The finale season seems different this year. Through university campuses, students make their way through exams with nights and a lot of caffeine, just as they have always done. But they also get more AI help than ever. At the end of May, Openai offers students two months of free Chatgpt Plus access, which normally costs $ 20 per month. It is a convincing affair for students who want to help bother – or cheat – their path through the finals: rather than trigger the free version of Chatgpt to outsource testing tests or go through a practice chemistry exam, students can now access the company’s most advanced models, as well as its “deep research” tool, which can quickly synthesize hundreds of digital sources.
The Openai agreement is only one of the many promotions of the AI that go around the campuses. In recent months, Anthropic, XAI, Google and Perplexity have also offered students free or considerably reduced versions of their paid chatbots. Some campaigns are not exactly subtle: “Good luck with the finals”, an employee of Xai recently wrote In addition to the details of the company’s agreement. Even before the current promotions wave, students won like powerful AI users. “More than any other use case, more than any other type of user, young college adults in the United States adopt the chatpt”, the vice-president of education in Openai note In a February report. Gen Z uses technology to help more than school work; Some people integrate AI into their lives in a more fundamental way: create personalized training plans, generate grocery lists and ask for chatbots for romantic advice.
Gifts from AI companies help to widen these young users more, who are unlikely to pay hundreds of dollars a year to test the most advanced AI products. Maybe it all seems familiar. This recalls the 2010s, when a generation of start-ups fought to gain users by offering cheap access to their services. These companies have particularly targeted young urban and wealthy millennials. For suspect prices, you could start your day with Pilates reserved via Classpass, order lunch with Doordash and Lyft to meet your friend for the Happy Hour through the city. (On Uber, for example, prices almost doubled from 2018 to 2021, according to a analysis). These companies, as well as countless others, have created what has become known as “Millennium lifestyle subsidy. “Now something similar takes place with AI.
AI companies are making great efforts to continue students. Anthropic, for example, recently launched a “campus ambassadors” program to help increase interest; Early promotion offered students in certain schools for a year of access to a premium version of Claude, the AI assistant of Anthropic, for only $ 1 per month. An ambassador, Josefina Albert, current senior at the University of Washington, told me that she had shared the agreement with her classmates and even contacted the teachers to see if they could be willing to promote the offer in their courses. “Most were quite hesitant,” she told me, “what is understandable.”
Current discounts have a cost. There are about 20 million post -secondary In the United States, students say that only 1% of them benefit from a free chatgpt for the next two months. The start-up would actually give students a document that is worth around $ 8 million. In Silicon Valley, $ 8 million is a rounding error. But many students are probably taking advantage of several offers of this type at a time. And, more specifically, IA companies are preparing for the bill more than just students. All large AI companies offer free versions of their products despite the fact that technology itself is not free. Whenever you type a message in a chatbot, someone somewhere pays the cost of treatment and generation of an answer. These costs add up: Openai has more than half a billion of weekly users, and only one fraction of them are paid subscribers. Last week, Sam Altman, CEO of the start-up, suggested That his business spends tens of millions of dollars in processing messages “please” and “thank you” for users. Stick to the cost of forming these models, which could be as much as $ 1 billion For the most advanced versions, and the price becomes even more substantial. (The Atlantic recently concluded in a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)
These costs are important because, despite the huge assessments of AI start-ups (Openai was just assessed at $ 300 billion), they are not very profitable. In January, Altman said that Optai was actually losing Money on its $ 200 “pro” subscription. This year, the company would be projected burn nearly $ 7 billion; In a few years, this number could reach up to $ 20 billion. Normally, losing so much money is not a good business model. But Openai and its competitors are able to focus on acquiring new users, as they have raised unprecedented sums from investors. Like my colleague Matteo Wong explain Last summer, the Silicon Valley undertook a jump of faith of billions of dollars, on the right track to spend more on AI than on what NASA spent On the Apollo space missions, in the hope that investments will end up being chargeable.
The subsidy of the millennium lifestyle has also been fueled by extreme quantities of money. Driving companies such as Uber and Lyft picked up customers even if they were bleeding money for years. At one point in 2015, Uber was offer Carpool goes up everywhere in San Francisco for only $ 5 while burning $ 1 million simultaneously per week. Sometimes the economy was fragile shocking. In 2019, the owner of a pizzeria based in Kansas REMARK that his restaurant had been added to Doordash without his fact. Stranger Still, a pizza he sold for $ 24 was at a price of $ 16 on Doordash, but the company paid the high price to him. In its quest for growth, the food delivery start-up had would have Rounded the menu of its restaurant, slapped it on their application and offered its pie to a heavy reduction. (Of course, the owner of the Pizzeria began to order his own pizzas via Doordash – to profit.)
These offers did not last forever, and Neither can be free. The subsidy of the lifestyle of the millennium finally came crushing Bottom as cheap money has dried up. Investors that have enabled these start-ups for so long to offer services at artificially sought-after deflated prices. Companies were therefore forced to increase prices, and not all survived.
If they want to succeed, AI companies will eventually have to make profits to their investors. Over time, underlying technology will become cheaper: despite increasing businesses, technical improvements are already increasing efficiency and to come down Some expenses. Start-ups could also increase income through ultra-premium business offers. Openai is would have Considering selling “doctoral research agents” at $ 20,000 per month. But it is unlikely that companies such that Optai authorize hundreds of millions of free users to take place indefinitely. This is perhaps the reason why the start-up is currently working on research and social media; Silicon Valley has spent the last two decades essentially perfecting trade models for both.
Today’s gifts put Openai and companies like it only do red in red, but perhaps not in the long term. After all, the millennials got used to Uber and Lyf increase Since the start of the pandemic. While students learn to write tests and program computers using AI, they become dependent on technology. If AI companies can now hang young people on their tools, they may be able to count on these users to pay in the future.
Some young people are already hung. In Openai d’Openai Rrange In the adoption of Chatgpt students, the most popular category of non-education or use of career was “relational advice”. In conversations with several younger users, I have heard of people who use AI for color correspondence cosmetics, the generation of personalized grocery lists according to budget and food preferences, creation of personalized audio meditations and half-marathon training routines and looking for advice on the care of their factories. When I spoke with Jaidyn-Marie Gambrell, a 22-year-old based young in Atlanta, she was in the McDonald’s car park and had just consulted Chatgpt on her order. “I went to Chatgpt and said to myself:” hey girl “,” she said. “” Do you think it would be smart for me to get a McChicken? “” The chatbot, which she programmed to remember her food and fitness goals, advised. But if she really wanted a sandwich, suggested Chatgpt, she should order the McChicken without Mayo, additional lettuce, tomatoes and without fries. So that’s what she got.
The subsidy of the lifestyle of generation Z is not entirely like its millennial predecessor. Uber was attractive because using an application to instantly invoke a car is much easier than hunting a taxi. Carpooling applications were destructive for the taxi sector, but for most users, they were simply practical. Today’s chatbots also sell convenience by accelerating test writing and meal planning, but the impact of technology could be even more destabilizing. College students currently registering for Chatgpt further before the finals could take exams intended to prepare them for jobs as the same IA companies suggest will soon evaporate. Even the most active young users with whom I spoke had mixed feelings on technology. Some people “skate at the university because of Chatgpt,” said Gambrell. “This level of convenience, I think it can be abused.” When companies offer documents, people tend to take them. Finally, however, someone has to pay.