OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#51

Post by rvz » Tue, Apr 04, 2023, 7:37 PM UTC

true_religion wrote: post #16

Danjoe4 wrote: post #2

The comments are so ignorant it's unreal. I think the OpenAI team is doing their best. I've heard it's actually hard to scale an app to 100+ million users

I think it’s because people associate OpenAi with Microsoft so they think that one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world ought to be able to scale to these numbers.

Imagine people saying 'Google is doing their best' whilst GCP goes down every week with startups like Anthropic and others getting investment from Google.

It is also like accepting the hilarious availability times of GitHub and then saying 'GitHub is doing their best' whilst they have an outage every week.

Lets just say that a service that claims to scale to more than 50 million or 100 million users going down each week is not acceptable or being an apologist for large companies unable to scale with the so-called best engineers working for them.

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#52

Post by dekhn » Tue, Apr 04, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

unmole wrote: post #35

Rastonbury wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't show up on their financials I reckon, they made equity investment into OpenAI - their P&L won't show on Microsoft's. If they have a sweetheart deal with MSFT, Azure revenues aren't going to change. Even if they built a new DC or bought a boatload of GPUs for OpenAI, it will get mixed into their massive Capex and they probably are using existing infrastructure

They apparently got a lot of Azure credits and Microsoft isn't making any revenue from running OpenAI's workloads.

The value to microsoft is in the marketing around a premier training company using their hardware... their actual hardware in this case is a bespoke supercomputer, but performance watchers like me are paying attention. From what I can tell, of the top 3 cloud providers, azure is doing the best work with high speed interconnects right now.

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#53

Post by Veen » Tue, Apr 04, 2023, 8:09 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #47

Veen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the OpenAI API Playground is more reliable. It’s less convenient than ChatGPT Plus, but I’ve not had many timeouts. Plus, you can always use Bing Chat. It’s more locked down, but depending on what you’re doing, it’s pretty good and backed by GPT-4.

The Playground doesn't have GPT-4 API yet. As for Bing, despite the claims that it is GPT-4, it's clearly inferior to what OpenAI is offering. It's probably an older iteration of the model, and I wonder if it might also be a scaled-down version to run it cheaper at scale.

The Playground certainly does have GPT-4. I've been using it there for a couple of weeks. Maybe you need to have applied to the beta and been given access?

https://ibb.co/f2KJm4z

As for Bing? Who knows what's going on behind the scenes. I've read that the "Creative" mode uses GPT-4 while the others might use a faster model, but that may well be nonsense.

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#54

Post by int_19h » Tue, Apr 04, 2023, 8:28 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #53

int_19h wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Playground doesn't have GPT-4 API yet. As for Bing, despite the claims that it is GPT-4, it's clearly inferior to what OpenAI is offering. It's probably an older iteration of the model, and I wonder if it might also be a scaled-down version to run it cheaper at scale.

The Playground certainly does have GPT-4. I've been using it there for a couple of weeks. Maybe you need to have applied to the beta and been given access? https://ibb.co/f2KJm4z As for Bing? Who knows what's going on behind the scenes. I've read that the "Creative" mode uses GPT-4 while the others might use a faster model, but that may well be nonsense.

Ah, indeed, that access is still rather limited; most can only have a peek a GPT-4 through ChatGPT Plus.

As for Bing, I don't know what's behind the scenes, but it does noticeably worse on tasks in "Creative" mode than ChatGPT backend in GPT-4 mode, in my limited experiments. For example, try this:

> A is 1m left of B, B is 1m above C, D is 1m right of C, E is 1m below D, and E is 1m right of F. Where is F located relative to C?

GPT-4 can usually solve this correctly. Bing is usually wrong even when it tries to solve it step by step (and it often won't unless you prompt it).

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#55

Post by ericpauley » Tue, Apr 04, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #32

bloppe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic common sense would tell you that starting with an assumption and working backwards to justify that assumption is called succumbing to confirmation bias. I sourced my cost/flop estimate from here: https://aiimpacts.org/2019-recent-trends-in-gpu-price-per-fl... I'll acknowledge that a fleet entirely made up of A100 GPUs running at full capacity 100% of the time with Azure's 3-year commitment pricing (likely very…

Uhh... I'm pretty sure that page is about the price of buying an entire GPU that does N GFLOP/S in perpetuity. It has no relevance to the calculation you did, unless you assume the GPU is used for one second and then thrown in the bin. > I'll acknowledge that a fleet entirely made up of A100 GPUs running at full capacity 100% of the time with Azure's 3-year commitment pricing (likely very low margin) would make this…

Yup. GP is conflating FLOP/s and FLOPs.

