[flagged]
LLMs are cheap
41–50 of 319 posts
Re: LLMs are cheap
#42Given how addicted people are to using LLMs steep price hikes are almost certainly guaranteed at some point. When this happens, what we will see is once again the rich and privileged will benefit from the use of LLMs while the poor have to just rely on their own brains. Consider how some students will have to grow up struggling through school without any LLMs while rich kids breeze their way through everything with t…
That would assume that there's a moat...
Re: LLMs are cheap
#43> OpenAI reportedly made a loss of $5B in 2024. They also reportedly have 500M MAUs. To reach break-even, they'd just need to monetize those free users for an average of $10/year, or $1/month. A $1 ARPU for a service like this would be pitifully low. This is a tangent to the rest of the article, but this "just" is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas holding up the skies. Taking a user from $0 to $1 is immeasurably ha…
This is true only because people are so dumb. Paying $1000 for an iPhone? Sure. $10 for a Starbucks? Sure. $1 per year for LLM? Now hold on, papa is not an oil oligarch...
People pay for the perceived value. If apple started by giving away iPhones they would balk at paying that much for them too. It's also very well know that free to anything is much harder than increasing the price
Re: LLMs are cheap
#44> OpenAI reportedly made a loss of $5B in 2024. They also reportedly have 500M MAUs. To reach break-even, they'd just need to monetize those free users for an average of $10/year, or $1/month. A $1 ARPU for a service like this would be pitifully low. This is a tangent to the rest of the article, but this "just" is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas holding up the skies. Taking a user from $0 to $1 is immeasurably ha…
This is true only because people are so dumb. Paying $1000 for an iPhone? Sure. $10 for a Starbucks? Sure. $1 per year for LLM? Now hold on, papa is not an oil oligarch...
It's not only that they're stupid, it's the fact that maybe they don't really need it.
Do they really need an iPhone? in a sense, yes, since the alternative still means spending a good amount of money and in no way they can do without a phone.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#45The entire comparison hinges on people only making simple factual searches ("what is the capital of USA") on both search engines and LLMs. I'm going to say that's far enough from the standard use case for both these sets of APIs to be entirely meaningless. - If I'm using a search engine, I want to search the web. Yes these engines are increasingly providing answers rather than just search results, but that's a UI/pro…
Anecdotally, I'm a paying user and do a lot of super basic queries. What is this bug, rewrite this drivel into an email to my HOA, turn me into a gnome, what is the worst state and why is it west Virginia. This would probably increase 10x if one of the providers sold a family plan and my kids got paid access. Most of my heavy lifting is work related and goes through my employer's pockets.
I love your prompts. :D
Re: LLMs are cheap
#46I don't think LLMs are inherently "costly" or "cheap". This doesn't really matter. Gold is pricey, but its usages justify the cost. Will LLMs, as they are used and evangelized now, have a true positive return for those using it? In some domains it will, most probably not everywhere and not for everyone.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#47LLMs aren't cheap if you consider the impact on the climate and the cost that comes from it.
I would like to understand if this still has truth to it.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#48LLMs aren't cheap if you consider the impact on the climate and the cost that comes from it.
I didn't realize Large Language Models have a direct impact on the climate.
Well, running them does. And, from what I get from the article, that's what they're trying to do: either running them or having someone do it for them as a service.
How big is that impact? Well, that's a complicated issue.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#49[flagged]
This only means that you can't extract enough value from the LLM to make up for costs. Or maybe you are using the wrong (too expensive) model.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#50> OpenAI reportedly made a loss of $5B in 2024. They also reportedly have 500M MAUs. To reach break-even, they'd just need to monetize those free users for an average of $10/year, or $1/month. A $1 ARPU for a service like this would be pitifully low. This is a tangent to the rest of the article, but this "just" is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas holding up the skies. Taking a user from $0 to $1 is immeasurably ha…
This is true only because people are so dumb. Paying $1000 for an iPhone? Sure. $10 for a Starbucks? Sure. $1 per year for LLM? Now hold on, papa is not an oil oligarch...
A 1000$ iPhone over 5 years is 17$/month, is it worth 17x as much as a free tier LLM?
For most people yes. Also many people are spending for less than 1000$ for their phones.