Technology

OpenAI is a non-profit. Further, US tech companies usually take many years to become profitable. It’s called reinvesting revenue, more companies should be doing that instead of stock buybacks.

Let’s suppose hosted LLMs like ChatGPT aren’t financially sustainable and go bust though. As a user, you can also just run them locally, and as smaller models improve, this is becoming more and more popular. It’s likely how Apple will be integrating LLMs into their devices, at least in part, and Microsoft is going that route with “Copilot+ PCs” that start shipping next week. Integration aside, you can run 70B models on an overpriced $5k MacBook Pro today that are maybe half as useful as ChatGPT. The cost to do so exceeds the cost of a ChatGPT subscription, but to use my numbers from before, a $5k MacBook Pro running llama 3 70B would have to save an engineer one hour per week to pay for itself in the first year. Subsequent years only the electrical costs would matter, which for a current gen MacBook Pro would be about equivalent to the ChatGPT subscription in expensive energy markets like Europe, or half that or less in the US.

In short, you can buy overpriced Apple hardware to run your LLMs, do so with high energy prices, and it’s still super cheap compared to a single engineer such that saving 1 hour per week would still pay for itself in the first year.