I doubt anyone would say that given that they got into ads years before giving people the option to pay.

But the same logic applies. Youtube is not profitable without ads and would shut down.

Yeah, probably, but then again YouTube is entertainment and Google never claimed to be fixing the world and whatever. Also they're not sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars.

If ChatGPT and AI is "just" supposed to be Youtube, sure. ChatGPT wasn't supposed to be just YouTube.

Youtube premium is not claiming AGI to justify a certain valuation.

I don’t think OpenAI has claimed they have AGI?

Maybe not having it but being really close to that and knowing how to build it. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies."

Hasn't the happened? Plenty of companies are working and experimenting with agents.

I'm still waiting for the "materially change the output of companies" part.

Sam Altman said in 2024 that AGI could happen as soon as 2025.

https://dianawolftorres.substack.com/p/is-agi-just-around-th...

And that's not his only bold claim about AGI.

My personal theory: Youtube ads exist as just a punishment to beat you into paying for premium. As in, while the ads make some money, their primary purpose is to motivate you to pay. And that a subscriber generates meaningful more revenue than the ads sales of a non-subscriber.

It seems plausible to me, since I get so many low quality poorly targeted ads on repeat. I can't imagine those ads are generating much revenue, but it makes sense if their primary purpose is just to beat me into paying for a subscription.

IIRC ads predate Youtube premium by years.

But why compare these two businesses? They are completely different. From the estimates I've seen, Youtube operating costs are a fraction of what OpenAI is burning yearly.