Re:Greg (2017)
by jug on Saturday November 18, 2023 @03:49PM
(#38324234)
The profit focus being wrong seems so weird to me. It's an awfully expensive operation to run GPT-4 at scale and even now, it's rumored they are running the services at a loss. I understand the philosophical side, sure, but you can't just disregard all those massive GPU farms and staff tuning their models. AI is said to have created a new country in terms of energy use and OpenAI no doubt accounts for a large portion of that.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Greg (2017)
by someperson on Saturday November 18, 2023 @03:52PM
(#38324277)
Certainly Microsoft's GPTv4 infrastructure is still eye-wateringly expensive:
> GitHub Copilot has reportedly been costing Microsoft up to $80 per user per month in some cases as the company struggles to make its AI assistant turn a profit.
> According to a Wall Street Journal report, the figures reportedly come from an unnamed individual familiar with the company, who noted that the Microsoft-owned platform was losing an average of $20 per user per month in the first few months of 2023.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-is-reportedly-losing...
I'm hacking on some GPT-for-long-form-text stuff right now and it is _eye wateringly_ expensive once you start generating at anything close to "professional human" token outputs. $80 per month sounds already pretty optimized.
This article about copilot is BS. Nat Friedman refuted this on twitter and made it clear that copilot wasn't losing money.
Re:Greg (2017)
by capableweb on Saturday November 18, 2023 @06:18PM
(#38325920)
> The profit focus being wrong seems so weird to me.
It is a non-profit after all, who owns a for-profit company. I'm just trying to imagine how the board sees it.