Earlier quoted context omitted.
sama tweeted that the $200 tier was priced too low to cover costs a few months ago.
How credible are his PR statements, though?
You think "we're losing money on this subscription tier" is good PR for their investors?
LLMs are cheap
261–270 of 319 posts
Re: LLMs are cheap
#262LLMs aren't cheap if you consider the impact on the climate and the cost that comes from it.
Degrowth is a losing political argument. You aren't getting what you want and you're helping the arsonists win elections by going with this strategy. The winning argument is sustainable high growth with renewable energy.
Energy being renewable or not is unrelated to climate change.
A ton of co2 is released through the production and burn of vegetal oil for example.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#263Re: LLMs are cheap
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Degrowth is a losing political argument. You aren't getting what you want and you're helping the arsonists win elections by going with this strategy. The winning argument is sustainable high growth with renewable energy.
Energy being renewable or not is unrelated to climate change. A ton of co2 is released through the production and burn of vegetal oil for example.
The CO2 removed from the air by the soy plants from which the oil comes cancels out the CO2 added by burning the oil.
Literally all the carbon in the soy oil was pulled from the atmosphere.
That's where the phrase "carbon neutral" comes from.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy being renewable or not is unrelated to climate change. A ton of co2 is released through the production and burn of vegetal oil for example.
The CO2 removed from the air by the soy plants from which the oil comes cancels out the CO2 added by burning the oil. Literally all the carbon in the soy oil was pulled from the atmosphere. That's where the phrase "carbon neutral" comes from.
You seem to easily forget all the co2 used to farm those plants and transport the oil.
There is no such thing as carbon neutral as long as some metal, plastic and petrol is involved.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CO2 removed from the air by the soy plants from which the oil comes cancels out the CO2 added by burning the oil. Literally all the carbon in the soy oil was pulled from the atmosphere. That's where the phrase "carbon neutral" comes from.
You seem to easily forget all the co2 used to farm those plants and transport the oil. There is no such thing as carbon neutral as long as some metal, plastic and petrol is involved.
I agree that the production of soy oil in the current economy uses a lot of fossil fuel.
But you brought up soy oil to support your assertion that "energy being renewable or not is unrelated to climate change", which is wrong.
If it were possible to produce soy oil without using fossil fuels, then producing, using and burning soy oil would be carbon neutral.
The argument you want is we cannot simply assume that the world's economy can be weaned off of fossil fuels without a permanent and severe reduction in living standards. Maybe it can be done, maybe it cannot: it depends on how efficient the substitute energy sources get.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Websites have been choosing shitty UX for decades at this point. The web is so polluted with crap and obstacles it’s ridiculous. Nobody seems to care any more. Now LLMs have come along that will just give you the info straight away without any fuss, so of course people are going to prefer them. Do you honestly believe LLMs aren't gonna get sponsored answers/ads and "helpful" UI elements that boost their profits?
I’m talking about today’s experience, not speculating about what might happen at some arbitrary point in the future. The web has this shitty UX. LLMs do not have this shitty UX. I’m going to judge on what I can see and use.
When all you get back is a wall of LLM generated text blocking ads will be impossible. This will go the same way as google search results. Probably within six months.
Re: LLMs are cheap
#268You can't compare an API that is profitable (search) to an API that is likely a loss-leader to grab market share (hosted LLM cloud models). Sure there might not be any analysis that proves that they subsidized, but you also don't have any evidence that they are profitable. All the data points we have today show that companies are spending an insane amount of capex on gaining AI dominance without the revenue to achiev…
> an API that is likely a loss-leader to grab market share (hosted LLM cloud models) Everyone just repeats this but I never buy it. There is literally a service that allows you to switch models and service providers seamlessly (openrouter). There is just no lock-in. It doesn't make any financial sense to "grab market share". If you sell something with UI, like ChatGPT (the web interface) or Cursor, sure. But selling…
This is also the argument of the guy in the article, fyi (it's not a loss leader, no reason for it to be).
Re: LLMs are cheap
#269You can't compare an API that is profitable (search) to an API that is likely a loss-leader to grab market share (hosted LLM cloud models). Sure there might not be any analysis that proves that they subsidized, but you also don't have any evidence that they are profitable. All the data points we have today show that companies are spending an insane amount of capex on gaining AI dominance without the revenue to achiev…
> you also don't have any evidence that they are profitable. Sure we do. Go to AWS or any other hosting provider and pay them for inference. You think AWS are going to subsidise your usage of somebody else’s models indefinitely? > All the data points we have today show that companies are spending an insane amount of capex on gaining AI dominance without the revenue to achieve profitability yet. Yes, capex not opex. T…
> Go to AWS or any other hosting provider and pay them for inference. You think AWS are going to subsidise your usage of somebody else’s models indefinitely?
Not indefinitely or for any undetermined scale, but AWS regularly subsidise up to 100k [0] in credits. It would not surprise me in the slightest if most. Inference is much cheaper than training and 100k in compute covers a decent amount of usage. Activate is tiered over 3 years so if you want to know the full story, let’s see how many of these services are still around in 18 months. I suspect just like when Games were the flavor of the month, then Crypto, we’ll see the real story when they actually have to pay a bill and their investors aren’t seeing any growth
Re: LLMs are cheap
#270This article is naive beyond belief. Not worth responding to.