You've somehow missed all the "enshitification" processes Cory Doctorow and others have been documenting?
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification."
OpenAI (et al.) are all deeply in the "First, they are good to their users" stage of their business plan, but they WILL. NOT. STAY. THERE. Whatever product relying on OpenAI you can offer/build/grow into a business, sooner or later you're going to be squeezed for every cent in profit, in the same way as companies who were convinced Facebook was a great alternative to running their own web presence are these days - having to pay to ensure content that people who've like and subscribed to their pages end up seeing anything they post.
Your $20 subscription is not even close to covering electricity costs - never mind covering capitalisation costs for $1.6 billion data centres with another $1.6 billion dollars worth of GPUs to put in them. (Think about it. Even if that 3.2 billion dollar datacenter was funded borrowing at only 1% - you'd need over 130,000 paying subscribers at $20/month just to cover the interest on the loans.)
I read about it, but don't believe it's a new law now that affects everything with no exceptions. Even is OpenAI wants to go from explore and expand into extract mode, open-source models are getting better every day and will create a decent floor.
> you'd need over 130,000 paying subscribers at $20/month just to cover the interest on the loans.
Maybe I live in a bubble (I definitely do), but that subscriber number seems quite reasonable and of course omits additional revenue from their APIs. Also if OpenAI wants to lose money, be my guest. I definitely enjoyed my VC-subsidized Uber rides of the past.
What's the course of action you recommend? Using nothing that's VC funded because Corey Doctorow says it will become shitty eventually?
Of course you wouldn't build a multi-billion dollar data center for a single application bringing in a pittance. But that's not what anyone is doing. Demand is high and data centers can be shared between many different companies.
as long as that resource is privately funded paid for, i don't care.
It's only a problem if this resource is taxpayer subsidized.
Perhaps it would be better for it to be efficient because it uses less energy and in general is a good thing to do for the world. I understand there aren't financial incentives around that so it's probably difficult for you to agree with.
Edit: It seems simply suggesting we do better is enough for people to lose their minds.
Governments of any shape are unable to accurately pick which industry to allow or prevent. Even harder would be creating legislation that carves out specific industry.
You can tax the externalities of the use of electricity. Please don’t create pandering comments with zero substance.
I don’t like bitcoin but who am I to tell people what to spend money on.
i would say that some gov'ts in the world does do this - famously the chinese CCP.
They dictate by providing state funding for industries they deem important (for whatever reason - geopolitically strategic, military, or welfare, etc). Whether it's the most "efficient" form of capital allocation is irrelevant (for them).
The people do not have a say, and in fact, cannot be doing any form of criticism - they may have feedback, but only in so far as the party allows said feedback. It's implicit that the CCP is picking for the "greater good" - but who is the judge of that? CCP itself is!
So by an act of tautology, they are doing it most efficiently!
With the greatest housing bubble has ever seen, and a deflationary spiral around the corner.
Now that's a laudable mindset.
Human idiocy driven extinction
When it comes to energy use, I don't believe anyone should have the power to say what should be allowed or not. That will stifle innovation. For every innovation there must have been thousands if not more failures.
People are funny on this forum, when it was Bitcoin it was the devil and now it’s helping us complete our lines of code it’s ok to require a nuclear power plant to run such a system? I guess whatever benefits the individual is ok ? Silicone valley types are funny too because it was all about developing fusion to save humanity now it’s about developing fusion to cat gifs?
These products need to be taxed to price in these externalities we can’t keep this up, it’s ridiculous.
The negative externality you are worried about isn't AI, but pollution/carbon emissions. Tax pollution instead of deciding for other people what use case is worth it.
Edit: To be clear, I am all for this. I'd love to see a massive(!) carbon tax.
By contrast, the ai we have today is the worst ai it will ever be. Quality will go up with time, and price will go down, as incentives drive the development of better, cheaper models.
Algorithmic improvements are coming quickly in generative ml. We're still in very early days.
The world isn't static. Electricity is fungible, it doesn't matter what it goes to.
Machine learning has utility, not just in theory but to plenty of people, including me. It has helped me do my job faster.
You can put tax on energy from carbon, fine. There’s no justification for taxing energy intensive things by themselves because you don’t like using energy. Human energy usage is and should be growing exponentially (and not an S curve) besides occasional pauses when efficiencies are found (like LED lighting using something like 90% less energy than incandescent).
Fossil fuels are clearly going away anyway, not because of ideals either, solar is just way cheaper now.
Edit: " Shouldn’t we wait until the research has created an efficient architecture that is easily scalable first?"
Who is "we"? If I think I can offer a product that uses AI and after paying API requests to OpenAI I can turn a profit, I'll build it. API requests will only get cheaper, but why should I wait for that if I can turn a profit now?