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OpenAI joins The Rust Foundation as a Platinun member and donates funds to support Rust maintenance (rustfoundation.org)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

No, they are now charging by usage. They will either end up with boatloads of money while people still have ChatGPT integrated into their workflows, or they will end up with zero money as people either switch to other models or realize that AI was a shit idea all along.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    No, they are now charging by usage.

    Not the actual cost... they are still losing money even in their most expensive tiers. There is just no path to profitability with ANY of the current models, they simply cost more to run than the people they are supposedly trying to replace

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    FWIW the general consensus is that they are just about making a profit on selling it by the token (as opposed to the subscriptions which are massively subsidised) so long as you pretend that capital expenses and R&D aren't real and at some point they could stop doing them in order to make profit.

    That is very much not a given, with all the labs in a death march to not let the others get better than them and take their lunch, and open source only 9-18 months behind the closed models.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    FWIW the general consensus is that they are just about making a profit

    This is what the tech bros claim (which is obviously convenient so they can lure more suckers investors in); every outside pundit concludes otherwise

    Check this article I received yesterday... in a nutshell, if a company returns less than 7% on investment, they would normally be liquidated by investors. To make it to 7%, AI companies would have to reach a revenue of $2 TRILLION per year (cumulative amongst the big AI players, which are like 5 total)

    Last leaked financials from OpenAI showed $13 Billion revenue and a $21 billion loss

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Your link is broken.

    Yes, judging them now the big AI companies are terrible businesses, they are just about, maybe, marginally profitable if they stop the huge fixed expenses which they cant stop because of their environment.

    The gamble is that AI will increase in usage, while becoming more efficient and resisting becoming commoditised. I don't think there's a strong chance of all three of those happening, but if they did that would justify them losing money now in order to make big profits later. That's the gamble.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Your link is broken.

    Sorry about that, here is another https://archive.ph/3V0oc

    The gamble is that AI will increase in usage, while becoming more efficient and resisting becoming commoditised.

    But again we already know that is impossible since the economies of scale do not work. Each extra user means a shit ton of extra processing in those Data Centers and, even disregarding the destruction of the planet, nobody will pay that cost just to get 35% hallucinations in their queries.

    Right now, they are literally gambling with the IPOs that they hype will last long enough for them to cash out and let pension plans and other large automated index investors holding the bag.

    This Xmas may not be merry at all...

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    The thing about per token basis is that it's hard to justify unless you get token back whenever it spends a shitload of tokens on some rabbit hole. The alternative is me baby sitting every action it does which would make it very hard to justify me paying anything at all.

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