4w ago

OpenAI is so cooked and I'm all here for it

181 comments

"I personally chose the price"
Is that how well-run companies operate? The CEO unilaterally decides the price rather than delegating that out to the numbers people they employ?
- Should have asked chatgpt to play the role of a CEO.
  
  This answer would be much funnier if that wasn't his fucking plan.
- A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.
  If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?
  
  Is that what Ayn Rand is about? All I really remember is that having a name you chose yourself is self-fulfilling.
- far, far, far, far, far, far, far fewer business people than you’d expect/guess are data-driven decision makers
  and then there’s the whole bayfucker ceo dynamic which adds a whole bunch of extra dumb shit
  it’d be funnier if it weren’t for the tunguska-like effect it’s having on human society both at present and in the coming decades to follow :|
- I think I remember Jeff Bezos in "The Everything Store" book seeing a price they charged for AWS and went even lower for growth. So there could be some rationale for that? However, I think switching AI providers is easier than Cloud Providers? Not sure though.
  I can imagine the highest users of this being scam artists and stuff though.
  I want this AI hype train to die.
- I’m guessing that means a team or someone presented their pricing analysis to him, and suggested a price range. And this is his way of taking responsibility for making the final judgment call.
  (He’d get blamed either way, anyways)
- In tech? Kinda yeah. When a subscription is 14.99 $£€/month it's a clear "we just think it's what people think is a fair price for SaaS".
  The trick is that tech usually works on really weird economics where the fixed costs (R&D) are astonishingly high and the marginal costs (servers etc) are virtually nil. That's how successful tech companies are so profitable, even more than oil companies, because once the R&D is paid off every additional user is free money. And this means that companies don't have to be profitable any time in particular as long as they promise sufficient projected growth to make up for being a money pit until then. You can get away with anything when your investors believe you'll eventually have a billion users.
  ... Of course that doesn't work when every customer interaction actually costs a buck or two in GPU compute, but I'm sure after a lot of handwaving they were able to explain to their investors how this is totally fine and totally sustainable and they'll totally make their money back a thousandfold.
- It works for ice tea and hotdogs, why not AI? (I jest)

CEO personally chose a price too low for company to be profitable.
What a clown.
- They're still in the first stage of enshittification: gaining market share. In fact, this is probably all just a marketing scheme. "Hi! I'm Crazy Sam Altman and my prices are SO LOW that I'm LOSING MONEY!! Tell your friends and subscribe now!"
- well, yes. But also this is an extremely difficult to price product. 200$/m is already insane, but now you're suggesting they should've gone even more aggressive. It could turn out almost nobody would use it. An optimal price here is a tricky guess.
  Although they probably should've sold a "limited subscription". That does give you max break-even amount of queries per month, or 2x of that, but not 100x, or unlimited. Otherwise exactly what happened can happen.
  
  "Our product that costs metric kilotons of money to produce but provides little-to-no value is extremely difficult to price" oh no, damn, ye, that's a tricky one
  
  The real problem is believing that you can run a profitable LLM company.
  
  I signed up for API access. I run all my queries through that. I pay per query. I've spent about $8.70 since 2021. This seems like a win-win model. I save hundreds of dollars and they make money on every query I run. I'm confused why there are subscriptions at all.
- More like he misjudged subscriber numbers than price.
  
  despite that one episode of Leverage where they did some laundering by way of gym memberships, not every shady bullshit business that burns way more than they make can just swizzle the numbers!
  (also if you spend maybe half a second thinking about it you’d realize that economies of scale only apply when you can actually have economies of scale. which they can’t. which is why they’re constantly setting more money on fire the harder they try to make their bad product seem good)
  
  Wait but he controls the price, not the subscriber number?
  Like even if the issue was low subscriber number (which it isn't since they're losing money per subscriber, more subscribers just makes you lose money faster), that's still the same category of mistake? You control the price and supply, not the demand, you can't set a stupid price that loses you money and then be like "ah, not my fault, demand was too low" like bozo it's your product and you set the price. That's econ 101, you can move the price to a place where your business is profitable, and if such a price doesn't exist then maybe your biz is stupid?
  