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#56

Post by theRealMe » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:13 AM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #19

bloppe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of my estimates do you find absurd? How would you calculate cost?

Most obviously this part must be off by 3-4 orders of magnitude: > Let's say the cost of compute is 1 cent per 100B flops (probably a lowball) That's like 0.5ms worth of compute on A100. VMs with an A100 cost a few dollars per hour at cloud providers, i.e. about a cent per second or 0.001 cents per ms. OpenAI would obviously get a far better deal than somebody renting a single GPU for an hour. Look, we know what Open…

“But just basic common sense should tell you that they are not operating at -10000% gross margins.”

I’ll be honest, I laughed out loud at this.

Pretty sure I read somewhere that Bing had around 1 billion searches per day BEFORE the hype of bingchat. At $7/query that makes MSFT’s $10 billion investment basically peanuts. Less than 2 days of Bings GPT usage payments. Lmao.

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#57

Post by Rastonbury » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:33 AM UTC

ChatGTP wrote: post #39

Rastonbury wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynic in me sees they are making a vendor lock-in play, the API is dirt cheap so much so that every other bespoke chatbot or language model is now obsolete - every chat startup is now switching to OpenAI. Once everyone has their prompts and embeddings tuned and is serving customers, OpenAI can dial up the price and customers chose to keep paying or redo their prompts/embeddings to switch to Bard or the next compe…

I don’t know a lot about codex, but was this a more standard interface used by other providers ?

It was their model for code and what was used for Github copilot, was also used by Replit

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#58

Post by Rastonbury » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

rvz wrote: post #50

dereg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating credits out of thin air is impossible as all financial transactions must be accounted for. In the case of Azure credits, they will appear as increased revenue on Microsoft's balance sheet. However, if Microsoft decides to price Azure services below cost as part of their agreement with OpenAI, their profit margins will be affected. I highly doubt that is the case because the alleviation of cost is in the form…

It will, hence the MSFT layoffs happening at the same time. People here wanted Google scale of operations and replacing Google with ChatGPT as their search engine. But it seems that some here have forgotten about the high availability requirements and incalculable operational costs of running a search engine. Google.com's availability is a very high barrier of serving in the multi-billions of searches a day. Azure ha…

You realise that openAI is just one customer of Azure, the second largest cloud provider in the world. How much revenue do you think they are forgoing? 50m is a rounding error there, their guidance for next quarters revenue has a range of a billion

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#59

Post by htss2013 » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 6:20 AM UTC

unmole wrote: post #35

Rastonbury wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't show up on their financials I reckon, they made equity investment into OpenAI - their P&L won't show on Microsoft's. If they have a sweetheart deal with MSFT, Azure revenues aren't going to change. Even if they built a new DC or bought a boatload of GPUs for OpenAI, it will get mixed into their massive Capex and they probably are using existing infrastructure

They apparently got a lot of Azure credits and Microsoft isn't making any revenue from running OpenAI's workloads.

But what are the workloads costing MSFT? If the credits are part of the acquisition deal, maybe they're considered capex not opex, and MSFT gets to amortize the credits' operating cost over decades.

What is the true marginal cost to MSFT for gpt workloads anyway? As long as it's not bumping paying customers then it's what the cost of electricity?

Re: OpenAI has temporarily stopped selling the Plus plan

#60

Post by theshrike79 » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 11:17 AM UTC

rany_ wrote: post #26

ren_engineer wrote: post #9

Have to assume they literally can't get enough GPUs to respond to demand. Wonder if $20/mo is even profitable for them?

It probably is. I'd bet for 99.99% of their users, simply using the API directly would be much cheaper. The ChatGPT premium subscription is overpriced if you compare it to the cost of each API call.. at least according to OpenAI's pricing.

Yeah, I'm waiting for one more month for the API-bots to mature. Then I'll cancel my ChatGPT premium subscription and put up a private Discord server just for myself and a GPT4 bot.

And save a ton of money at the same time.