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So there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of OpenAI, and anyone looking at my comment history will see that I'm not shy about calling them out on real thin
by benreesman 3y ago
So there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of OpenAI, and anyone looking at my comment history will see that I'm not shy about calling them out on real things (the F-you name, the crazy "is this even legal?" structure, the continued insistence this isn't for the personal benefit of the people involved, the lobbying, the arms-length affiliation with the dystopian biometrics thing, the list goes on).
But this and a few other recent headlines around the ChatGPT/Instruct frontend to the 3.5-turbo and 4-series models having stability issues isn't a reasonable thing to get on their case about: what company operating at that kind of scale doesn't have stability/quality issues? If anything it's really friggin impressive how little operational bleed they've had on what is arguably the toughest ops problem a major Internet property has ever faced at launch. How the hell do you even smoke test something like that?
Now to the extent that they say or imply that we're not all getting A/B-tested at a minimum, and more likely explore-exploit bandited against inference costs, that's almost certainly horseshit: they clearly started selling the 4-series at least and probably all of them at a loss on the inference, and they've clearly been playing with ways to control costs (Rich Uncle Nadella's patience with loss-leaders is most likely finite, being as he's not running a charity and all).
But as someone who finds a lot of this loathsome on the social and business side, I'm not going to knock an engineering and ops group for tripping up here and there on a problem that hard. That's not fair.
- loveparade 3y agoGood take, I mostly agree. However, I think there's a difference between explore-exploiting free vs. paying customers. If you are free user, that's what you should be expecting. But as a paying user I am expecting consistent quality. If they cannot provide that, they should be charging more so they can provide it, or not offer paid plans at all. What I don't like is being cheated into paying for something that doesn't offer to quality of service initially demonstrated or promised.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoMan imagine what would you have thought buying an Altair for 400 in 1975 and getting a box with switches and flashing lights. 20 dollars a month for instant access to this is a steal.
- loveparade 3y agoYou're missing the point. $20 is a steal, but the price is irrelevant. No matter what the price is, it's bad business practice to say "Here's a demo of what you're getting for $X" but then deliver something different that only works as advertised some of the time. It's like presenting an Altair at a conference and letting people play with it. But when they buy it, they get something different, or realize that the Altair presented at the conference was actually just a trick that works a fraction of the time.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoI made the analogy because they were also swamped with orders and underdelivered on promises, but it's still a big deal and worth it despite that.
- GhettoGPT 3y ago[flagged]
- benreesman 3y agoGod that’s good. I hope a person did that because if so they’re a genius, it’s fucking spot on. Isn’t it so grating anywhere but where we’re used to it?
- GhettoGPT 3y ago[dead]