"Hopes to grow" revenues. Current estimates put hardware costs alone at $700k/day, so even if they hit $300M in 2023 that won't make them profitable. This isn't even counting the people costs and other operation costs required to run a company.
edit: order of magnitude was wrong on costs per day.
And yet, $300M is only 1.25M subscribers at the current $20/mo rate. If we say that they need a $1B / year to be comfortably profitable, that's ~4.2M subscribers. A good rule of thumb is that you can hope to convert about 10% of your free user base to paid; one random source says they have 100M monthly active users - which at 10% conversion, is $2.4B / year. I think they'll be fine.
You are talking about a revolutionary product that literally dominates mindshare from consumers to students to CEOs to governments. Its a pure monopoly that has insanely wide utility and instantly obvious value proposition.
Do you know anything about B2C freemium products? 10% conversion over 10s-100s of millions of users is literally insane.
It doesn't matter how revolutionary GPT-4 is, people's willingness to pay for anything is generally very low. ChatGPT premium is also a very expensive subscription for a consumer product!
People are willing to pay $10k a year for college, very high conversion rate.
People are willing to pay for tutoring, at rate that's probably about 10% of student base, despite its very high costs ($50/h, not $20/m)
At the very minimum, I can already see every university and high school student paying for GPT-4. Its a way way way more powerful essay writer and personal tutor than GPT3.5, that alone is incentive to upgrade. For only $20 a month.
Know what GPT-4 currently is insanely capacity limited. So far, the limitation is not on the demand side, but the supply side.
Getting 100 million users in 3 months with 0 marketing or network effects already annihilates existing records, getting 10% conversion is nothing special.
You could have saved yourself and everyone else the time by instead writing “I have no idea what I’m talking about and I don’t understand constraints”.
The cheating sites I see on the first page of Google seem to charge around $10-$30/page. GPT is cheaper, but lower quality. I don't think the market for tens of dollars cheaper but shittier quality than buyessayfriend.com is anywhere near every highschool and college student.
edit: order of magnitude was wrong on costs per day.