I mean, the GP made a point about "per-user costs" that I believe was false, so that was the specific thing I was commenting on. Steering the discussion to a totally different topic of research costs doesn't help us reach closure on that point. It's basically new objections being thrown at the wall, and none being scraped off.

I think what you're not realizing is that OpenAI already has the kind of consumer-facing business that makes Google and Meta hundreds of billions of revenue a year. They have the product, they have the consumer mindshare and usage. All they are missing is the monetization part. And they're doing that at a vastly lower cost basis than Google or Meta, no matter what class of spending you measure. Their unit costs are lower, their fixed costs are lower, their R&D costs are lower.

They don't need to stop R&D to be profitable. Literally all they'd need to do is minimal ads monetization.

There's all kinds of things you can criticize the AI companies for, but the economics being unsustainable really isn't one of them. OpenAI is running a massive consumer-facing app for incredibly cheap in comparison to its peers running systems of a similar scale. It'd be way more effective to concentrate on the areas where the criticism is either obviously correct, or there's at least more uncertainty.