They had some estimated 10M paid users a few months ago.

>Is a paid user generating profit right now?

For themselves ? I don't know and neither does the person saying they have no PMF.

There is nothing stopping Open AI from inserting ads into GPT's responses, either explicitly with the search tool or weaved into predicted responses.

Their revenue nearly quadrupled year on year and model training and inference costs have reduced by several orders of magnitude in the last few years.

I'm not saying that Open AI are foolproof. But the money being pumped to them is more or less expected.

At some point chatgpt will become crap and the cycle will repeat

I don't know what you think nearly 4B visits per month is (and top ten in worldwide traffic) that "a small group of active users" can generate. 300M active users a week is not a small group and you do not get there without general public awareness.