I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.

No way 1/7 people globally use ChatGPT?

This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats.

OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.

The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).