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...
They're being artificially propped up by billionaires to use as a bludgeon against labor. Profit is less important to them than destroying upward mobility and punishing anyone who thinks about unionizing.
Wish more people caught on to this! The AI wave is not an economic boom and it is not motivated by any sort of consumer demand, it is very much a concerted push by industry to further impoverish the working class on several fronts (Monetary, mental, organizational, etc). That's why it has continued flying in the face of all economic logic for the past several years.
Yes, like the other commenter replied, the Theils and Musks of the world want to go back to feudalism. That’s also why after years of making a big deal that interfering would tarnish the Washington Post, Bezos now seems to not care what happens to it’s reputation because he knows that there isn’t an alternative anymore.
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.
I mean, we have had solid proof that giving children homework is counterproductive for at least 2 decades now. Maybe this will be the final straw that actually makes us listen to the experts and just stop giving children homework
This is why they report "annualized revenue" where they take their best month and multiply it by 12.
It doesn’t even have to be a calendar month, it can be the best 30 days in a row times 12. I’d love to be able to report my yearly income that way when applying to apartments, lmao.
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.
There have been scarier graphs in the 2020s 🙄
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.
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.
the sooner the ai bubble bursts and takes down big tech with it the better
Honestly the AI bubble is going to take the entire stock market with it. Over a quarter of the S&P 500 (an index of the 500 and something most valuable companies on the US Stock Market) is made up of tech companies directly investing in the AI bubble, and most individuals and funds these days invest into indexes rather than individual stocks so when a single overvalued market sector making up over a quarter of the market loses most of its value, every stock portfolio is going to lose a shitload of value.
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...
I'd argue the scariest graphs are about the climate, but few people seem to care anymore. We are already at 1.5°C global warming. Coastal regions around the world are almost definitely going under by 2100.
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 good~~ economy 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...
His is the scariest chart of the 2020s? Not the alarming warming spikes or the more powerful natural disasters? Who gives a shit if kids are cheating in school if they world they’re going to inhabit one day won’t leave them time for book learnin because they’re too busy surviving.
Tbf, part of why shit it so bad is because people are uneducated. If they can’t think for themselves then they’ll just believe whatever bullshit Fox News or the algorithm feeds them without critically thinking about it at all
When parents fail to reinforce the value of education at a young age, this is the result. I know people personally who openly admitted to using chatgpt during finals at college, and they aren't bad people, but they don't see the value in the serious mastery of education, and they weren't exactly model students before chatGPT came around either.
I can't independently find this chart, does openai publish their daily usage data?
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.
What school gives work in the last few days, though? At least from what I remember, it was mostly wrapping things up, watching movies in class, etc.
Maybe we should not believe unsourced graphs?
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