  please explain to us how you think having less, or more, subscribers would make this profitable

The plagiarism power virus is too expensive to operate? I'm shocked I tell you
- Now imagine if they actually paid for the training data as well.

really looking forward to how these multi-billion dollar AI datacenter investments will work out for big tech companies
that said I'm pretty sure most of that capacity is reserved for the surveillance state anyway
- I’m excited for the used hardware dump

Hmm, we should get together some funds to buy a single unlimited subscription, and then let it continuously generate as large and complex prompts as the rate limitting allows.
- Buy two. Ask the other to generate expensive prompts.
- On one hand, heck yes. On the other, part of the reason its so expensive is because of the energy and water usage, so sticking it to the man in this way also is harmful to the environment :(
  
  Normally the people talking about water use have no idea what they are talking about. Normally data center cooling is closed loop, much like a cars cooling system. So they don't use significant amounts of water at all.

By "Sam Altman said" in a "series of posts", this article means these two tweets from 10 hours ago: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1876104580070813976.
\ This is a screenshot of a tweet talking about an article written about two tweets by Sam Altman. Is this really the world we're living in, now?
- Yeah, and I think you're pretending it's more ridiculous than it is
- Welcome to the wonderful XXI century where our innovations in communication technology and financial instruments allow a hyperoptimised economy where two tweets are more than enough to cause billion-dollar shifts on the market. Completely organic and based on solid fundamentals I am assured by the same people that assured me of this in 2000 and 2008.
- I've seen more written on one post. People will eat up 'news' if presented in the right way. There is a reason the stupid websites and advertisers use the click-bait titles.

Never offer unlimited on a utility model without guardrails. That’s just business 101.

This is something I've been speculating for a while. The cost of running these complex systems (as OpenAI models aren't just LLMs) is subsidized so heavily that we don't really know the cost of running these things.
This is a huge risk to any business, as the price for these services has to go up significantly in the long term.
- Ed Zitron calculated from the publicly available numbers that OpenAI was spending $2.35 for every $1 of ChatGPT they sell
  
  Is that for all operations or literally just to run the paid services? Cause if that includes the free services, marketing, R&D then they have a lot of options to cut costs.
  Given what AWS/etc. charge for their LLMs/APIs it feels like the entire industry is subsidizing LLM compute to stay competitive. But I could be wrong there.
- Was it altman that tweeted they were near the singularity? I assumed it was a way to raise money. Felt more like "Fuck! We need more money to burn."

I cancelled a 20$ subscription I started because it was arguably useful for me and served exactly one use-case. Now I don't need it anymore.
Of course, they had a form asking feedback/why. I chose "ChatGapT is nott advanced enough" as that was one of the alternatives. Hopefully it will lead to them putting more resources into development and burn through investor money faster.
"Trust me bro, just 200m dollars more"
Sam Altman, probably
- Just one more datacenter bro, just one more (that consumes the same power as Belgium.)
- OpenAI burns through 200M$ in less than a week

If they are losing money on $200/month, that does not necessarily mean they lose money on the $20/month.
One is unlimited, the other is not. You only have to use the $200 subscription more than 10 times the amount the $20 subscription allows for OpenAI to earn less on that subscription.
- We already know they're losing money on everything

Why is same personally picking subscription prices anyway? Should there be some accountant doing that math? Wtf
- If it worked for Elon and his 8 per blue check, it has to work for our altman boi
- Their accountant is probably three GPTs in a trench coat that’s being fed prompts by an unpaid intern or some poor dude in India.
- Why is AI not making enough money? I specifically requested it.
- This was my biggest takeaway here. Wtf?! "I personally set the price and thought we would make some money"?! Either he is trying to sound cool by being casual or he is a fucking idiot. Or probably both.

