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What we see here is the real user base of LLM. And 97% of them are free users.
It’s hardly a mystery why no AI company is remotely close to making a profit, ever.
Yup, I’m surprised the bottom hasn’t dropped out from these companies yet. It will be like the dot com crash in the early 2000s I’m guessing. And they’ll act so surprised…
The value isnt the product; that’s garbage.
It’s the politics of the product. Its the labor discipline, the ability to say ‘computer said so’. Why bomb hospital? Computer said so. Yes, i wanted to bomb hospital, but what i wanted didn’t factor in! i did it because computer (trained to say bomb hospital) said so!
Edit “
deusmachina vult!”Fuck no, it’ll be much worse than the dotcom bubble. If you want to be terrified, look how much of the stock market is NVIDIA and the big tech companies.
Sorry to break it to you, but AI does have uses, it’s just they are all evil.
Imagine things like identifying (with low accuracy) enemies from civilians in a war zone.
What is discussed in this thread are LLMs, which are a subgroup of AI. What you are referring to, is image recognition, and there are plenty of examples where their use is not evil, e.g. in the medical field.
Yeah exactly, ML is very powerful and can be very useful in niche areas.
LLMs have tainted good AI progress cause it made line go up.
I have a few friends who work have started calling their field “data analysis with computers”, because “AI” and “Machine Learning” sounds like “prompt engineer” nowadays.
That’s so sad
AI as a concept has many uses that are beneficial!
The beneficial uses are non-profit seeking uses, which are not the ones seen jammed into everything. Pattern matching is extremely helpful for science, engineering , music, and a ton of other specific purposes in controlled settings.
LLMs/chat bots implemented by profit seeking companies and vomited upon the masses have only evil purposes though.
Have we still learned nothing about enshittification? This implication of this graph is that there’s an entire generation of people being raised right now who won’t be able to do jack shit without depending on AI. These companies don’t need to be profitable right now, because once they’re completely entrenched in the workflows and thought processes of millions of people, they can charge whatever they want. Accuracy and usefulness are secondary to addiction and dependency. If you can afford to amass power and ubiquity first, all the profit you can imagine will come later.
I mean, I failed / dropped out of High school, I’m absolutely fine. I’m not worried for the kids tbh. Kids will always take the path of least resistance when it comes to schoolwork, just the path is now actually getting homework done by an ai instead of just guessing / skipping the assignment. I’m genuinely more worried for all the older generations who don’t realize that because of AI honor roll has 0 meaning now.
once they’re completely entrenched in the workflows and thought processes of millions of people, they can charge whatever they want
Except that those people won’t have jobs or money to pay for AI.
Fair, but social media shows that enshittification doesn’t have to result in them charging money. Advertising and control over the zeitgeist are plenty valuable. Even if people don’t have money to pay for AI, AI companies can use the enshittified AI to get people to spend their food stamps on slurry made by the highest bidder.
And even if companies have conglomerated into a technofeudal dystopia so advertisement is unnecessary, AI companies can use enshittified AI to make people feel confused and isolated when they try to think through political actions that would threaten the system but connected and empowered when they try to think through subjugating themselves or ‘resisting’ in an unproductive way.
This is why they report “annualized revenue” where they take their best month and multiply it by 12.
Reminder that the bullshit Cursor pulled is entirely legal…
Not that I have sources to link but last I read I thought the big two providers are making enough money to profit on just inference cost, but because of the obscene spending on human talent and compute for new model training they aren’t turning a profit. If they stopped developing new models they would likely be making money though.
And they are fleecing investors for billions, so big profit in that way lol
The companies that were rasing reasonable revenue compared to their costs (e.g. Cursor) were ones that were buying inference from OpenAI and Anthropic at enterprise rates and selling it to users at retail rates, but OpenAI and Anthropic raised their rates, so that cost was passed onto consumers, who stopped paying for Cursor etc. and now they’re haemorrhaging money.
Midjourney reported a profit in 2022, and then never reported anything new.
Cursor recently made 1 month of mad profit, by first hiking the price in their product and holding the users basically hostage, and then they stopped offering their most succesful product because they couldnt afford to sell it at that price. They annualized that month, and now “make a profit”.
Basically, cursor let everyone drive a Ferrari for a hundred bucks a month. Then they said “sorry, it costs 500 a month”. And then said “actually, instead of Ferrari, here’s a Honda”. Then they subtracted the cost of the Honda from the price of the Ferrari, and called it a record profit
This is legal somehow
Hell, openai didn’t turn a profit on users paying $2000 a month.
AI. The Boat of big tech.
A giant pit you throw money into and set it on fire. I guess its a worthwhile investment for Thiel and his gaggle of fascist technocrats. So they can use it to control everyone.
Simple evil solution.
Make it part of tuition.
Devil blushes
“Employees will use AI to do their jobs!” AI enthusiasts don’t seem to grasp that if AI can do your job, you’re not going to have a job any more.
