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Blockchain is a bad analogy to chatgpt. It would have been a good analogy if there were lots of people actually using blockchain as a currency. Suggesting Nvidi

Blockchain is a bad analogy to chatgpt. It would have been a good analogy if there were lots of people actually using blockchain as a currency. Suggesting Nvidia revenue is analogous is at least closer to fair because as I understand it a majority of GPU usage for LLMs is still for training. If everyone is sitting around training and no one is doing inference... there's a problem. I don't believe any image generation service was earnings billions in revenue. Certainly no VR application did. OpenAI is reported to have done over $3 bill in revenue LTM. That's real money, it's all inference money, none of it is hardware. It's all real usage revenue. The revenue is different. Money talks. And, even though it's anecdata, I personally know dozens of people who use ChatGPT a lot in their job. I used it a lot and get 1000's of dollars a month of value out of it. I worked in VR at peak hype and everyone who worked in it saw the usage numbers - awful, always awful. Not a single person I knew who had a VR headset used it with any frequency. No one.

apwell23 2y ago
> OpenAI is reported to have done over $3 bill in revenue LTM. 1. revenue doesn't mean much, afaik they still lose money on every query. 2. I think you are using that as a proxy for utility . Companies buying licenses en-masse hoping it will boost productivity is an unproven thesis. Don't see any profit boost in their qtrly reports from chatgpt licenses that they bought. I use chatgpt and use it daily for coding. it isn't that its completly useless but uses are limited and certainly not worth hundereds of billions of dollars used to literally boil oceans. If someone took away chatgpt from me it not a big deal for me, to be honest. its dumb as rocks for coding, doesn't do even a tiny bit of high level thinking and almost half of it responses are hallucinating garbage.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Revenue = people are paying to use the product. You use it daily for work. In engineering. How much time does it save you every day? 15 mins? 1 hr? That's a lot at your hourly rate.
  - deleted 2y ago
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wpietri 2y ago
I guess I wasn't clear enough. Regarding blockchain, I was responding to the point that revenue was proof. A shit-ton of money went into blockchain projects. VR has also had significant sales. Both of these are fine analogies to demonstrate that billions of dollars in revenue does not prove a lasting success. I'm not arguing that nobody uses ChatGPT; I believe they do. My point instead is that it's not clear how sustained the usage will be. E.g., a counter-anecdote: I know of a team who hired a dev who was a big ChatGPT fan. They eventually fired him, because his LLM-generated communication was poor and confusing, and his code was the kind of bad pretty typical of generated code. I'm sure he felt like he was getting thousands of dollars of value out of it up until the point he was shown the door. One of the things that makes it especially hard to gauge is the extent to which piles of investor money are driving this. During Bubble 1.0, a lot of infrastructure companies had "real revenue" that turned out to be nth-hand investor money. We know ChatGPT has some real users, but how much of that inference traffic is ineffective or unsustainable startups burning up VC cash? That's a question that I expect will take 18 months or so to answer.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  The blockchain stuff wasn't usage revenue, it was people trying to make a quick buck revenue. VR didn't have significant sales of applications, all the sales were hardware which was shelfware. Billions of dollars of real usage revenue is an entirely different thing. Bubble 1.0 is akin to Nvidia revenue - lots of dollars being spent on training, less on inference. Very unclear how much of it ever sees a return. There is a big difference between Nvidia revenue and ChatGPT revenue as far as the issue you are discussing. Inference revenue = real, training revenue (for infra providers) = very speculative.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Do you have stats on that "real usage revenue"? Because I don't think inference revenue alone qualifies. There are a lot of "AI" applications that are pumping money into the inference providers, but how much is real, sustainable, socially valuable usage is, as I've said a few times not yet determined.

apwell23 2y ago

> OpenAI is reported to have done over $3 bill in revenue LTM. 1. revenue doesn't mean much, afaik they still lose money on every query. 2. I think you are using that as a proxy for utility . Companies buying licenses en-masse hoping it will boost productivity is an unproven thesis. Don't see any profit boost in their qtrly reports from chatgpt licenses that they bought. I use chatgpt and use it daily for coding. it isn't that its completly useless but uses are limited and certainly not worth hundereds of billions of dollars used to literally boil oceans. If someone took away chatgpt from me it not a big deal for me, to be honest. its dumb as rocks for coding, doesn't do even a tiny bit of high level thinking and almost half of it responses are hallucinating garbage.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Revenue = people are paying to use the product. You use it daily for work. In engineering. How much time does it save you every day? 15 mins? 1 hr? That's a lot at your hourly rate.
- deleted 2y ago
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wpietri 2y ago

I guess I wasn't clear enough. Regarding blockchain, I was responding to the point that revenue was proof. A shit-ton of money went into blockchain projects. VR has also had significant sales. Both of these are fine analogies to demonstrate that billions of dollars in revenue does not prove a lasting success. I'm not arguing that nobody uses ChatGPT; I believe they do. My point instead is that it's not clear how sustained the usage will be. E.g., a counter-anecdote: I know of a team who hired a dev who was a big ChatGPT fan. They eventually fired him, because his LLM-generated communication was poor and confusing, and his code was the kind of bad pretty typical of generated code. I'm sure he felt like he was getting thousands of dollars of value out of it up until the point he was shown the door. One of the things that makes it especially hard to gauge is the extent to which piles of investor money are driving this. During Bubble 1.0, a lot of infrastructure companies had "real revenue" that turned out to be nth-hand investor money. We know ChatGPT has some real users, but how much of that inference traffic is ineffective or unsustainable startups burning up VC cash? That's a question that I expect will take 18 months or so to answer.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
The blockchain stuff wasn't usage revenue, it was people trying to make a quick buck revenue. VR didn't have significant sales of applications, all the sales were hardware which was shelfware. Billions of dollars of real usage revenue is an entirely different thing. Bubble 1.0 is akin to Nvidia revenue - lots of dollars being spent on training, less on inference. Very unclear how much of it ever sees a return. There is a big difference between Nvidia revenue and ChatGPT revenue as far as the issue you are discussing. Inference revenue = real, training revenue (for infra providers) = very speculative.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Do you have stats on that "real usage revenue"? Because I don't think inference revenue alone qualifies. There are a lot of "AI" applications that are pumping money into the inference providers, but how much is real, sustainable, socially valuable usage is, as I've said a few times not yet determined.