Napkin math: if the 5 trillion investment is paid back by 1 billion customers, every customer pays $5000. If they want to write off the investment in 5 years, that's $1000 per year.
Even with the current AI capabilities, with the right products that seems doable.
IIRC, the estimates are something like:
Estimated user share: Free 60%, Plan 35%, Consumption/API 5% Estimated revenue share: Free 0%, Plan 21%, Consumption/API 79%
So, in other words, almost all revenue comes from a small group of (B2B) customers.
I ain't paying 1000 USD per year (83,33 per month) for this garbage. I pay about 18 EUR per month for a Mistral subscription, and if it cost 3-4 the cost, I wouldn't pay for it.
The beauty is the open models: the margins are going to be thin on proprietary models. The only thing they got going for it, is creating artificial scarcity. But the Chinese are able to buy them from secondary markets anyway, or via Jensen Huang's girlfriend.
Even if the US proprietary models are 6 months ahead, there's going to be a time when the competition is good enough. I believe we are already well past that point.