3 ms·

> That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions. That is a problem for the VC’s that bet wrong, not for the world at large. The models exist

by Aeolun 2y ago

> That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions. That is a problem for the VC’s that bet wrong, not for the world at large. The models exist now and they’ll keep being used, regardless of whether a bunch of rich guys lost a bunch of money.

adamc 2y ago
Their ongoing operation is quite expensive, so even that is not assured.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  My ongoing operation is a MacBook pro that costs pennies worth of electricity.
- square_usual 2y ago
  Where are you getting this from? Outside of o3, every AI provider's API is super cheap, with most productive queries I do coming in under 2c. We have no reason to believe any of them are selling API requests at a loss. I think <2c per query hardly counts as "quite expensive".
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    The reasoning people have for them selling API requests at a loss is simply their financial statements. Anthropic burned $3B this year. ChatGPT lost $5B. Microsoft has spent $19B on AI and Google has spent close to $50B. Given that revenue for the market leader ChatGPT is $3.7B, it's safe to say that they're losing massive amounts of money. These companies are heavily subsidized by investors and their cloud service providers (like Microsoft and Google) in an attempt to gain market share. It might actually work - but this situation, where a product is sold under cost to drum up usage and build market share, with the intent to gain a monopoly and raise prices later on - is sort of the definition of a bubble, and is exactly how the mobile app bubble, the dot-com bubble, and previous AI bubbles have played out.
    - webmaven 2y ago
      Are the training costs (CapEx) and inference costs (OpEx) being lumped together?
      - daveguy 2y ago
        Not sure if it matters at this point. There will need to be many more rounds of CapEx to realize the promises that have been put forth about these models.
  - TeaBrain 2y ago
    The implication would be that those API requests are being sold at a loss. Amodei wrote in January that Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained for only a few $10Ms, but Anthropic has been losing billions.
    - daveguy 2y ago
      That would be a killer for the current and near future generations of LLM as a business. If they are having to pay many times in compute what they are able to get for the API use (due to open models being near comparable?), then you definitely can't "make up for it in volume".
jcgrillo 2y ago
> they’ll keep being used How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced. So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait any day now we'll be able to...) or just garbage (natural language queries instead of SQL). What is this shit for?
- scotty79 2y ago
  > What is this shit for? Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists. Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market. It's not as good as people at solving problems yet but it's already better than humans at bullshiting them.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    Are people actually satisfied by that? I personally find "chatting" with an LLM grating and dissatisfying because it often makes very obvious and incongruous errors, and it can't reason. It has no logical abilities at all, really. I think you're really underestimating what a therapist actually does, and what human communication actually is. It's more than word patterns. I could see this being useful in a "dark pattern" sense, but only if it's incredibly cheap, to increase the cost to the user of engaging with customer support. If you have to argue with the LLM for an hour before being connected to an actual person who can help you, then very few calls will make it to the support staff and you can therefore have a much smaller team. But that only works if you hate your users.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    Subjective evaluation of "humanity" and "empathy" in responses is much less important than clinical outcome. I don't think an online chat with a nebulous entity will ever be as beneficial as interactions that can, at least occasionally, be in-person. Especially as the trust of online conversations degrade. Erosion of trust online seems like a major negative consequence of all the generative AI slop (LLM or otherwise).

by Aeolun 2y ago

adamc 2y ago

Their ongoing operation is quite expensive, so even that is not assured.

LPisGood 2y ago
My ongoing operation is a MacBook pro that costs pennies worth of electricity.
square_usual 2y ago
Where are you getting this from? Outside of o3, every AI provider's API is super cheap, with most productive queries I do coming in under 2c. We have no reason to believe any of them are selling API requests at a loss. I think <2c per query hardly counts as "quite expensive".
- nostrademons 2y ago
  The reasoning people have for them selling API requests at a loss is simply their financial statements. Anthropic burned $3B this year. ChatGPT lost $5B. Microsoft has spent $19B on AI and Google has spent close to $50B. Given that revenue for the market leader ChatGPT is $3.7B, it's safe to say that they're losing massive amounts of money. These companies are heavily subsidized by investors and their cloud service providers (like Microsoft and Google) in an attempt to gain market share. It might actually work - but this situation, where a product is sold under cost to drum up usage and build market share, with the intent to gain a monopoly and raise prices later on - is sort of the definition of a bubble, and is exactly how the mobile app bubble, the dot-com bubble, and previous AI bubbles have played out.
  - webmaven 2y ago
    Are the training costs (CapEx) and inference costs (OpEx) being lumped together?
    - daveguy 2y ago
      Not sure if it matters at this point. There will need to be many more rounds of CapEx to realize the promises that have been put forth about these models.
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  The implication would be that those API requests are being sold at a loss. Amodei wrote in January that Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained for only a few $10Ms, but Anthropic has been losing billions.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    That would be a killer for the current and near future generations of LLM as a business. If they are having to pay many times in compute what they are able to get for the API use (due to open models being near comparable?), then you definitely can't "make up for it in volume".

jcgrillo 2y ago

> they’ll keep being used How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced. So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait any day now we'll be able to...) or just garbage (natural language queries instead of SQL). What is this shit for?

scotty79 2y ago
> What is this shit for? Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists. Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market. It's not as good as people at solving problems yet but it's already better than humans at bullshiting them.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  Are people actually satisfied by that? I personally find "chatting" with an LLM grating and dissatisfying because it often makes very obvious and incongruous errors, and it can't reason. It has no logical abilities at all, really. I think you're really underestimating what a therapist actually does, and what human communication actually is. It's more than word patterns. I could see this being useful in a "dark pattern" sense, but only if it's incredibly cheap, to increase the cost to the user of engaging with customer support. If you have to argue with the LLM for an hour before being connected to an actual person who can help you, then very few calls will make it to the support staff and you can therefore have a much smaller team. But that only works if you hate your users.
- daveguy 2y ago
  Subjective evaluation of "humanity" and "empathy" in responses is much less important than clinical outcome. I don't think an online chat with a nebulous entity will ever be as beneficial as interactions that can, at least occasionally, be in-person. Especially as the trust of online conversations degrade. Erosion of trust online seems like a major negative consequence of all the generative AI slop (LLM or otherwise).