If you spend more money training the model and offering it as a service (with all the costs that that entails) than you earn back directly from that model's usage, it can only be profitable if you use voodoo economics to fudge it.
Luckily we live in a time period where voodoo economics is the norm, though eventually it will all come crashing down.
You’re right, but that’s not what’s happening. Every major model trained at Anthropic and oAI have been profitable. Inference margins are on the order of 80%.
That’s true, but OpenAI and its proponents say each model is individually profitable so if R&D ever stops then the company as a whole will be profitable.
The problem with this argument is that if R&D ever stops, OpenAI will not be differentiated (because everyone else will be able to catch up), so their pricing power will disappear, and they won't be able to charge much more than the inference costs.
You're missing that they're pricing the value of models progressing them towards AGI, and their own use of that model for research and development. You can argue the first one, and the second is probably not fully spun up yet (though you can see it's building steam fast), but it's not total fantasy economics, it's just highly optimistic because investors aren't going to buy the story from people who're hedging.
LLMs by themselves are not going to lead to AGI, agreed. However, there's solid reasons to believe that LLMs as orchestrators of other models could get us there. LLMs have the potential to be very good at turning natural language problems into "games" that a model like MuZero can learn to solve in a superhuman way.
If you've been around, imgur, basically. All the image hosting solutions before it (imageshack) and all the file hosting solutions before them. Yahoo.
"Crashing" in this context doesn't mean something goes completely away, just that its userbase dwindles to 1-5-10% of what it once was and it's no longer part of the zeitgeist (again, Yahoo).
the only way I can see that happening here (userbase dwindles to 1-5-10% of what it once was) is if another better service came about but I don't think that is what @bayarearefugee is talking about when s/he said 'come crashing down' ?
> In this case, "bad things happening" is an exodus of the ultra wealthy, which is not so simple to reverse.
Speaking as an American who lives in California (so not directly relevant to the article in question, but 'wealth exodus' is often brought up to scare people about wealth taxes here as well):
Fucking Good. Bye Felicia. Hope they all move to Florida and/or Texas. We'll still be absolute fine here without them.
But also institute land value taxes so they can't be here while pretending to not be here
I also live in California, and agree with you in sentiment because the housing prices are too damn high.
However, the reason that most municipalities around here will bend over backwards to attract wealthy residents/businesses is because of their chronically underfunded liabilities (pensions, retirement healthcare benefits, etc).
Commonly attempting the "private beta with a waitlist" pseudo-release model (until they finally learned their lesson relatively recently) is a large part of how google fumbled the LLM ball to OpenAI and others.
> The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
The lawmakers care primarily about the wants of their corporate donors, which is why this legalized gambling situation arose, and also why you have many geriatric congress people on both sides of the aisle suddenly very interested in legitimizing crypto with soft "regulation".
> but maybe international outsourcing is the way to go in some areas
Seems like a lot of people forget there was a fairly massive push for this back in the early to mid aughts (for example, google "tech outsourcing 2004", as iirc 2004 was around the peak of the mania) and it generally didn't work out so great, with most companies who tried it pulling back away from it a year or two later.
Maybe it'll work better now, but I haven't seen evidence that much has changed that would modify the outcomes.
I don't think they care about winning hearts exactly, but I do think they (correctly) realize that LLM models are racing rapidly toward being commodified and they are still going to be way ahead of us on manufacturing the hardware to run them on.
Watching the US stock market implode from the bubble generated from investors over here not realizing this is happening will be a nice bonus for them, I guess, and constantly shipping open SOTA models will speed that along.
I guess its good that this is drawing some light on the subject, but nothing will happen.
Even if MrBeast were to be investigated by a government agency for similar issues, his business links to noted Trump sycophant Chamath Palihapitiya would shield him from any consequences for his actions.
It’s funny how he’s admired by Chamath and other Silicon Valley types for his entrepreneurship or good deeds or whatever when the core of how his channel works is deceiving viewers
Yeah people can barely see past the length of their own nose.
Its a marketing experiment basically. I think a bunch of people coalesced to answer the question. "So, how could we completely wipe the leaderboard in terms of views/attention and dethrone an entire cohort of competitors in the quest for dominance over people's attention?"
In the process they completely pulled out all stops, if it bleeds it leads, save the children, high risk stunts, and psychological knee jerks. Out of nowhere they play minecraft too? Of course, its popular so, why not. The ends justifies the means. Of course, all influencers do this to a point, but none are so systematic, diversified and approach the question with so many types of content.
We shouldn’t need to clarify this, but Tim Allen and Roseanne Bar were not threatened by high-ranking government officials, right?
These are two completely different situations. If conservatives want to vote with their dollars and boycott Disney, that’s something I wholeheartedly support. If they want to use their power as federal officials to silence voices they disagree with, that’s unacceptable.
> Disney content, financially motivated or not, is some of the most left friendly media there is.
This is kind of true, but it isn't correct to color this as Disney doing a favor to the left. The reason their content is "left" friendly is that most people are pretty aligned with the "left" when it comes to social issues.
They are offering this content because it is popular with the majority of people (and thus profitable), not as some sort of favor to their friends.
Luckily we live in a time period where voodoo economics is the norm, though eventually it will all come crashing down.
reply