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$200 a month for a user is losing money? There’s no way he’s just including model queries. An entire a6000 server is around $800 / month and you can fit a hell of lot more than 4 peoples worth of queries. He has to include training and or R&D.
It includes anything that will keep them from having to pay investors back. Classic tech start up bullshit.
Silicon valley brain rot formula:
Losing money, get billions every month
Making money pay billions back
Which one do you think they pick
I’m honestly fairly surprised as well, but at the same time, they’re not serving a model that can run on an A6000, and the people paying for unlimited, would probably be the ones who setup bots and apps doing thousands of requests per hour.
And honestly? Those people are 100% right.
If they can’t deliver true “unlimited” for 200 bucks a month, they shouldn’t market it as such.grumble grumble unlimited mobile data grumble grumble
To be fair, unlimited is supposed to mean unlimited for a reasonable person. Like someone going to an “all you can eat buffet”. However those purchasing these would immediately set up proxy accounts and use them to serve all their communities, so that one unlimited account, becomes 100 or a 1000 actual users. So like someone going to an “all you can eat” and then sneaking in 5 other people under their trenchcoat.
If they actually do block this sort of account sharing, and it’s costing them money on just prolific single users, then I don’t know, their scaling is just shite. Like “unlimited” can’t ever be truly unlimited, as there should be a rate limit to prevent these sort of shenanigans. But if the account can’t make money with a reasonable rate limit (like 17280/day which would translate to 1 request per 5 sec) they are fuuuuuucked.
Yeah, poor wording on my part, proxy accounts being banned is totally fair, but a user using various apps and bots is the type of ‘Power User’ scenario I’d expect a unlimited plan to cover.
Agreed. Like how fucking difficult is it to see “It costs us X per query, what Y rate limit do we need to put on this account so that it doesn’t exceed 200$ per month?”. I bet the answer to is hilariously low rate limit that nobody would buy, so they decided to value below cost and pray people won’t actually use all those queries. Welp. And if they didn’t even put a rate limit, also lol. lmao.
Surely this includes staff, real estate, and other operating costs.
Sam, just add sponsored content. The road to enshittification doesn’t have to be long! Make it shitty fast so people can move past it and start hosting their own models for their own usage.
Isn’t that why it has to be long? Not many people actually rely on OpenAI yet.
Right? He just needs to have it add some Shell or Wal-Mart logos to the generated images. Maybe the AI generated Fifty Shades-esque Gandalf fanfic somebody is prompting can take place in a Target.
Hey ChatGPT, give me an overview of today’s weather.
Today’s weather is beautifully sunny and hot, with clear skies and no rain in sight—perfect for enjoying the new Coca-Cola Zero™. Hmmmm, refreshing!
When has “not profitable” ever stopped a tech startup lmao
Sooooo, wanna tell us how much the cost really is per prompt?
So people are really believing Altman would publish these damning statements without ulterior motives? Are we seriously this gullible? Holy shit, we reached a critical mass of acephalous humans, no turning back now.
losing money because people are using it more than expected
“I personally chose the price and thought we would make some money.”
Big MoviePass energy
Ahahahaha I forgot about moviepass
Good. Burn that thing to the ground.
Likely they’ll try to sell it to governments, and with Elon Musk proposing goVeRNmeNt eFfIciEnCy, at least xAI can become somewhat profitable.
Heard someone (I think that Shark Tank dumbass) already mention instituting some kind of “AI mandate” on healthcare. Musk will probably destroy OpenAI, because he seems to have a vendetta against them.
Much like uber and netflix, all of these ai chatbots that are available for free right now will become expensive, slow, and dumb once the investor money runs out and these companies have to figure out a business model. We’re in the golden age of LLMs right now, all we can do is enjoy the free service while it lasts and try not to make it too much a part of our workflow, because inevitably it will be cut off. Unless you’re one of those people with a self-hosted LLM I guess.
Not LLM but there Google Assistant has gotten much more stupid over the past several years. They realized that it was too expensive and had to lobotomize it.
Can’t even set a timer with it anymore which was pretty much all I used it for. That and navigation with Android Auto
Huh? I set a timer with a voice command just two days ago. I’m not using “Gemini” though, does opting into that literally remove functionality?