Thats why farmers don’t exist, steel plows took em all out, similar for painters since cameras were invented.
June 6th is not when school’s out over here.
So is the hypothesis that OpenAI’s usage is heavily regionally skewed to… wherever classes end that date? I’m guessing US, because that’s what I guess when somebody forgets there’s a planet attached to their country.
Schools in the US don’t all follow the same schedule; it varies drastically state to state, and can even vary by district within any given state.
Even worse for that hypothesis, then. Assuming the poster was from the US in the first place.
Exactly. Some universities end their spring terms in early May. Some in early June. K12 schools tend to more consistently end their years in early June, but that’s still spread out over a few weeks.
Yeah that kind of coordination coming from the end of the school year doesn’t make sense. Zooming out a bit it looks like there was just a spike in May 2025. It was all useage of a particular model, OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, which barely registers outside of these short periods of high use in March and then May of 2025. I don’t really know what a ‘token’ is so maybe it’s not a 1:1 comparison when useage shifts between different models? Or the data’s bad? Or some particular project used that model a large amount in those specific months?
A token is the “word” equivalent as far as AI is concerned. It’s just not a full word, it’s whatever unit of meaning the neural network has decided makes sense (so “ish” can be a token by itself, for instance). Point is, tokens processed is just a proxy for “amount of text the thing spat out”.
At a glance, and I haven’t looked into it, this looks like a product launch or a product getting replaced or removed, maybe putting something free behind a paywall or whatever. Definitely not the school year ending in a particular place. It’s pretty clearly misinfo, I’d just have to do more homework to figure out what kind than I’m willing to do for this purpose, but your assessment definitely makes a ton more sense than the OP.
I’m guessing any college that wants to hop on trends has an LLM class that chugs through tokens.
Is that relevant to the June date? Universities aren’t any more internationally consistent than other tiers of education, to my knowledge.
If you think that’s the scariest graph in the 2020s you have a shit memory of what happened at the beginning of this decade…
The scariest thing about this sentence is realizing we’re already halfway to the next decade
What the hell has happened this decade so far, anyway? 🤦🏻♀️ Feels like we made little progress and just took giant steps backwards everywhere.
I can think of a couple of good things!
We proved the efficacy of mrna vaccines and deployed them at an unprecedented scale against a novel virus that had us all locked in our house. If it hadn’t worked, our governments were pinches this close to sacrificing us all for the
greater goodeconomy anyway so realistically these vaccines probably saved billions of lives.We’ve also deployed a huge amount of solar energy and started replacing combustion engines with electric ones on a huge scale in some countries.
There has also been a lot of bad stuff though…
The other J6
For a brief moment, I felt hope.
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Trusting unsourced graphs is as stupid as trusting AI.
“June 6 is when school gets out in… uh… all the places where the children are using this AI thingy. Right.”
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Holy shit, you can even see the weekends.
Question: which country are they talking about? When I search for summer vacation 2025 nothing comes up for June 6th.
cant wait for my surgeon to ask chat gpt where the bladder is
“What do ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean again?”
‘Chat GPT? Explain to me like I’m 5 how to remove an inflamed appendix, but use only Roblox terminology… Also, say it like Mr. Krabs from SpongeBob.’
This seems like a good place for a thought i had yesterday. I was driving home and watched a younger woman, no older than 20 take a corner fast and sharp on the sidewalk. She was on one of those electric scooters you can rent. My first thought is how fun that would have been at that age. Then i really started thinking.
Here was this young woman pretty sure at driving age but vehicle prices are out of control. So owning even a beater may be too much for many. I had a scooter very similar but you had to push it everywhere. The deference is, I was eight. I think what I’m trying to find the words for is their privilege of a motorized scooter came at a price they’ll never even understand.
These poor youth think they have it easy with there motorized scooters and chatgpt for answers. Truth is there are benefits to some things, maybe history will show I’m being an old fuddy duddy but I know i would still rather afford a cheap car than have rentable scooters.
Maybe like my teachers before me they will only be half truths. My teacher was right, I don’t carry a calculator on me at all time. The supercomputer the size of that old calculator, that just so happens to also have that function? Well, its never far.
Despite being from a time before the internet, pocket calculators and smart phones, (my first “calculator” was a slide rule), I’m as quick to adopt and master tech as I find a need for it. I like shiny new tech.
But as someone who also spent a few years teaching math in a my local and very rural school, I was not very generous with the use of that super computer in your pocket in my classroom. The reason being I wanted you to get your fingers dirty and greasy playing and manipulating those numbers yourself. I wanted to you develop a personal relationship with them and have at least a basic idea of the how and why they work.
Modern tech is great if you already have an understanding of how things work and can simply view it as a tool. But modern tech pretty much prevents people from developing the basic understanding of the how and why things work. And we are all dumber for it.
