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It Costs So Much to Run ChatGPT That OpenAI Is Losing Money on $200 ChatGPT Pro Subscriptions
(futurism.com)
If you can't even make a buck torching the planet so people don't have to write their own emails, how do you live? 
Yeah, this is the biggest question for all the LLMs. When are they actually going to turn a profit and how?
They seem to be doing the Uber model of flooding the market to then hike prices, but I don't see how people are going to be able to afford it. I guess it is just training them to then sell them to companies?
Uber also just burned money forever before they price hiked. I think again, this is just gaining market share. Make sure there's few people left who can write or research or do art because it was all done by the "cheap" machine and then you can hike the prices and have a near monopoly on it.
I'm not sure that'll pan out though. Nobody drives a taxi as a hobby. People do create art as a hobby, or write, or even do research.
Where it might pan out* is clerical work. LLMs will never be able to do actual work unsupervised. But if you can fire 100+ laywers in favor of one guy who fixes the LLM's mistakes, then its probably profitable. Art, writing and creative works in general are a red herring. It's a promise to the masses that they'll be able to conjure whatever entertainment they want, meanwhile the company is working to rugpull them out of what social mobility still exists.
*and even then I can't imagine there won't be a massive bubble burst incoming. The current business model loses money. Fullstop. LLM doesn't seem a good fit for a consumer good.
And honestly for that use in particular it’s actually a pretty decent tool. Like, in a socialist system under common ownership that sounds like a good tool for reducing unnecessary human labor.
That’s not what we’re doing, to be clear, but I do appreciate when we can glimpse what actual use these things do have
The company I work for is pressuring every single department to onboard "AI", and there is so much talk of "training" the LLMs we will buy to suit our needs. I imagine lots of other companies are demanding the same of their employees right now
My org have been talking about hiring "AI consultants". I wanted to flip a table over and storm out when that was mentioned. There's no shortage of better things to spend money on.
I need to get in on this grift before I'm laid off lmao
Yep, working in a safety critical environment and constantly hear how safety reports will be made by personally tailored AI and requirements developed and managed with AI. Then the natural step is to hire AI consultants to do that. Fuckin hell it's looking bleak. And because every business executive thinks this is the solution, it'll become a race to the bottom because all capital will also go to those dumbass ideas, then all people capable of doing work without AI will be replaced by those who do it less well with AI over time. I'm entirely unconvinced that this will be good (despite the fact historically that such advances have been fine, like with calculators or computers generally). This time we don't KNOW how the solution is reached..
Lt. Broccoli at Quark's holosuite.