It's not free, it's the battle for market dominance. That's why everybody else launched early even it's buggy. That's why Meta is "open sourcing" Llama.

Because Meta deployed to every phone in the planet turning the ocean blood red.

It wasn’t their choice but as a growth company they’d be toast without continued user growth and Meta cut them off a the knees at any price pint above 0

> I don't get why they'd do it. What's the advantage to OpenAI of giving away their core product for free?

No one else can provide AI web services while the leader gives it away for free. They can corner or at least consolidate the market then monetize later. We have seen this kind of loss leading many times with groups like Uber and Facebook. It is a risky strategy for OpenAI and might not work for the company, but for the founders they just need to make it look good for a few quarters and they can cash out when they want or stick around if it does work.

My guess: either the reports are wrong or there's some other part of the deal we don't know about.

OpenAI isn't run by idiots, they wouldn't make a billion-dollar deal that didn't benefit them.

> OpenAI isn't run by idiots

All of the management drama in the past year would suggest otherwise. Sometimes people we think are smart turn out to not always be so smart.

Perhaps they're betting on Apple not being able to outcompete them. When it is well entrenched in the Apple ecosystem it'll be time to start charging.

It’s not like Apple hasn’t done this before with services it doesn’t think are ready to release. The original iPhone shipped with Google maps and they still pay Apple to use search. Apple will eventually replace it with something home grown. Maybe OpenAI got a good deal.