OpenAI apparently has 10m paying subscribers.

An impressive number!

Convincing consumers to pay for something, especially a new kind of thing, is extraordinarily hard.

But in the future most consumers will have to have an LLM subscription of some kind.

The applications of LLMs will continue to grow, becoming a thing you couldn't imagine living without.

LLM inference is too expensive to be supported by advertising.

In the future most consumers will have an LLM subscription.

10M users out of 7B doesn't sound as big.

At the beginning of the internet, one way to get online was America Online.

AOL gave access to the open internet, but also to the proprietary content and chat rooms.

At the beginning, the open internet wasn't that useful, and the value of the bonus proprietary content was the most important.

But as the internet's natural compounding loops took off, the relative value of the proprietary AOL content declined and was ultimately surpassed.

Imagine a consumer subscription as a thing that gets you an LLM subscription… but you can only use it in the proprietary closed world of that provider.

An offering that allows you to use your subscription in an open ecosystem of applications would be far more powerful.