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Back to Reid Hoffman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar on where AI goes from here, with Reid Hoffman & Sarah Friar.

Why Is ChatGPT Free?

Sarah Friar says ChatGPT stays free for about 90% of its 1.2 billion weekly users because OpenAI is building a business that can pay for that access.

She says the 1.2 billion people are about a fifth of the world's population. Some of them ask what to cook for a picky kid. Others use it for something life-changing. Use is moving from asking, the chat moment, to doing, the agentic moment, and on to a virtual coworker. OpenAI had just announced 100,000 advertisers on the platform, in 89 countries. Friar says the ads are why a free tier can exist. The mission is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not only for people who can pay or who live inside a corporation.

Transcript

Reid Hoffman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar on where AI goes from here ·

Masters of Scale

More from this episode

  1. What Percent of ChatGPT Users Ask Health Questions?Sarah Friar says about a third of ChatGPT's 1.2 billion weekly users ask a health or wellness question every week.
  2. Why Does OpenAI Hold Back Cyber Models?Sarah Friar says OpenAI has held back models that are very cyber capable until the team is sure.
  3. How Much More AI Do the Top Companies Use?Sarah Friar says frontier firms, the top 10% of companies in the world, use about 8 times as many agentic tokens on the OpenAI platform as an average firm.
  4. What Share of a Job Do People Use ChatGPT for?Sarah Friar says people use ChatGPT for only about 40% of what their job title says, because the work inside a job is changing along with the job.
  5. Why Did OpenAI Pay for School Lunches?Sarah Friar says OpenAI paid for free school lunches because a Georgia community asked for them out of an $80 million grant.

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