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.
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.)