>Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.

Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retrieval and Zuck is literally panicking about the fact that users share more personal details with OpenAI than on his doomscrolling attention sinks.

not necessarily, if openai managed to monetize free users. Could be through advertising, or integrations with marketplaces on commission (e.g. order your next Hello Fresh through ChatGPT? Get recommended a hotel?)

They could succeed where Alexa failed. A free user can even bring in more than a paid user if you look at some platforms like spotify, where apparently there is a large chunk of free users generating more income through ads than if they would pay

Most potential customers wouldn't ever think in terms as "justifying" a €20 purchase when the product is great.

ChatGPT (and competitors) is an incredibly high value tool, and €20 per month is nothing for somebody who wants or needs it. It's just a matter of if they use it enough to start hitting the daily limits.

>no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses.

This could very well have been a cost-reduction effort to try and simulate what it was doing before.

Somebody must think training has already looked at the web enough, or there may be too much slop now that there was no contingency for.

Then you've got tighter guardrails to make it more palatable for a wider audience.

I guess different people would draw the line differently, but when it goes from being worth money to not worth it any more that could be an enshittification effect.

Especially if things like that accelerate.