A capital investment is predicated on there being future profits. I don't understand why they can't be profitable already. If 800M AU is not a critical mass for flipping on the revenue switch, I can't imagine what is.

So what stops them from monetizing those users today? Why would it be any different in the future if they can't?

I say further limit the free tier and more aggressively push those free users to a paid plan. Raise the prices for Business users and API access. An IPO isn't going to raise the trillion they need to keep running off capital.

Once OpenAI reaches the eventual pricing needed to break even, I suspect we'll see that it no longer makes sense for many of their customers to replace humans with AI after all. As it stands now, their investors are essentially paying OpenAI to put employees of other businesses out of jobs by masking the true costs. The sooner they can reach the sustainable pricing phase the better.