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.