It's worth that much to me in the time saved. But I'm a business owner, so I think the calculus might be quite different (since I can find ways to recoup those costs) from an individual, who pays out of their main income.
I outlined examples of how I used CC/AI a couple months ago [1]. Since then I've used it even more, to help reduce our cloud bills.
Normies literally see no difference between GPT and Claude, just that Claude is much more expensive and CEO is even more of a dummie than Altman.
The challenge is that if the numbers are accurate they need 5-10x to break even on inference compute costs, before getting into training costs and all the other actual overhead of running a company like compensation.
Will everyone be willing to pay 5-10x? Probably no.
Will half of users pay 10-20x? Or a quarter pay 20x++?
Or we end up with ads … which already seem to be in motion
That's not to say that there aren't many, like you, for whom $500 is a perfectly good deal, there's just not nearly enough for OpenAI to ever turn a profit.