What are people using the $200 plan for that makes it worth it? You only get their model with their training, you don't have any access to weights or training. And with how nerfed openai makes its models, nothing even remotely nefarious can be done with it. All you can do is process simple data. Which having a purposed trained model seems the most valuable for.
- Probably mostly fake social media profiles and YouTube/Tiktok AI slop.
  You could use it to create hundreds of real-looking fake accounts on reddit or other social media site. OpenAI's site doesn't have this kind of fake user function built into its app, but it should be easy enough with an API. Just have a bot randomly scroll reddit's most popular posts. Then have it find the most popular comments on those posts over a certain length. Feed the text of that comment to OpenAI, instructing the LLM to make a disagreeing/concurring/answering reply. Then have the bot post OpenAI's output as a comment on reddit. Have each account comment not at superhuman speed, but at the speed that a normal human user would post.
  Use these tools to build up an arsenal of hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands of sockpuppet accounts. Each will have years of post history behind them, so they will pass typical subreddit filters like "account must be this old or have X comment karma" to post. Just keep these bots constantly running and available.
  Then, when you want to use them, use them. Don't even dramatically switch their persona. Want to use your bot network for politics? Have your 10,000 fake users mostly comment on random banal stuff. But every 10th post or so have them post a comment for whatever politician or cause you support. You might even have them regularly post content of that political persuasion as a normal part of their operation. Same thing with advertising. Have them mostly post random stuff, but have them occasionally post a glowing review for a product, film, or service.
  The real use for OpenAI's software is as a vector for very effective and difficult to detect and filter astroturfing campaigns. Hell, just getting your name out there can be advantageous. Are you a nobody, but with a lot of cash, that wants to launch a political career? Higher such a bot net to sprinkle your name across social media. Even if all the bots do is mention you, neither praising or condemning, it gets your name out there. The next election cycle, when people start talking about potential primary candidates for a particular office, real people will suggest your name, simply because they heard it somewhere. Name recognition is a powerful thing.
  
  even russian influence campaigns don't do it this way. it's probably a split between this kind of thing being too expensive (and they're using underpaid interns) and accounts being too disposable (you can burn it all after desired effect is achieved)
- t their model with their training, you don’t have any access to weights or training. And wit
  OK, I see what's going on. The original premise is flawed. The $20 model is limited. It's intended for you to hit their web page and query for things. The $200 model is unlimited, you can API the crap out of it for your random project, run an entire business through it. It also gives you full access to o1 which appears to do 6-10 queries for every query to make sure it's not lying to you.
  The $20 model doesn't have to be losing money for the $200 model to be losing money, they're completely different use cases and honestly, unlimited queries for fixed capital is never going to work, you can just sublet the access,
- Seems like they need to do lots ofovideo slop using sora

$200 a month for a user is losing money? There's no way he's just including model queries. An entire a6000 server is around $800 / month and you can fit a hell of lot more than 4 peoples worth of queries. He has to include training and or R&D.
- It includes anything that will keep them from having to pay investors back. Classic tech start up bullshit.
  Silicon valley brain rot formula:
  Losing money, get billions every month
  Making money pay billions back
  Which one do you think they pick
- I'm honestly fairly surprised as well, but at the same time, they're not serving a model that can run on an A6000, and the people paying for unlimited, would probably be the ones who setup bots and apps doing thousands of requests per hour.
  
  And honestly? Those people are 100% right.
  If they can't deliver true "unlimited" for 200 bucks a month, they shouldn't market it as such.
  grumble grumble unlimited mobile data grumble grumble
- Surely this includes staff, real estate, and other operating costs.

Can someone explain the Pale Horse reference?
- In the Bible's book of revelations, John (the author) is witnessing the end of the world and sees four horsemen being unleashed upon the world to spread a curse/trial/whatever wherever they ride. Each horseman brings with them something different- famine, disease, war (or strife), and death. Death is the last, IIRC, and rides upon a pale horse. I think that's what they're referencing. This person is saying that openAI is going to die soon.
  
  it won't. its backed by microsoft. they can literally afford to burn the cash on this while it becomes profitable, and it will AI has so many low hanging fruits to optimize its insane.
  
  this is correct as to the background of the term itself, the reason ed uses it here is because it is the term that he selected some months ago when he listed “some likely pale horses that signal the bubble popping”

