Microsoft's OpenAI losses hidden as part of $4.7 billion 'other' expense — stake in AI company still doesn't turn a profit as companies grapple with ongoing contract negotiation

Certainly nothing bad will happen to our economy when the biggest investments of the current century have no path to profitability.

“Stake in OpenAI doesn’t return profit”

And I don’t see how it could. Sell copilot at a loss, which consumes ChatGPT (sold at a loss) which runs on Azure (exchanged at below cost for stock in OpenAI).

Putting aside my ethical and cultural issues with training generative AI for a second, I have no idea what the appeal of this stuff is as a product.

Like, if they want me to pay a monthly subscription, what do they expect me to do with it? I have zero interest in chatting to a computer that's not thinking and is just stringing together words based on probabilistic bias, and I have zero interest in making or consuming AI-generated media. I don't want an AI "girlfriend", nor do I want an AI to play a video game for me. Finally, I don't see the value in having an AI tell me things that it summarized from various internet sources when we all know that the chances of it "hallucinating" (aka: making shit up or generally being totally wrong) is extremely high and basically unavoidable.

So, aside from the basic novelty of talking to your computer, what the hell is the point of all this?

Personally I wouldn't pay $2/month for LLMs, let alone $200/month...