It's 2025, and OpenAI is officially open for business

So are we sticking with them out of loyalty—or obligation?

OpenAI’s LLM model, ChatGPT, reminds me of that first friend you made in high school.

They were new, exciting, and showed you the ropes—a welcome companion when you hadn’t yet connected with others. At first, you valued their company deeply.

But as time went on, you met other friends with different perspectives and insights.

Gradually, you found yourself reaching out to them more often and to your older friend less.

You still cherish the memories, but you’ve moved on.

Sometimes, though, that old friend gets a bit clingy—maybe asking for a Chrome extension. When you do reconnect, the conversations feel hollow: slow responses, irrelevant tangents, or repetitive chatter that mirrors past talks. It leaves you wondering whether the connection was ever as meaningful as it seemed.

That’s been my experience as I’ve explored alternative LLMs like Google Gemini, Cohere, Anthropic Claude, and Perplexity. Each brings fresh capabilities and accesses information in unique ways. Truthfully, I’ve been using them more often and questioning whether my $25 per month ChatGPT subscription still justifies its cost.

Both OpenAI and Google unveiled their text-to-video AI generators in December. The general consensus online is that Google’s Veo 2 outshines OpenAI’s Sora, delivering more realistic physical characteristics and smoother natural movements.

Recently, OpenAI announced that they are “evolving” their business structure to include for-profit company intended to fund its non-profit research lab. Their stated goal is to:

best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.

Looking to the future, OpenAI says:

As we enter 2025, we will have to become more than a lab and a startup — we have to become an enduring company.

Online criticism has flared in response to OpenAI’s new structure, with AI naysayer Ed Zitron leading the pack:

Yeah I need way more money than anyone ever got before. I need it because my shit is difficult right now. But it's important in ways even I haven't been able to work out. OpenAI is a serious business. Help me. Please help me please my serious company is so good. Help me.

My grain of thought

As someone who’s started her own company with the lofty (and altruistic) goal of improving humanity, I get it—sacrifice is part of the deal, even if that means (shudder) making money. Doing good isn’t cheap—or is it?

The truth is, we can’t always predict the results of our efforts or whether they’ll align with our often vague and idealistic goals. Still, we forge ahead. Like OpenAI, THE GRAIN offers a product for free or at a discount because it’s just getting started. But real talk: there are operational costs. The lights need to stay on, subscription fees pile up—or, in OpenAI’s case, they’re dealing with astronomical energy and development expenses.

For a while, OpenAI has been like that one reliable friend you stick with through a semester or two. But now, we’ve met others who are vying for our loyalty. So here’s the real question: are we sticking with OpenAI because we genuinely want to, or because we feel we have to?