Dopey me, should’ve caught that

But that’s part of the point: ChatGPT is so hyped it bends perception. The OP article after all quoted a Google employee who has nothing to do with ChatGPT.

I mean they are buying degrees for six figures.

If it meant good grades without doing the work and it became socially acceptable it is ~150 million global tertiary students times 10 months of the year times whatever that is worth on a monthly basis. Maybe only $150B ARR right now at $100/mo (textbooks to read cost more than this, but you don’t need them anymore), so not $1T on students but still massive, and if you capture them in pre/early career it is easily $1T in ARR once your queue deepens.

And Coursera opened at a $6b market cap.

So how do we value ChatGPT then? Should it be as valuable as Coursera, Udacity etc put together? Should it be that PLUS Harvard Deloitte and ServiceNow? Or since they have no major moat should it be Zero? It’s hype of this scale that can rationalize unprecedented figures.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/03/31/coursera-ipo-cour-begins...

I should make explicit that I think it is impossible to achieve in practice because higher education will collapse completely before they achieve any fraction of market saturation with the numbers I wrote.

Coursera is a discount retailer of tertiary education so I don’t see any relevant connection.

ChatGPT/OpenAI specifically is probably already overvalued unless they have some first-mover advantage that I can’t see.

Someone else has said it many times over but I agree that LLMs will disappear into the technology stack — a rising tide that lifts many market caps.