Just tried it again, and it worked but for whatever reason, did not use my actual timer app on the phone, and used Google Assistant. For whatever reason the timer was muted by default, so that’s why I thought it didn’t work at the last time I used it.
I believe that coincided with the Sonos debacle.
IMHO, Google Now > Google Assistant
Agreed - bring back the golden age where the Google Now app existed and could actually do useful things
This. AI Hype beasts keep saying “This is the worst AI will ever be” and “It’ll just get better” but really it’s just going to get worse as they actually try to turn the bubble into a profit
will become expensive, slow, and dumb
Wouldn’t they have to become smart first?
I was about to say, a selfhosted LLM means I’m not competing with every market analysis tool, customer service replacement, and 10 y/o kid bombarding the service with junk. It doesn’t need to be ultra fast if I’m the only one using the hardware.
and who’ll supply the model and training and updates and data curation, dom? is it as manna from heaven? do you merely step upon the path and receive the divine wisdom of fresh llm updates?
fucking hell
Honestly, the data used to create these models was ripped from the public and I think that they are owed back to the public. OpenAI started as a non profit, and I think it should stay that way.
The FOSS model works well enough for other projects and I think that corporate AI will be exactly the same as the industrial revolution, progress at the cost of humanity. This isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a solution looking for problems.
Base open source model.
Topic expert models.
Community lora.
Program extensions.Look what comfy UI + Stable Diffusion can achieve.
Base open source model just means some company commanding a great deal of capital and compute made the weights public to fuck with LLMaaS providers it can’t directly compete with yet, it’s not some guy in a garage training and RLFH them for months on end just to hand the result over to you to fine tune for writing caiaphas cain fanfiction.
And with the pruned llama models, it runs really quickly on a 2070.
Once they are cut off self hosted focus will explode and will see huge improvements in terms of ability and ease of use.
your Tech Friend is giving you bad advice, stop listening to them
What advice?
That they will not fight self hosted methods tooth and nail
oh, I guess then you must be the Tech Friend
either way you probably want to stfu
Until their legislated into illegality.
Is it gonna be “to protect the children”, “to stop criminals”, or “to save the environment”? Place your bets!
“We’re not running AI on these servers, officer! Just good old-fashioned crypto hashes.”
“I personally chose the price”
Is that how well-run companies operate? The CEO unilaterally decides the price rather than delegating that out to the numbers people they employ?
In tech? Kinda yeah. When a subscription is 14.99 $£€/month it’s a clear “we just think it’s what people think is a fair price for SaaS”.
The trick is that tech usually works on really weird economics where the fixed costs (R&D) are astonishingly high and the marginal costs (servers etc) are virtually nil. That’s how successful tech companies are so profitable, even more than oil companies, because once the R&D is paid off every additional user is free money. And this means that companies don’t have to be profitable any time in particular as long as they promise sufficient projected growth to make up for being a money pit until then. You can get away with anything when your investors believe you’ll eventually have a billion users.
… Of course that doesn’t work when every customer interaction actually costs a buck or two in GPU compute, but I’m sure after a lot of handwaving they were able to explain to their investors how this is totally fine and totally sustainable and they’ll totally make their money back a thousandfold.
Should have asked chatgpt to play the role of a CEO.
This answer would be much funnier if that wasn’t his fucking plan.
This is my first experience listening to this guy, and I’ll be darned, it’s a another idiot billionaire.
I’d like to think there are intelligent billionaires but honestly folks, if you win that big and haven’t cashed out to do something more meaningful with you’re life, you’re an idiot.
jesus fuck how did i never see this before
Worth the watch just to hear the genuine laughter
A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.
If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?
Is that what Ayn Rand is about? All I really remember is that having a name you chose yourself is self-fulfilling.
Ayn Rand is about spending your whole life moralizing a social philosophy based on the impossibility of altruism, perfect meritocratic achievement perfectly distributing wealth, and hatred of government taxation, regulation, and social welfare programs…
… and then dying alone, almost totally broke, living off of social security and financial charity from your former secretary.
I wonder if she ever realised or simply blamed everyone around herself.