Thank you for making your students do that. I’m sure it made them miserable at the time but I guarantee they are better for it.
In college I had a similar experience with statistics. I had to run a factor analysis by hand start to finish, calculating standard deviations, means, and all the other crap, showing work over 3 pages to get eigenvalues and all that. It sucked, but dammit if I dont have a WAY better appreciation for how it works now than I ever would have otherwise.
Hey I’m one of the youths in their 20s who can’t afford a car because America devolved into a third world country by the time I aged into adulthood. I bought my first car, 3 years ago and it broke down within a few months, then I bought a car with my partner so we would have wheels. We are divorced now. No car and I only have an ebike so I’m thankful for the transportation I do have, at least I don’t have to ride the bus
Thats rough. I wish i could say it will get easier but after 40 years I’ve noticed it doesn’t. I truly hope you get ahead. It’s not easy out there right now. Cheers mate.
hahahahahaha holy shit it’s not even a scaled graph jesus christ
Yeah without doing any research a consistent 2/3 drop is actually pretty damn compelling. Saving this to check back when US schools restart in a month
That’s…not how school schedules work.
oh are we writing useless comments, I’ll join
When did your local school district let out for summer? And your local college/university?
I was joining the unconstrictive criticism, nothing to do with the content of your comment.
You cam see the weekends. Even after school is out and the students aren’t using it, Mon-Fri office works clearly still are.
My take away is that it’s mainly children who are still using the free version of ChatGPT. Surely everyone else has moved on to better models.
If you want to know what people are typing into chatbot sites, here’s 140,000 examples: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmarena-ai/arena-human-preference-140k. It’s mostly nonsense.
Excuse me but who is “everyone else”? I am thankful to know noone who pays for this slop.
I can’t independently find this chart, does openai publish their daily usage data?
The statistics are from OpenRouter, not OpenAI: https://openrouter.ai/provider/openai
This is implying that LLM usage by students is all bad (either because of cheating or because or because of kids getting bad information from LLMs). If I were a student, I’d absolutely be using LLMs to help me organize notes, summarize things, quiz me on material, and get general overiews of certain topics/explanations of problems, etc. I’d also not assume everything it spit out was correct.
LLMs have a LOT of problems and pose potential pitfalls for students, but they are a tool. They can be used in different ways and those ways are not all bad.
Also school gets out on different dates in different places.
An index card full of test answers is also a tool, but you’ll find most examination centers don’t allow them.
You just ignored what OP said, they highlighted all the good uses llms can help students with such as test quizzes, note organizing, transcribing, etc, you ignored their comment and made an unrelated response to the content of the comment equating llm use to cheating on exams.
I didn’t ignore what they said at all. Organizing your own notes and creating summaries of topics (most grade school essays are just this) is an important part of learning and fully understanding something. Having an LLM do it defeats the purpose, same as taking an answer sheet into a test.
Exactly. Imagine you’re taking a class. Imagine your note taking process is:
- Record an audio copy of the lecture.
- Feed the audio into an LLM to transcribe it.
- Have the LLM condense the transcription into notes.
What good have you actually accomplished? The point of studying is not to produce a derivative work of a professor’s lecture. The point is to actually learn something. And this is best done by working through the material, on your own, using your own mind and faculties. It is the act of actually doing the transformation that builds the rich conceptual networks that result in effective learning.
It’s almost like math teachers requiring work to be shown has a logical reason behind it!
they highlighted all the good uses llms can help students with such as test quizzes
Wait, what? Using your brain is the entire point of most tests and quizzes.
Outsourcing them to LLMs sounds like brainrot manifesting.
That is ignoring the vast majority of usage. Read about what professors, teachers, etc. are saying about its use and you will not hear it being used as tool as the major use. Everyone claims they are using it as a tool, but most people are using them to outsource thinking, unfortunately. Which is highly problematic when the outputs of LLMs are highly wrong much of the time. You need to use the same skills to evaluate the output that people are outsourcing away. Tools like calculators at least do their tasks correctly as long as your inputs are correct. The same is not true of LLMs. Moreover, people are blindly trusting the LLMs to a point where they are completely stuck whenever the LLM can’t do something or are wrong
Tools like calculators do not take away your ability to think logically, just to do route computation. Research is still emerging, but suggests long term negative effects on cognitive abilities from high LLM use
Also: Regardless of if this graph is caused by schools getting out or not, it’s still very highly used in schools.
Uh I’m a student and the only real thing most people do with LLMs is make it do their work for them. At least the good students will use it to avoid doing busywork. I used it in my physics college class to do my homework because the class was easy, and I got an A on the final exam.
LLM are powerful when used for what they are - predictive text. While I dont trust them completely you can usually catch most hallucinations of a bit cautious. Just like I don’t trust a blog post blindly.
Have trouble understanding some topic / technology? I’ll ask two of them to explain. Or copy one answer into the next and have it verify.
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