Much like uber and netflix, all of these ai chatbots that are available for free right now will become expensive, slow, and dumb once the investor money runs out and these companies have to figure out a business model. We're in the golden age of LLMs right now, all we can do is enjoy the free service while it lasts and try not to make it too much a part of our workflow, because inevitably it will be cut off. Unless you're one of those people with a self-hosted LLM I guess.
- This. AI Hype beasts keep saying "This is the worst AI will ever be" and "It'll just get better" but really it's just going to get worse as they actually try to turn the bubble into a profit
- will become expensive, slow, and dumb
  Wouldn't they have to become smart first?
- Not LLM but there Google Assistant has gotten much more stupid over the past several years. They realized that it was too expensive and had to lobotomize it.
  
  Can't even set a timer with it anymore which was pretty much all I used it for. That and navigation with Android Auto
- Once they are cut off self hosted focus will explode and will see huge improvements in terms of ability and ease of use.
  
  your Tech Friend is giving you bad advice, stop listening to them
  
  Until their legislated into illegality.
- I was about to say, a selfhosted LLM means I'm not competing with every market analysis tool, customer service replacement, and 10 y/o kid bombarding the service with junk. It doesn't need to be ultra fast if I'm the only one using the hardware.
  
  and who’ll supply the model and training and updates and data curation, dom? is it as manna from heaven? do you merely step upon the path and receive the divine wisdom of fresh llm updates?
  fucking hell

More power to the open source community

Okay everyone should create an openai account and start feeding it shit. Ask it the most braindead questions ever, if they your questions as training data itll just fuck the next model up even more.
- What what in the butt?

You can help by asking ChatGPT to produce the most processor intensive prompt it can come up with and then having it execute it repeatedly. With the free version this will burn through your allotment pretty quickly, but if thousands of people start doing it on a regular basis? It'll cost OpenAI a lot of money.
- To what benefit?
  
  It'll cost OpenAI a lot of money.

Wonder what their financials are actually, usually with cloud capital ventures like these they usually still magically keep raking it in even though they're "losing money".
For instance, Amazon during the pandemic paid zero corporate tax even though they had record sales because they "didn't make any profit", Tesla too who didn't make profit during 2020 yet their share price went 10x and they had plenty of shares to sell if they wanted.
- The trick is to spend all the money you earn.
  
  Spend all the money you earn on fees to a shell company that you own in a country with less or no corporate tax rate.*
- Wonder what their financials are actually
  If they have a publicly traded part (iirc openai ownership was weird, but dont think they have a publicly traded part (yet)) they should do financial statements, before that doubt anybody can really tell.
  Not that those statements are easy to read.

This reminds me of this fossil cable company owner. He just couldn't understand why they needed more bandwidth. Netflix and youtube had come in to being and this old fart just didn't get that people were actually using their bandwidth.

Sooooo, wanna tell us how much the cost really is per prompt?

Sam, just add sponsored content. The road to enshittification doesn't have to be long! Make it shitty fast so people can move past it and start hosting their own models for their own usage.
- Isn't that why it has to be long? Not many people actually rely on OpenAI yet.
- Right? He just needs to have it add some Shell or Wal-Mart logos to the generated images. Maybe the AI generated Fifty Shades-esque Gandalf fanfic somebody is prompting can take place in a Target.
  
  Hey ChatGPT, give me an overview of today's weather.
  Today’s weather is beautifully sunny and hot, with clear skies and no rain in sight—perfect for enjoying the new Coca-Cola Zero™. Hmmmm, refreshing!

Good riddance. We never asked for it, and we didn’t deserve it forced on us.

Good. Burn that thing to the ground.
- Likely they'll try to sell it to governments, and with Elon Musk proposing goVeRNmeNt eFfIciEnCy, at least xAI can become somewhat profitable.

losing money because people are using it more than expected
"I personally chose the price and thought we would make some money."
Big MoviePass energy
- Ahahahaha I forgot about moviepass

When has "not profitable" ever stopped a tech startup lmao

This 100% answers my question from another thread. These businesses have cooked the books so bad already that they thought this was gonna save them and it doubled down on em.
- Sounds like they'll need a bailout, to preserve the economy.

