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ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

businessinsider.com

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Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you abbreviate "Microsoft" as "M$". It means you think of them without bias and with a clear head. /s

M$ has been a rather common abbreviation for Microsoft since at least slashdot days.

my point is that it is a derogatory abbreviation commonly used by people who, in fact, do not have an unbiased view of Microsoft.

it's harder to type than just "MS" so when someone uses "M$" they go out of their way to signal that they are biased. Being biased is fine, so long as one understands that they are biased and that they are communicating their bias along with the rest of the message.

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#202

This might sound tone deaf but thats seems extremely cheap to me. It means the cost range for chatGPT is between $300m - $500m per year. If the 100m users is accurate, it means they only need to convert low single digit percentage to paying users to break even. Now it makes sense why they chose to charge $20/m, I predicted much higher.

> If the 100m users is accurate

Users or accounts? I made an account but I use it approximately once every two weeks for about 30 minutes at a time, as it hasn't been that useful for me (needs more up-to-date info after September 2021).

I imagine many people made an account but only a small percentage are using it meaningfully often.

Also users are limited in the number of requests they can make. I have a feeling ChatGPT is actually very expensive to run, and they are burning cash like crazy.

If they weren't burning cash to run the thing, it would be more widely available.

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is resources will be limited or models that are slightly worse will be released that will be much more cost effective but not quite as good. This is often the case with these types of technologies.

So far, with technologies, it's been that new tech is both cheaper and better than the previous one. To not look far - gpt3.5 turbo.

Again, not what I'm saying.

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for it, then stopped paying for it. It seemed to be completely novel and fun to use but after a while it just became a pain. I tried writing a library to act as a code assistant for data science but trying to get it to write the codes that were useful to me took around the same amount of time as writing them myself. What you say is completely correct, it gets to around 70% of whatever you ask it to do then you…

>> I'm not going to pay 20$/month for something that I can just use for free Well, it works until it doesn't because the website is overloaded. $20 gets you in through the VIP door and you don't need to wait along with the rest of the peasants.

You also get (throttled) GPT 4 which is much better at many tasks. That’s why I paid. We’ll see if the novelty lasts for very long but right now it’s a exciting product that I use multiple times a day and the most sci-fi invention of my life so far so I don’t mind paying

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have started incorporating ChatGPT into my side project. I'm not integrating it into software or anything like that, but using it as a tool for product ideas, product photo ideas, funny social media captions, figuring out the best hashtags to use, product tagging and categorization. It has proven to be a great way to get everything to around 70%, then send off to my assistant for the remaining 30% of polish. So at…

> It has proven to be a great way to get everything to around 70%, then send off to my assistant for the remaining 30% of polish. So at $20/month, it was such a no-brainer, that I had to do it. Yup. I bought accounts for everyone here. We are using it as what I have been calling a "force multiplier". We are not and cannot use it for coding, yet, things like presentations, analyzing logs, creating lists of things, res…

As long as you train everyone to understand that it hallucinates and that you need to double check any numbers or other real facts.

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#206

This might sound tone deaf but thats seems extremely cheap to me. It means the cost range for chatGPT is between $300m - $500m per year. If the 100m users is accurate, it means they only need to convert low single digit percentage to paying users to break even. Now it makes sense why they chose to charge $20/m, I predicted much higher.

The problem with this model is that if ChatGPT really is "good enough" now - many others will be "good enough" soon, and then it's a race to the bottom.

Not a problem for the users

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting that the article mentions Microsoft is trying to build their own AI chips to help reduce cost, they are years behind Google in that effort. Google still has the advantage in both research and hardware, they just fumbled the execution but it's still very early in the game

> they are years behind Google in that effort. Google still has the advantage in both research and hardware, they just fumbled the execution but it's still very early in the game Where do we think Apple is in regards to this? If anyone has the upper-hand here with hardware, I would think it'd be Apple. But there's been zero indication that Apple has been working on any sort of generative AI.

This was very promising: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/stable-diffusion-...

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm not going to pay 20$/month for something that I can just use for free Well, it works until it doesn't because the website is overloaded. $20 gets you in through the VIP door and you don't need to wait along with the rest of the peasants.

You also get (throttled) GPT 4 which is much better at many tasks. That’s why I paid. We’ll see if the novelty lasts for very long but right now it’s a exciting product that I use multiple times a day and the most sci-fi invention of my life so far so I don’t mind paying

I didn't see any difference between 3.5 turbo and 4 for the data science app that I wrote. Another thing is that it's stochastic. So you could actually get a prompt that works well then you run it again and the identical prompt that generated codes that work now has generated codes that don't work. Of course, I could have my data science app cache codes that worked so if the prompt doesn't change it already has the generated code but I didn't want to have an ever growing repository of cached codes. Anyways.

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid for it, then stopped paying for it. It seemed to be completely novel and fun to use but after a while it just became a pain. I tried writing a library to act as a code assistant for data science but trying to get it to write the codes that were useful to me took around the same amount of time as writing them myself. What you say is completely correct, it gets to around 70% of whatever you ask it to do then you…

The cheap version does all of that much worse. I don't understand how people can be so cheap.

I don't think it's cheap to pay for a service, test it out for a month, find that in the beginning you used it everyday, and by the end of the month you forgot it existed. Then decide to not keep paying for it.

Probably for the next proposal I write, I'll pay for it again. It's super useful to take care of all the bullshit things you have to write for science to not plaigerize yourself.

I also tried using it as a dungeon master like that blog post from a couple weeks ago. But gpt4 didn't seem to remember things with regularity enough to actually work. Basically there was an uncanny valley because gpt4 doesn't have a pad of paper to write things down on like any person would have.

Re: ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

#210
post #99

Sorry for the tangent, wondering how you've used GPT to make your life better? I'll start: - making little scripts in shell / js / python that I'm not as fluent in. 5 min vs 1-3 hours - explaining repos and apis instead of reading all the docs - help with debugging - flushing out angles for new concepts that I did not previously consider (ex: how do you make a good decentralized exchange)

> explaining repos and apis instead of reading all the docs - help with debugging

You can only do this with something that existed in its training set, right? There's no way to point it at a random GitHub repo and say "digest this, so I can ask you questions about it"?

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