Every time I read about her dying alone and broke I smile a little.
Oh boy I got a fun video for you: https://youtu.be/GmJI6qIqURA @26:50
Atlas Shrugged is so bad that if you didn’t know anything about the author, it could be read as a decent satire.
A monologue that last SIXTY PAGES of dry exposition. Barely credible characterization from the protagonist and villains and extremely poor world building.
Anthem is her better book because it keeps to a simple short story format - but still has a very dull plot that shoehorns ideology throughout. There’s far better philosophical fiction writers out there like Camus, Vonnegut, or Koestler. Skip Rand altogether imo
far, far, far, far, far, far, far fewer business people than you’d expect/guess are data-driven decision makers
and then there’s the whole bayfucker ceo dynamic which adds a whole bunch of extra dumb shit
it’d be funnier if it weren’t for the tunguska-like effect it’s having on human society both at present and in the coming decades to follow :|
I endorse this as a data professional. It’s maddening.
There’s a reason so many companies fail
there is, but this isn’t (the primary) it tbh
It works for ice tea and hotdogs, why not AI? (I jest)
I think I remember Jeff Bezos in “The Everything Store” book seeing a price they charged for AWS and went even lower for growth. So there could be some rationale for that? However, I think switching AI providers is easier than Cloud Providers? Not sure though.
I can imagine the highest users of this being scam artists and stuff though.
I want this AI hype train to die.
I’m guessing that means a team or someone presented their pricing analysis to him, and suggested a price range. And this is his way of taking responsibility for making the final judgment call.
(He’d get blamed either way, anyways)
$20/mo sounds like a reasonable subscription-ish price, so he picked that. That OpenAI loses money on every query, well, let’s build up volume!
While the words themselves near an apology, I didn’t read it as taking responsibility. I read it as:
Anyone could have made this same mistake. In fact, dumber people than I would surely have done worse.
Who needs to know what they are taking about anyway, just suck your finger in the air and set a price
This 100% answers my question from another thread. These businesses have cooked the books so bad already that they thought this was gonna save them and it doubled down on em.
Sounds like they’ll need a bailout, to preserve the economy.
sam altman proving once again that he is not only a tech genius but also a business genius. make sure to let him scan your eyeballs before it’s too late.
Good riddance. We never asked for it, and we didn’t deserve it forced on us.
You don’t have to buy every product and service, you know.
Other people are destroying the world while using it though.
So…. It’s entirely my fault if I use a phone or a television, or… a computer?
Thanks for the sage advice! AI is the best!
AI is the best!
I agree
CEO personally chose a price too low for company to be profitable.
What a clown.
They’re still in the first stage of enshittification: gaining market share. In fact, this is probably all just a marketing scheme. “Hi! I’m Crazy Sam Altman and my prices are SO LOW that I’m LOSING MONEY!! Tell your friends and subscribe now!”
I’m afraid it might be more like Uber, or Funko, apparently, as I just learned tonight.
Sustained somehow for decades before finally turning any profit. Pumped full of cash like it’s foie gras by Wall Street. Inorganic as fuck, promoted like hell by Wall Street, VC, and/or private equity.
Shoved down our throats in the end.
It was worth it to finally dethrone Big Taxi🙄
well, yes. But also this is an extremely difficult to price product. 200$/m is already insane, but now you’re suggesting they should’ve gone even more aggressive. It could turn out almost nobody would use it. An optimal price here is a tricky guess.
Although they probably should’ve sold a “limited subscription”. That does give you max break-even amount of queries per month, or 2x of that, but not 100x, or unlimited. Otherwise exactly what happened can happen.
“Our product that costs metric kilotons of money to produce but provides little-to-no value is extremely difficult to price” oh no, damn, ye, that’s a tricky one
I signed up for API access. I run all my queries through that. I pay per query. I’ve spent about $8.70 since 2021. This seems like a win-win model. I save hundreds of dollars and they make money on every query I run. I’m confused why there are subscriptions at all.
The real problem is believing that you can run a profitable LLM company.
What the LLMs do, at the end of the day, is statistics. If you want a more precise model, you need to make it larger. Basically, exponentially scaling marginal costs meet exponentially decaying marginal utility.
