>if a minority is prepared to pay $200 per month, then what is the majority prepared to pay?

Nothing. Most people will not pay for a chat bot unless forced to by cramming it into software that they already have to use

Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period.

This is _especially_ true for developers in general, which is very ironic considering how our livelihood is dependent on Software.

Yeah, cause we want to be in control of software, understandably. It's hard to charge for software users have full control of - except for donations. That's #1 reason for me to not use any gen AI at the moment - I'm keeping an eye on when (if) open-weight models become useful on consumer hardware though.

> Forget chat bots, most people will not pay for Software, period.

Apple says their App Store did $53B in "digital goods and services" the US alone last year. Thats not 100% software, but its definitely more than 0%

Games are a big exception here, as is anything in the app store.

But productivity software in general, only a few large companies seem to be able to get away with it. The Office Suite, CRM such as SalesForce.

In the graphics world, Maya and 3DS Max. Adobe has been holding on.

It's a generic chat LLM product, but ChatGPT now has over 20 million paid subscribers. https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...

So $415m revenue per month, annualized $5 billion / yr. Let's say we use a revenue multiple of 4x, that means OpenAI should be valued at $20 billion USD just based on this. Then one obviously has several other factors, given the nature of OpenAI and future potential. Maybe 10x more.

Which puts the current valuations I've heard pretty much in the right ballpark. Crazy, but it could make sense.