Having masses of people using ChatGPT and not paying for it doesn't make for a successful business. The people who are willing to pay are more likely to be aware of the alternatives and choose the one best suited for their use.
For many school kids I think it's all just "AI", not "ChatGPT".
We said the same about Google, Uber, DoorDash, Facebook, TikTok, <insert any other unprofitable business that eventually became profitable>. Sure, most of them are making money through ads, but for that you need some audience. There’s absolutely survivorship bias here, but eventually it might just pan out.
That's true. Some business models succeed in the most unexpected of ways. They can pivot and change the recipe until it works.
No one ever said that about Facebook. Facebook was profitable way before it IPO’d and only did so because it had more than 500 owners and has to do reporting anyway as a public company.
Google also didn’t go through billions of dollars and was profitable when it IPOd.
DoorDash still isn’t profitable.
But either way, your argument suffers from survivorship bias. There are thousands of companies that fail and disappear into obscurity