Ed Zitron's analysis hinges on a lot of assumptions. Much of it comes down to the question of how much it actually costs to run a single inference of ChatGPT. That $20/month pro subscription could be a loss-leader or it could be making money, depending on the numbers you want to use. If you play with the numbers, and compare it to, say, $2/hr for an H100 currently on the front page, $20/$2/hr gets you 10 hours of GPU time before it costs more in hardware than your subscription, and then factoring in overhead on top, it's just not clear.

You’d need to know how much they are using for that. I only use the API and the $20 I bought a year ago aren’t gone yet.