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ChatGPT could cost over $700k per day to operate

businessinsider.com

21–30 of 223 posts

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

#21
post #16
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…

They're interesting numbers, but the linked article's cite amounts to: > ChatGPT could cost OpenAI up to $700,000 a day to run due to "expensive servers," an analyst told The Information. which, pardon me, but no shit. Before I break out my back of the envelope calculator, on how many biggest GPU instances in Azure that is, the real question is what their underlying assumptions are, and where they're getting them fro…

The estimate in the article pins most of the cost on inference, not training, so diurnal patterns are unfortunately not as useful here.

> While training ChatGPT's large language models likely costs tens of millions of dollars, operational expenses, or inference costs, "far exceed training costs when deploying a model at any reasonable scale," Patel and Afzal Ahmad, another analyst at SemiAnalysis, told Forbes. "In fact, the costs to inference ChatGPT exceed the training costs on a weekly basis," they said.

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

#22
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…

I'm not familiar with Sam's comments re: "days of these LLMs being over" - can you provide more context (or link)?

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

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything performance should get better with time

Why do you think that would be the case?

Moore's law-ish like optimization.

You Z80 computer cost $700 in the lat 70's...they're now in sub-$1 embedded controllers.

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

#24

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.

[deleted]

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

#25

My main concern with AI is that I'm not so sure if there is a market for any kind of intelligence anymore. So much human talent and intelligence has been wasted over the past few years; so many potentially useful projects went unfunded, I struggle to think of what purpose AI would serve in such an economic system as ours. I can see its potential, but I can't see our current system facilitating that potential. It seem…

I’ve never heard a more cynical AI take. There’s always a market for intelligence, whatever that means. The word intelligence is misleading anyway. No one said the AI needed to compete with the smartest person on the planet. It just needs to be smart enough to do some tasks that are “bullshit jobs”

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

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that would be the case?

Moore's law-ish like optimization. You Z80 computer cost $700 in the lat 70's...they're now in sub-$1 embedded controllers.

But what is being optimized? Hardware sure isn't getting faster in a hurry, and I don't see anything on the horizon that will aid in optimizing software.

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

#27

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.

I suspect the number will go higher since right now you are limited to 25 queries every 3 hours. They will definitely introduce higher tiers which removes or expands that limit.

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

#28
post #27

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.

I suspect the number will go higher since right now you are limited to 25 queries every 3 hours. They will definitely introduce higher tiers which removes or expands that limit.

I expect a lot of optimization will come in the next few months (weeks?)... it may be hanging together by threads behinds the scenes - this is often the case when things are moving this quickly.

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

#30

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.

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 $20/month, it was such a no-brainer, that I had to do it. Even at $75/mo it would more than pay for itself.

It even understands the concept of a "shit post". So - its more social media savvy than I am, thats for sure.

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