you want the users who pay the monthly fee and never show up. If it were on the api where users are paying by the token that would make sense (but be nefarious).

When the models reach a clear plateau where more training data doesn't improve it, yes, that would be the business model.

Right now, where training data is the most sought after asset for LLMs after they've exhausted ingesting the whole of the internet, books, videos, etc., the best model for them is to get people to supply the training data, give their thumbs up/down, and keep the data proprietary in their walled garden. No other LLM company will have this data, it's not publicly available, it's OpenAI's best chance on a moat (if that will ever exist for LLMs).

[rfoo]

It could be as simple as something like, someone previously at Instagram decided to join OpenAI and turns out nobody stopped him. Or even, Sam liked the idea.

[cvwright]

Likely they need the engagement numbers to show to investors.

Though it’s hard to imagine how huge their next round would have to be, given what they’ve raised already.

[theodric]

So users come to depend on ChatGPT.

So they run out of free tokens and buy a subscription to continue using the "good" models.

[globalnode]

I ask it a question and it starts prompting me, trying to keep the convo going. At first my politeness tried to keep things going but now I just ignore it.

[leumon]

Possibly to get more training data.