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A lot of people here seem to think this is somehow for their benefit, or that OpenAI and friends are trying to make something useful for the average person. The

A lot of people here seem to think this is somehow for their benefit, or that OpenAI and friends are trying to make something useful for the average person. They aren't spending billions of dollars to give everyone a personal assistant. They are spending billions now to save even more in wages later, and we are paying for the privilege of training their AI to do it. By the time this thing is useful enough to actually be a personal assistant, they will have released that capability in a model that is far too expensive for the average person.

Aeolun 2y ago
Everything they’ve released is affordable to the average person. Why would this one be different?
Night_Thastus 2y ago
Don't worry, it'll never be good enough to actually be a personal assistant.
- 4ndrewl 2y ago
  Not this version, but in 3 years time. Promise. Just keeping sending us money...
  - sandos 2y ago
    Same as self-driving cars 10 years ago? Yeah...
    - Night_Thastus 2y ago
      Self-driving cars have actually made progress. Better sensors, better programming, etc. Tesla can't do it but clearly Waymo can. It's not perfect, but with enough time and effort it can get to the point where it'll be regularly usable in most cases. But LLMs? Those have already scraped all the data they're going to, and bigger models have less and less impact. They're about as good as they're ever going to be.
random3 2y ago
I think it's less a problem of cost for the average person and more a problem of setting the market price for them at a fraction of the current one. This has such a deflationary impact that it's unlikely captured or even conceivable by the current economic models. There's a problem of "target fixation" about the capabilities and it captures most conversation, when in fact most public focus should be on public policy and ensuring this has the impact that the society wants. IMO whether things are going to be good or bad depends on having a shared understanding, thinking, discussion and decisions around what's going to happen next.
- fraboniface 2y ago
  Exactly, every country should urgently have a public debate on how best to use that technology and make sure it's beneficial to society as a whole. Social media are a good example that a technology can have a net negative impact if we don't deploy it carefully.
  - tartoran 2y ago
    Ok, this conversation about social media has cropped up time and time again and things haven't improved but got even worse. I don't expect we'll be able solve this problem with discussions only, so much money is being poured in that any discussion is likely to be completely neglected. Not saying that we shouldn't discuss this but more action is needed. I think the tech sector needs to be stripped of political power as it got way too powerful and is interfering with everything else.
  - mrdependable 2y ago
    I agree, though while everyone is having public debates, these companies are already in there greasing palms. I personally think the fact we are allowing them to extract so much value from our collective work is perverse. What I find even more sickening is how many people are cheering them on. Let them make their AI if we have to. Let them use it to cure cancer and whatever other disease, but I don't think we should be allowing it to be used for commercial purposes.
reissbaker 2y ago
This seems unreasonably pessimistic (or unreasonably optimistic in OpenAI's moat?). There are so, so many companies competing in this space. The cost will reflect the price of the hardware needed to run it: if it doesn't, they'll just lose to one of their many competitors who offer something similar for cheaper, e.g. whatever DeepSeek or Meta releases in the same space, with the cost driven to the bottom by commoditized inference companies like Together and Fireworks. And hardware cost goes down over time: even if it's unaffordable at launch, it won't be in five years. They're not even the first movers here: Anthropic's been doing this with Claude for a few months now. They're just the first to combine it with a reasoning-style model, and I'd expect Anthropic to launch a similar model within the next few months if not sooner, especially now that there's been open-source replication of o1-style reasoning with DeepSeek R1 and the various R1-distills on top of Llama and Qwen.
- mplewis 2y ago
  And none of the competitors can make this technology profitable, either.
  - chipgap98 2y ago
    Isn't there every reason to believe the cost will come down?
    - Volundr 2y ago
      Is there actually reason to believe costs will come down significantly? I've been under the impression that companies like OpenAI and Google have been selling this stuff at well below cost to drive adoption with the idea that over time efficiency improvements would make it possible, but that those improvements don't seem to be materializing, but I'm not particularly informed in this so I'd love to hear a more informed take.
      - reissbaker 2y ago
        The costs for OpenAI and Google aren't public, but if you look at the open-source models, inference is very cheap: for example, you can generally beat the public serverless prices by a factor of ~2 by using dedicated GPUs [1], and given that a 70b model costs about $1/million tokens serverless — and tend to perform similarly on benchmarks to 4o — OpenAI is most likely getting very fat profit margins at $2.50/million input tokens and $10/million output tokens. The problem for them is making enough money for the training runs (where it seems like their strategy is to raise money on the hope they achieve some kind of runaway self-improving effect that grants them an effective monopoly on the leading models, combined with regulatory pushes to ban their competitors) — but it seems very unlikely to me that they're losing money serving the models. 1: https://fireworks.ai/blog/why-gpus-on-demand https://fireworks.ai/blog/why-gpus-on-demand
mosquitobiten 2y ago
>we are paying for the privilege of training their AI this was, is and is going to be a constant thing with every AI company
energy123 2y ago
I think this is a misread of the economics. Human level AI will be expensive at first, but eventually nearly free. OpenAI will have no say in whether this happens. Competition between AI firms means OpenAI has no pricing power. And cost decreases from hardware and software (for a fixed level of intelligence) will allow competition to deliver those lower costs. This won't mean humans can't earn wages by selling their labor. But it will mean that human intellectual labor will be not valuable in the labor market. Humans will only earn an income by differentiated activity. Initially that will be manual labor. Once robotics catches up, probably only labor tied to people's personality and humanness.
nickpsecurity 2y ago
Another angle is that they might use it to scrape more content for internal use. That’s on top of the training data that the user interactions generate. Which I was your point, I believe.

