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ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

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

#211

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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…

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…

If you use it through the API you can get very far with much less than 20$

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

#212
post #70

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Nerd-snipe and useful? That’s the holy grail! We’re having fun and we’re solving real problems that we have. Amazing. I’ve already incorporated it into my publishing process. My home-grown “cms” uses ChatGPT (via API) to write my article description, draft a twitter thread, and craft a “viral insight”. The latter is mostly useful to make sure my article even makes a point. Hoping to use it for a related articles feat…

> Nerd-snipe and useful? That’s the holy grail! Yes. i think its a good software product! Maybe one of the best there ever was - I'm not surprised Sam Altman jumped the YC ship for this one, or that MS is particularly interested it. It gets ignored in all the other bru-haha but I'm excited to see what the really talented software teams of the world will be able to accomplish with an AI coding assisstent - and I don't…

Especially for new software in a different language than you already know or haven't used years, in a realm other than your current area of expertise. It's pretty useful to be able to directly ask it how do to, eg basic string manipulation in $new_language, but even more convenient is to ask it to do the transformation for you. "Given a string of the format X, write a $language snippet that outputs X'." It'll do more advanced things than that, but that's one area I found it to be useful and time-saving in an unfamiliar language because it saves me from looking up that boilerplate before getting to the part where I throw a regexp at the problem.

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

#213
post #100

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It's not like a database you can cache though, the responses are non-deterministic, the responses you get can be different the next time you query it with the exact same prompt. That's part of the point of it being generative AI (vs a question/answer system that people imagine it is).

> That's part of the point of it being generative AI (vs a question/answer system that people imagine it is). The point I am trying to make is that not all use cases for ChatGPT are generative. There are a lot of Q&A use cases today despite the fact that these are so far beneath its true capabilities. These items could be dealt with using more economical means. "give me a recipe for XYZ" should not require a GPU for…

Sure for Bing type interfaces it makes sense but if you consider what it is more holistically there are two questions: 1) do you want it to be non-deterministic and hope the first answer is the one you want everyone to see and 2) do you invalidate the entire cache every time there's a minor update to the model? How else do you tell which keys to remove?

You'd basically be removing the entire cache every release

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

#214
post #9

Interesting numbers. That roughly equates to about $250 million per year plus I don't know how much training is costing them to keep the model up to date and suchlike. The company also has about 375 employees. I've no idea how much they get paid but I used $200k as a yearly cost and that comes to $75 million. That's about 3:1 cost of operating the services to paying employees. That seems quite high as I've never been…

A typical OpenAI engineer gets 200-300k cash and 300-500k equity, at least from the levels.fyi data.

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

#215

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> 10% here and there is very small compared to the literal orders magnitude improvements during the reign of Moore's Law. I can't confirm it, but I noticed this comment says "gpu tech has beat Moore’s law for DNNs the last several years": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35653231

We're actually at an inflection point where this isn't the case anymore. For a long time, GPU hardware basically became more powerful with each generation, but prices stayed roughly the same plus minus inflation. Last couple of years, this trend has broken. You pay double or even quadruple the price for a relatively tenuous increase in performance.

Is that because of things unrelated to normal operations? From crypto coins, covid and now AI. I guess we may have to wait and see

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

#216
post #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"?

Using the GPT-4 32k context model I would guess you can just paste the entire docs in there, and ask it questions about it. 32k tokens is about 24k words.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7127966-what-is-the-diff...

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

#218

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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 g…

In my experience 3.5 is so far away from 4 that it makes it makes 3.5 useless. I'd give another shot to gpt 4 if 3.5 was almost working for you (what did you use it for, anything for specific?)

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

#219
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

In my experience 3.5 is so far away from 4 that it makes it makes 3.5 useless. I'd give another shot to gpt 4 if 3.5 was almost working for you (what did you use it for, anything for specific?)

Generation of data transformation pipelines in python. The problem is that a prompt that produces working code doesn't always produce working code.

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

#220

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I, too, am curious how you used a fancier autocomplete to eliminate food waste.

It taught me about the '2 bin system' in ISE. Basically kitchen logistics.

Why did you need an AI to tell you about that?
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