Some LLM bros must have seen this comment and become offended.
guess again
what the locals are probably taking issue with is:
If you want a more precise model, you need to make it larger.
this shit doesn’t get more precise for its advertised purpose when you scale it up. LLMs are garbage technology that plateaued a long time ago and are extremely ill-suited for anything but generating spam; any claims of increased precision (like those that openai makes every time they need more money or attention) are marketing that falls apart the moment you dig deeper — unless you’re the kind of promptfondler who needs LLMs to be good and workable just because it’s technology
and because you’re all-in on the griftlook bro just 10 more
repsgpt3s bro itl’ll get you there bro I swear broWell, then let me clear it up. The statistics becomes more precise. As in, for a given prefix A, and token x, the difference between the calculated probability of x following A (P(x|A)) to the actual probability of P(x|A) becomes smaller. Obviously, if you are dealing with a novel problem, then the LLM can’t produce a meaningful answer. And if you’re working on a halfway ambitious project, then you’re virtually guaranteed to encounter a novel problem.
Obviously, if you are dealing with a novel problem, then the LLM can’t produce a meaningful answer.
it doesn’t produce any meaningful answers for non-novel problems either
More like he misjudged subscriber numbers than price.
Wait but he controls the price, not the subscriber number?
Like even if the issue was low subscriber number (which it isn’t since they’re losing money per subscriber, more subscribers just makes you lose money faster), that’s still the same category of mistake? You control the price and supply, not the demand, you can’t set a stupid price that loses you money and then be like “ah, not my fault, demand was too low” like bozo it’s your product and you set the price. That’s econ 101, you can move the price to a place where your business is profitable, and if such a price doesn’t exist then maybe your biz is stupid?
I believe our esteemed poster was referencing the oft-seen cloud dynamic of “making just enough in margin” where you can tolerate a handful of big users because you have enough lower-usage subscribers in aggregate to counter the heavies. which, y’know, still requires the margin to exist in the first place
alas, hard to have margins in Setting The Money On Fire business models
despite that one episode of Leverage where they did some laundering by way of gym memberships, not every shady bullshit business that burns way more than they make can just swizzle the numbers!
(also if you spend maybe half a second thinking about it you’d realize that economies of scale only apply when you can actually have economies of scale. which they can’t. which is why they’re constantly setting more money on fire the harder they try to make their bad product seem good)
please explain to us how you think having less, or more, subscribers would make this profitable
Yeah, the tweet clearly says that the subscribers they have are using it more than they expected, which is costing them more than $200 per month per subscriber just to run it.
I could see an argument for an economy of scales kind of situation where adding more users would offset the cost per user, but it seems like here that would just increase their overhead, making the problem worse.
LLM inference can be batched, reducing the cost per request. If you have too few customers, you can’t fill the optimal batch size.
That said, the optimal batch size on today’s hardware is not big (<100). I would be very very surprised if they couldn’t fill it for any few-seconds window.
i would swear that in an earlier version of this message the optimal batch size was estimated to be as large as twenty.
yep, original is still visible on mastodon
this sounds like an attempt to demand others disprove the assertion that they’re losing money, in a discussion of an article about Sam saying they’re losing money
What? I’m not doubting what he said. Just surprised. Look at this. I really hope Sam IPO his company so I can short it.
oh, so you’re that kind of fygm asshole
good to know
Can someone explain why I am being downvoted and attacked in this thread? I swear I am not sealioning. Genuinely confused.
@[email protected] asked how request frequency might impact cost per request. Batch inference is a reason (ask anyone in the self-hosted LLM community). I noted that this reason only applies at very small scale, probably much smaller than what
OpenAI is operating at.@[email protected] why did you say I am demanding someone disprove the assertion? Are you misunderstanding “I would be very very surprised if they couldn’t fill [the optimal batch size] for any few-seconds window” to mean “I would be very very surprised if they are not profitable”?