Aeolun 2y ago

Everything they’ve released is affordable to the average person. Why would this one be different?

Night_Thastus 2y ago

Don't worry, it'll never be good enough to actually be a personal assistant.

4ndrewl 2y ago
Not this version, but in 3 years time. Promise. Just keeping sending us money...
- sandos 2y ago
  Same as self-driving cars 10 years ago? Yeah...
  - Night_Thastus 2y ago
    Self-driving cars have actually made progress. Better sensors, better programming, etc. Tesla can't do it but clearly Waymo can. It's not perfect, but with enough time and effort it can get to the point where it'll be regularly usable in most cases. But LLMs? Those have already scraped all the data they're going to, and bigger models have less and less impact. They're about as good as they're ever going to be.

random3 2y ago

I think it's less a problem of cost for the average person and more a problem of setting the market price for them at a fraction of the current one. This has such a deflationary impact that it's unlikely captured or even conceivable by the current economic models. There's a problem of "target fixation" about the capabilities and it captures most conversation, when in fact most public focus should be on public policy and ensuring this has the impact that the society wants. IMO whether things are going to be good or bad depends on having a shared understanding, thinking, discussion and decisions around what's going to happen next.

fraboniface 2y ago
Exactly, every country should urgently have a public debate on how best to use that technology and make sure it's beneficial to society as a whole. Social media are a good example that a technology can have a net negative impact if we don't deploy it carefully.
- tartoran 2y ago
  Ok, this conversation about social media has cropped up time and time again and things haven't improved but got even worse. I don't expect we'll be able solve this problem with discussions only, so much money is being poured in that any discussion is likely to be completely neglected. Not saying that we shouldn't discuss this but more action is needed. I think the tech sector needs to be stripped of political power as it got way too powerful and is interfering with everything else.
- mrdependable 2y ago
  I agree, though while everyone is having public debates, these companies are already in there greasing palms. I personally think the fact we are allowing them to extract so much value from our collective work is perverse. What I find even more sickening is how many people are cheering them on. Let them make their AI if we have to. Let them use it to cure cancer and whatever other disease, but I don't think we should be allowing it to be used for commercial purposes.

reissbaker 2y ago

This seems unreasonably pessimistic (or unreasonably optimistic in OpenAI's moat?). There are so, so many companies competing in this space. The cost will reflect the price of the hardware needed to run it: if it doesn't, they'll just lose to one of their many competitors who offer something similar for cheaper, e.g. whatever DeepSeek or Meta releases in the same space, with the cost driven to the bottom by commoditized inference companies like Together and Fireworks. And hardware cost goes down over time: even if it's unaffordable at launch, it won't be in five years. They're not even the first movers here: Anthropic's been doing this with Claude for a few months now. They're just the first to combine it with a reasoning-style model, and I'd expect Anthropic to launch a similar model within the next few months if not sooner, especially now that there's been open-source replication of o1-style reasoning with DeepSeek R1 and the various R1-distills on top of Llama and Qwen.

mplewis 2y ago
And none of the competitors can make this technology profitable, either.
- chipgap98 2y ago
  Isn't there every reason to believe the cost will come down?
  - Volundr 2y ago
    Is there actually reason to believe costs will come down significantly? I've been under the impression that companies like OpenAI and Google have been selling this stuff at well below cost to drive adoption with the idea that over time efficiency improvements would make it possible, but that those improvements don't seem to be materializing, but I'm not particularly informed in this so I'd love to hear a more informed take.
    - reissbaker 2y ago
      The costs for OpenAI and Google aren't public, but if you look at the open-source models, inference is very cheap: for example, you can generally beat the public serverless prices by a factor of ~2 by using dedicated GPUs [1], and given that a 70b model costs about $1/million tokens serverless — and tend to perform similarly on benchmarks to 4o — OpenAI is most likely getting very fat profit margins at $2.50/million input tokens and $10/million output tokens. The problem for them is making enough money for the training runs (where it seems like their strategy is to raise money on the hope they achieve some kind of runaway self-improving effect that grants them an effective monopoly on the leading models, combined with regulatory pushes to ban their competitors) — but it seems very unlikely to me that they're losing money serving the models. 1: https://fireworks.ai/blog/why-gpus-on-demand https://fireworks.ai/blog/why-gpus-on-demand

mosquitobiten 2y ago

>we are paying for the privilege of training their AI this was, is and is going to be a constant thing with every AI company

energy123 2y ago

I think this is a misread of the economics. Human level AI will be expensive at first, but eventually nearly free. OpenAI will have no say in whether this happens. Competition between AI firms means OpenAI has no pricing power. And cost decreases from hardware and software (for a fixed level of intelligence) will allow competition to deliver those lower costs. This won't mean humans can't earn wages by selling their labor. But it will mean that human intellectual labor will be not valuable in the labor market. Humans will only earn an income by differentiated activity. Initially that will be manual labor. Once robotics catches up, probably only labor tied to people's personality and humanness.

nickpsecurity 2y ago

Another angle is that they might use it to scrape more content for internal use. That’s on top of the training data that the user interactions generate. Which I was your point, I believe.