>Is refuted by the sentence that comes immediately before
No. "They're unprofitable while serving almost everyone for free" does not refute "they could be profitable if those users were monetized with ads." That's the entire distinction.
>why have OpenAI been actively not trying to “hugely profitable with a robust ads business” for the past 3 and a half year then?
Because "they didn't do it early enough" is not evidence. They may have prioritized growth, product adoption, subscriptions, or simply delayed ads for strategic reasons.
>Unfortunately I'm not. And again, none of your links above says otherwise.
They show that "LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search." is unsupported. Imagine dismissing numbers over "but why no ads earlier".
Prioritizing growth? When OpenAI had saturated the market by year one and has only been losing market share for the past 18 months! Again that's basically assuming Sam Altman is a complex idiot. No board in existence will let you move away from the most obvious business model in the Silicon Valley if this model was the obvious solution you think it is.
> They show that "LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search." is unsupported
It's not unsupported, the price per million token of frontier model is public, as well as the cost of running open source models, which gives us a rough idea of how much those frontier models cost to run, and it's significantly higher than what it costs to run a web search.
> Imagine dismissing numbers
But you're just making those “numbers” up: there's simply no cost numbers at all in these papers. They are just about energy, and you jump from there forgetting that consuming a kWh of electricity on a server from 19 years ago is substantially cheaper in capex than doing so on a H100, let alone doing so on newer hardware.
No. "They're unprofitable while serving almost everyone for free" does not refute "they could be profitable if those users were monetized with ads." That's the entire distinction.
>why have OpenAI been actively not trying to “hugely profitable with a robust ads business” for the past 3 and a half year then?
Because "they didn't do it early enough" is not evidence. They may have prioritized growth, product adoption, subscriptions, or simply delayed ads for strategic reasons.
>Unfortunately I'm not. And again, none of your links above says otherwise.
They show that "LLM inference which is significantly costlier than web search." is unsupported. Imagine dismissing numbers over "but why no ads earlier".