OpenAI might need another round of funding to remain afloat.
      • Manmoth
        715·
        1 month ago

        It’s a brand new, highly competitive technology and ChatGPT has first mover status with a trailer load of capital behind it. They are going to burn a lot of resources right now to innovate quickly and reduce latency etc If they reach a successful product-market-fit getting costs down will eventually be critical to it actually being a viable product. I imagine they will pipe this back into ChatGPT for some sort of AI-driven scaling solution for their infrastructure.

        TL;DR - It’s kind of like how a car uses most of it’s resources going from 0-60 and then efficiencies kick-in at highway speeds.

        Regardless I don’t think they will have to worry about being profitable for a while. With the competition heating up I don’t think there is any way they don’t secure another round of funding.

        • WalnutLum
          9·
          1 month ago

          Facebook is trying to burn the forest around OpenAI and other closed models by removing the market for “models” by themselves, by releasing their own freely to the community. A lot of money is already pivoting away towards companies trying to find products that use the AI instead of the AI itself. Unless OpenAI pivots to something more substantial than just providing multimodal prompt completion they’re gonna find themselves without a lot of runway left.

        • flappy@lemm.ee
          3·
          1 month ago

          If they run out of money (unlikely), they still have a recent history with Microsoft.

        • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          31·
          1 month ago

          TL;DR - It’s kind of like how a car

          Yes. It’s an inefficient and unsustainable con that’s literally destroying the planet.

    • AlexWIWAEnglish
      19·
      1 month ago

      Sounds like we’re going to get some killer deals on used hardware in a year or so

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      251·
      1 month ago

      Yeah. It’s a legitimate business, where the funders at the top of the pyramid are paid by those that join at the bottom!

          • porous_grey_matter
            7·
            1 month ago

            People who previously were at the high end of GPU can now afford used H100s -> they sell their GPUs -> we can maybe afford them

          • tyler@programming.dev
            1·
            1 month ago

            Yep and if OpenAI goes under the whole market will likely crash, people will dump their GPUs they’ve been using to create models and then boom, you’ve got a bunch of GPUs available.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
              1·
              1 month ago

              That would depend entirely on why OpenAI might go under. The linked article is very sparse on details, but it says:

              These expenses alone stack miles ahead of its rivals’ expenditure predictions for 2024.

              Which suggests this is likely an OpenAI problem and not an AI in general problem. If OpenAI goes under the rest of the market may actually surge as they devour OpenAI’s abandoned market share.

  • Ephera
    20·
    1 month ago

    I do expect them to receive more funding, but I also expect that to be tied to pricing increases. And I feel like that could break their neck.

    In my team, we’re doing lots of GenAI use-cases and far too often, it’s a matter of slapping a chatbot interface onto a normal SQL database query, just so we can tell our customers and their bosses that we did something with GenAI, because that’s what they’re receiving funding for. Apart from these user interfaces, we’re hardly solving problems with GenAI.

    If the operation costs go up and management starts asking what the pricing for a non-GenAI solution would be like, I expect the answer to be rather devastating for most use-cases.

    Like, there’s maybe still a decent niche in that developing a chatbot interface is likely cheaper than a traditional interface, so maybe new projects might start out with a chatbot interface and later get a regular GUI to reduce operation costs. And of course, there is the niche of actual language processing, for which LLMs are genuinely a good tool. But yeah, going to be interesting how many real-world use-cases remain once the hype dies down.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
      5·
      1 month ago

      It’s also worth noting that smaller model work fine for these types of use cases, so it might just make sense to run a local model at that point.

      • themurphy
        610·
        1 month ago

        I think the guy above is just mad he can’t figure out how to use it. Always easier to be mad at the tool.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          1 month ago

          different guy here. It seemed to be fairly useful for software engineers to solve quick issues where the answer isn’t immediately obvious - but it’s terrible at most other jobs.

          And part of why it’s bad is because you have to type into a text box what you want and read it back (unless you build you own custom API integration- which goes without saying is also a terrible way to access a product for 99% of people)

          Another part of why it’s bad is because you’re sharing proprietary information with a stranger that is definitely cataloging and profiling it

          Very few people interact with language in a way that is bidirectionally friendly with AI, and AI just isnt very good at writing. It’s very good at creating strings of words that make sense and fit a theme, but most of what makes “very good” writing isn’t just basic competency of the language.

        • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
          3·
          1 month ago

          GPT is selectively useful. It’s also, as of the last few weeks dumb as a bag of bricks. Dumber than usual. 4 and 4o are messed up. 4 mini is an idiot. Not sure how they broke them, but it started roughly around the time of the assassination attempt. Not sure if it was a national security request or a mere coincidence, but just the same.

          I’m even seeing 4o make comically dumb and stubborn programming mistakes lately, like:

          GPT: “I totally escaped that character”

          Me: “no, it’s the same as your previous response.”

          GPT: “Oh, sorry, here is the corrected code.” replies with same code again.

          I canceled my sub.

          • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
            4·
            1 month ago

            replies with the same code again

            And that’s exactly why I’ve already given up on AI before even really getting into it. The only things I use it for is when I want a basic skeleton for a simple script with the intention of turning it into a real script myself. It’s also pretty good at generating grep, sed and awk commands and oneliners (or at least it was when I last tried it), and sometimes, in spotting mistakes with them.

  • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    The start(-up?)[sic] generates up to $2 billion annually from ChatGPT and an additional $ 1 billion from LLM access fees, translating to an approximate total revenue of between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion annually.

    I hope their reporting is better then their math…