The advertiser based business model for those companies makes your question/thought process here problematic for me. Historically speaking Google and "Meta" (Facebook) were primarily advertising provider companies. They provided billboards (space and time on the web page in front of an end-user) to people who were willing to buy tht space and time on the billboard. The "free access" end-users would always end up seeing said billboards, which is how they ended up "paying" for the service.

So most of Meta/Google end-users were "paying" users. They were being subsidised by the advertising customers paying for the end-users (who were forced to view adverts). The end-users paid with interruption to the service by an advert. [0]

In that context it feels a little like you're comparing apples to dave's left foot, as OpenAI hasn't had that with advertising ............ historically [1].

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[0]: yes ad-blockers, yes more diverse revenue income streams over the years like with phones, yes this is simplified yadayada

[1]: excluding government etc. ~bailouts~ investments as not the same as advertising subsidies, but you could argue it's doing the same thing

The difference is in the unit economics. OpenAI has to spend massively per free user it serves. The others you mentioned have SaaS economics where the marginal cost of onboarding and serving each non-paying user is essentially zero while also gaining money from these free users via advertising. Hence, the free users are actually a net positive rather than an endless money sink.

Keep also in mind that AI has always been, and will always be, a commodity. The moment you start forcing people to convert into paying customers is the moment they jump ship at scale.

Just something to keep in mind.