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.
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.
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...
For anyone doing a serious project, it's much more cost effective to rent a node and run your own models on it. You can spin them up and down as needed, cache often-used queries, etc.
For sure, and in a lot of use cases you don't even need a really big model. There are a few niche scenarios where you require a large context that's not practical to run on your own infrastructure, but in most cases I agree.
Last time a batch of these popped up it was saying they'd be bankrupt in 2024 so I guess they've made it to 2025 now. I wonder if we'll see similar articles again next year.
I use it all the time for work especially for long documents and formatting technical documentation. It's all but eliminated my removed work. A lot of people are sour on AI because "it's not going to deliver on generative AI etc etc" but it doesn't matter. It's super useful and we've really only scratched the surface of what it can be used for.
I also thing we just need to find use cases where it is working.
While it will not solve everything, it did solve some things. Like you have found, I have used it for generating simple artwork for internal documents, that would never get design funding (even if it would I would have spent much more time dealing with designer), rewriting sentences so it sounds better, grammar check, quick search engine, enciclopedia, copywriting some non important texts...
I would pay few bucks per month if it wasn't free. I gave it to grammarly and barely use it.
So I guess next step is just reducing cost of running those models, which is not that hard as we can see by open source space.
OpenAI is no longer the cutting edge of AI these days, IMO. It'll be fine if they close down. They blazed the trail, set the AI revolution in motion, but now lots of other companies have picked it up and are doing better at it than them.
There is no AI Revolution. There never was. Generative AI was sold as an automation solution to companies looking to decrease labor costs, but's it's not actually good at doing that. Moreover, there's not enough good, accurate training material to make generative AI that much smarter or more useful than it already is.
Generative AI is a dead end, and big companies are just now starting to realize that, especially after the Goldman-Sachs report on AI. Sam Altman is just a snake oil saleman, another failing-upwards executive who told a bunch of other executives what they wanted to hear. It's just now becoming clear that the emperor has no clothes.
Generative AI is not smart to begin with. LLM are basically just compressed versions of the internet that predict statistically what a sentence needs to be to look "right". There's a big difference between appearing right and being right. Without a critical approach to information, independent reasoning, individual sensing, these AI's are incapable of any meaningful intelligence.
In my experience, the emperor and most people around them still has not figured this out yet.
Generative AI is just classification engines run in reverse. Classification engines are useful but they've been around and making incremental improvements for at least a decade. Also, just like self-driving cars they've been writing checks they can't honor. For instance, legal coding and radiology were supposed to be automated by classification engines a long time ago.
If they closed down, and the people still aligned with safety had to take up the mantle, that would be fine.
If they got desperate for money and started looking for people they could sell their soul to (more than they have already) in exchange for keeping the doors open, that could potentially be pretty fuckin bad.
Well, my point is that it's already largely irrelevant what they do. Many of their talented engineers have moved on to other companies, some new startups and some already-established ones. The interesting new models and products are not being produced by OpenAI so much any more.
I wouldn't be surprised if "safety alignment" is one of the reasons, too. There are a lot of folks in tech who really just want to build neat things and it feels oppressive to be in a company that's likely to lock away the things they build if they turn out to be too neat.