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[❓] ChatGPT's fate hangs in the balance as OpenAI reportedly edges closer to bankruptcy
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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If you look at how much they spend per day (poster quoted $700,000 daily but said unverified), how would it make any sense to provide the service for free? I won't argue for/against releasing the model to the public, since honestly that argument can go both ways and I don't think it would make much of a difference anyway except benefit their competitors (other massive companies).
However, let's assume they did release it publicly, what use would that be for the smaller business/individual? Running these models takes some heavy and very expensive hardware. It's not like buying a rack and building a computer, these models are huge. Realistically, they can't provide that as a free service, they'd fail as a company almost immediately. Most businesses can't afford to run these models themselves, the upfront and maintenance costs would obliterate them. Providing it as a service like they have been means they recoup some of the cost of running the models, while users can actually afford to use these models without needing to maintain the hardware themselves.
Less than a million dollars a day for everyone who wants to in the whole world to use AI right now? That’s peanuts. A single city bus costs $5-800k to buy. Even if costs goes up to several tens of million a day for access for the whole world that’s incredibly affordable.
It’s crazy that something so useful and so cheap to run can’t be sustained in the current system. This seems like an argument against a market based solution to AI.
You're ignoring the fact that the cost scales with usage. Increasing its availability will also increase the cost, hardware requirements (which can't really scale since there's a shortage), and environmental cost due to power usage.
No, I am not ignoring that. I specifically said:
With how many people are already using AI, it’s frankly mind boggling that they’re only losing $700k a day.
You’re also ignoring the fact that costs don’t scale proportionally with usage. Infrastructure and labor can be amortized over a greater user base. And these services will get cheaper to run per capita as time goes on and technology improves.
Finally, there are positive economic externalities to public AI availability. Imagine the improvements to the economy, education and health if everyone in the world had free access to high quality AI in their native language, no matter how poor or how remote. Some things, like schools, roads and healthcare, are not ideally provisioned under a free market. AI is looking to be another.
There are positive economic externalities to public everything availability. We don't live in this kind of world though, someone will always try to claim a larger share due to human nature. That being said, I'm not really interested in arguing about the political feasibility (or lack thereof) of having every resource being public.
There are significant throttles in place for people who are using LLMs (at least GPT-based ones), and there's also a cost people pay to use these LLMs. Sure you can go use ChatGPT for free, but the APIs cost real money, they aren't free to use. What you're seeing is the money they lost after all the money they made as well.
I don't disagree that the services will get cheaper and that costs don't scale proportionally. You're most likely right - generally speaking, that's the case. What you're missing though is that there is an extreme shortage of components. Scaling in this manner only works if you actually have the means to scale. As things stand, companies are struggling to get their hands on the GPUs needed for inference.
Saying "Things are inevitably bad because of human nature" is just very weird, since we obviously do have good policies and we try to solve other problems like crime and poverty. It sounds like you already agree that this is good policy? You're just saying it's not politically feasible? OK, sure, we probably don't disagree then.
I am obviously NOT arguing that every resource should be public. This discussion is about AI, which was publicly funded, trained on public data, and is backed by public research. This sleight of hand to make my position sound extreme is, frankly, intellectually dishonest.
OK, keep the premium subscription going then.
There's a shortage, but it's not "extreme". ChatGPT is running fine. I can use it anytime I want instantly. You'd be laughed out of the room if you told AI researchers that ChatGPT can't scale because we're running out of GPUS. You seem to be looking for reasons to be against this, but these reasons don't make sense to me, especially since this particular problem would exist whether it's publicly owned or privately owned.
We probably don't here, but like I said I'm not really interested in discussing the political feasibility of it.
I don't think I ever disagreed that the models themselves should be public, and there are already many publicly available models (although it would be nice if GPT-N were). What I disagree with is the service being free. The service costs a company real money and resources to maintain, just like any other service. If it were free, the only entity that could reasonably run the models is the government, but at this point we might as well also have the government run public git servers, public package registries, etc. Honestly, I'm not sure what impression you expected me to get, considering the claim that a privately run service using privately paid-for resources should be free to the public.
Actually no, I work directly with AI researchers who regularly use LLMs and this is the exact impression I got from them.