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We hate AI because it's everything we hate
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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ChatGPT has some very impressive usage numbers, but the image tells on itself by being a free app. The conversion rate (percentage of people who start paying) is absolutely piss poor, with the very same Ed Zitron estimating it being at ~3% with 500.000.000 users. That also doesn't bode well with the fact that OpenAI still loses money even on their $200/month subscribers. People use ChatGPT because it's been spammed down their throats by the media that never question the sacred words of the executives (snake oil salesmen) that utter lunatic phrases like "AGI by 2025" (Such a quote exists somewhere, but I don't remember if this year was used). People also use ChatGPT because it's free and it's hard to say no to get someone to do your homework for you for free.
I love how every single app on that list is an app I wouldn’t touch in my life
Not even Google maps
Absolutely not, I haven’t used any Google products or services in 15 years
That's pretty impressive. I can't do without YouTube or Android unfortunately.
That’s fair. Once the “don’t be evil” was gone, so was I hahahaha
You can use the Google-free Android forks.
Exactly, the users/installation count of such products are clearly a much more accurate indicator of the success of their marketing team, rather than their user's perceived value in such products lol
In house at my work, we've found ChatGPT to be fairly useless, too. Where Claude and Gemini seem to reign supreme.
It seems like ChatGPT is the household name, but hardly the best performing.
My thoughts exactly, I use Claude and find it much better than ChatGPT. Less hallucinations, more useful information
Who owns Claude? Is it ethically sourced?
Anthropic and no of course not.
I wouldn't really trust Ed Zitron's math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like "there is no real AI adoption" plainly wrong. The financials of OpenAI and other AI-heavy companies are murky, but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired. It took Uber over a decade to stop losing money every quarter.
OpenAI keeps getting more funding capital because (A) venture capital guys are pretty dumb, and (B) they can easily ramp up advertisements once the free money runs out. Microsoft has already experimented with ads and sponsored products in chatbot messages, ChatGPT will probably do something like that.
Except he doesn't say that. the author of this article simply made that up.
There is a high usage rate (almost entirely ChatGPT btw, despite all the money sunk into AI by others like Google) but its all the free stuff and they are losing bucketloads of money at a rate that is rapidly accelerating.
There is no path to profitability.
I wrote the article, Ed said that in the linked blog post: "There Is No Real AI Adoption, Nor Is There Any Significant Revenue - As I wrote earlier in the year, there is really no significant adoption of generative AI services or products."
There is a pretty clear path to profitability, or at least much lower losses. A lot more phones, tablets, computers, etc now have GPUs or other hardware optimized for running small LLMs/SLMs, and both the large and small LLMs/SLMs are becoming more efficient. With both of those those happening, a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing (this is already a thing with Apple Intelligence and Gemini Nano), and the tasks that still need a cloud server will be more efficient and consume less power.
How exactly will that make OpenAI and the likes more profitable?! That should be one of the scenarios that will make them less profitable.