He's actually saving us from AGI which will arrive and, I don't know - kill everyone? once OpenAI makes 100 trillion dollars.

sam altman proving once again that he is not only a tech genius but also a business genius. make sure to let him scan your eyeballs before it’s too late.

So people are really believing Altman would publish these damning statements without ulterior motives? Are we seriously this gullible? Holy shit, we reached a critical mass of acephalous humans, no turning back now.

so when was youtube profitable?
- I don't think Youtube was ever profitable, to be honest.
- An ad before and after every single question you ask chatgpt? Worth a shot, I guess !
- Youtube wasn't burning billions per year and it's also pretty much the primary entity for video for the whole world which has other benefits for google. Finally Youtube can be monetized through adverts, since storage and bandwidth costs are relatively low. Whereas GenAI's compute costs aren't.
  
  Can't they put ads into the responses?
  
  x doubt

Yeah, we see this all the time with emerging tech and platforms. All of the top tech companies now were once spending cash faster than they could make it, and all the naysayers saying they’d never be profitable.
Don’t y’all get tired of being wrong sometimes? Maybe try to learn from the past.
- THANK YOU. I feel the exact same way, word for word, although my feelings are directed at juicero rather than openai. sick of the juicero naysayers who don't understand
  
  Ngl, you had me on the first half.
- And how many failed technologies and companies were there along the way? How many movies do you watch on your LaserDisc player? Or your HDDVD player?
  This current "AI" iteration is already hitting its limits despite having access to the sum total of human history. The bubble is already bursting as companies are finding that people don't want AI in their refrigerators any more than they want it to replace a basic search engine or making fake Facebook accounts for you to talk to like Tom from MySpace.
  OpenAI has said that they will go bankrupt if they can't train their AI on copyrighted material for free.
  It's largely a tech without a use case in this current form, and not every money pit turns into a success before the companies burning cash go bankrupt.
- you may in fact want to understand how much the ZIRP years had a hand in this, and then to also look just how many of those that remain (of which there continue to be fewer and fewer) are having to engage in Creative Accounting to make it seem like everything is fine
  maybe try to learn from the past.
  
  ZIRP?
- but they're still not profitable lol
- Don’t y’all get tired of being wrong sometimes? Maybe try to learn from the past.
  Fondly remembering all the times we were wrong. Ah, remember that one time we were totally wrong about the metaverse not being the future? Oh, oh, or the classic "cryptocurrencies are just a scam" talk we had to walk back so many times. Damn, good thing we didn't call out WeWork for being a money sink or we'd be looking pretty fucking stupid now!
  
  Crypto is actually really useful for buying drugs and other illegal products and services. People have legitimately made a lot of money as well if they weren't falling for the stupid scams. You should see the price of BitCoin or Ethereum these days.
  Not saying it's ethical to run a lot of these given their limited usefulness and very high costs. But saying they didn't make people money, were all scams, or didn't have a use is objectively wrong.
- maybe try to learn from the past
  we did. you just don't listen.
- it’s weird you pretend to be an anti-corporate leftist but when convenient post shit like:
  All of the top tech companies now were once spending cash faster than they could make it, and all the naysayers saying they’d never be profitable.
  “the only thing I hate more than neolibs and Peter thiel is when a bunch of thiel’s friends get credibly accused of running a massive grift” haha sure

Uber didn't make a profit for a very long time. This is part of the game in silicon valley. Fake it until you make it.
- Uber is built on increasing worker exploitation. GenAI can't do the same thing.

you don't understand how technology companies work. they're not always making money
- yeah but there is a difference between losing some money on R&D and simply having an unviable business model.
  
  Would people on Lemmy actually know the difference though? Like half the people here don't believe in the premise of money and capitalism to begin with. How are they expected to understand the finer points of business?

Why would anyone believe this? It's a private company. They don't have to be truthful talking about their finances.
- Why would they lie about losing money? Companies lie for the opposite all the time, but none of them boasts of losing money, as that causes FUD, which exactly what a hypelord like Altman doesn't want.
  
  Tax writroffs on the "losses"
  "Nonprofit" image.

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