The tweet I linked shows that good LLMs can be much cheaper. I am saying that
OpenAI is very inefficient and thus economically “cooked”, as the post title will have it. How does this make me FYGM? @[email protected]
What are people using the $200 plan for that makes it worth it? You only get their model with their training, you don’t have any access to weights or training. And with how nerfed openai makes its models, nothing even remotely nefarious can be done with it. All you can do is process simple data. Which having a purposed trained model seems the most valuable for.
t their model with their training, you don’t have any access to weights or training. And wit
OK, I see what’s going on. The original premise is flawed. The $20 model is limited. It’s intended for you to hit their web page and query for things. The $200 model is unlimited, you can API the crap out of it for your random project, run an entire business through it. It also gives you full access to o1 which appears to do 6-10 queries for every query to make sure it’s not lying to you.
The $20 model doesn’t have to be losing money for the $200 model to be losing money, they’re completely different use cases and honestly, unlimited queries for fixed capital is never going to work, you can just sublet the access,
Probably mostly fake social media profiles and YouTube/Tiktok AI slop.
You could use it to create hundreds of real-looking fake accounts on reddit or other social media site. OpenAI’s site doesn’t have this kind of fake user function built into its app, but it should be easy enough with an API. Just have a bot randomly scroll reddit’s most popular posts. Then have it find the most popular comments on those posts over a certain length. Feed the text of that comment to OpenAI, instructing the LLM to make a disagreeing/concurring/answering reply. Then have the bot post OpenAI’s output as a comment on reddit. Have each account comment not at superhuman speed, but at the speed that a normal human user would post.
Use these tools to build up an arsenal of hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands of sockpuppet accounts. Each will have years of post history behind them, so they will pass typical subreddit filters like “account must be this old or have X comment karma” to post. Just keep these bots constantly running and available.
Then, when you want to use them, use them. Don’t even dramatically switch their persona. Want to use your bot network for politics? Have your 10,000 fake users mostly comment on random banal stuff. But every 10th post or so have them post a comment for whatever politician or cause you support. You might even have them regularly post content of that political persuasion as a normal part of their operation. Same thing with advertising. Have them mostly post random stuff, but have them occasionally post a glowing review for a product, film, or service.
The real use for OpenAI’s software is as a vector for very effective and difficult to detect and filter astroturfing campaigns. Hell, just getting your name out there can be advantageous. Are you a nobody, but with a lot of cash, that wants to launch a political career? Higher such a bot net to sprinkle your name across social media. Even if all the bots do is mention you, neither praising or condemning, it gets your name out there. The next election cycle, when people start talking about potential primary candidates for a particular office, real people will suggest your name, simply because they heard it somewhere. Name recognition is a powerful thing.
yt/tiktok ai slop’s point wasn’t making these people who push it rich, the point was to sell them a guide that will claim to do that, because they’re all suckers https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/
even russian influence campaigns don’t do it this way. it’s probably a split between this kind of thing being too expensive (and they’re using underpaid interns) and accounts being too disposable (you can burn it all after desired effect is achieved)
They quite famously did, and got caught doing it when they started accidentally posting error messages.
At the direction of, and with financial support from, the GRU, CGE and its personnel used generative AI tools to quickly create disinformation that would be distributed across a massive network of websites designed to imitate legitimate news outlets to create false corroboration between the stories, as well as to obfuscate their Russian origin. CGE built a server that hosts the generative AI tools and associated AI-created content, in order to avoid foreign web-hosting services that would block their activity. The GRU provided CGE and a network of U.S.-based facilitators with financial support to: build and maintain its AI-support server; maintain a network of at least 100 websites used in its disinformation operations; and contribute to the rent cost of the apartment where the server is housed. Korovin played a key role in coordinating financial support from the GRU to his employees and U.S.-based facilitators.
that’s news not socials, but we are seeing LLMs deployed by social media bot networks
i think it’s only a small part of their efforts and relatively recent one. i suspect they did their preparations to 2024 american elections and some elections in europe (at minimum romania) the old, manual way https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21537107 what do you need these permanent chatgpt-based accounts if investigation finds them in a week, making them useless forever? they have adapted to this because this is something that happened to them before
Seems like they need to do lots ofovideo slop using sora
The plagiarism power virus is too expensive to operate? I’m shocked I tell you
Now imagine if they actually paid for the training data as well.
