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Comment by YurgenJurgensen | Hacker News Reader

We've seen how these promising new technologies work. They start off looking amazing when they're running entirely on VC and grant money and don't care about profitability as long as they're generating buzz and getting users. This phase always ends, and then there's a scramble to become profitable. What does this mean for GPT?

"GPT-5, write me a poem."

"Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and this output is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends"

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Except they already sell API access for their AI and it seems like the right price, $0.0200 per 1k token for the best one, and my prompt right now are between 3k and 15k tokens. Doing a prompt is cheap enough for what it give, and there's no way it cost them more than that running it considering how quick it does it. They could easily do 2x that cost if it were too expensive to run for them, if not more. You can rent a server with 8x Nvidia A100 on lambdalabs for 8.80$/hr, let say my smallest prompt took 15 seconds (it didn't) and required that whole server (clearly not) it would cost them 3.7 cents to run my prompt, while costing me 6.2 cents, and lambdalabs would also make a profit on it.

Training the models weren't that expensive either, and that's a one time deal.

Wow, never thought about this. That’s an obvious and terrifying monetization model. Pay to always have GPT speak well of your company. Pay to appear more frequently in certain contexts.

Do people ever think that these AIs can model economics processes in so much detail that they don't even need the concept of money. Just directly go and procure the materials needed, do whatever necessary resource allocations required. Money is a concept for humans to transact, a proxy for resources. But if all the planning is done by AI, do we even need money.

Do we even need matter that hasn't been converted into paperclips or the machinery to produce more paperclips?

Better send more probes to be sure.

No, money is a means for states to procure things without needing to exercise violence at the point of procurement. It has a side benefit of providing a tool the rest of the economy can use to power itself. To your point, states are very good at imposing tax obligations when no money changes hands, which is all that is needed for money to be maintained.

Money is crucial for giving us prices and without knowing prices the economy would be screwed.

If we couldn't tell that it was cheaper to use renewable over fossil fuels or eat chicken over beef as two examples there could be big efficiency and allocation problems.

Sure, but that's the side effect of the state setting the value. It's definitely necessary, don't get me wrong, and in the absence of state money I daresay another solution would have been found.

The existence of money preceded the state by a wide margin. There is also a long history of privately issued money that only ended recently (and considering crypto in some ways never ended).

State issuance of money and the tax required to imbue it with value is merely a sufficient condition for money to exist. My original point is that as long as a states continue to exist, and continue to issue and tax money, money will continue to exist. Debating the history of money is besides the point (though I'd posit that in every case the money was used to a non-trivial extent, it bore some explicit value from a trustworthy authority, be that a state or a local warlord or a powerful corporation...).

An unguided, yet somehow planned and modelled economy?

AIs with total surveillance perhaps? Would need weather-control too or giant surpluses squirreled away in a distributed fashion.

Some kind of ascetic commune, but at global scale? Might work in a military setup when fighting the alien invasion.

I’ve actually had it do that on purpose before, for a laugh!

“Write a YouTube script sponsored by NordVPN by Littlefinger about the invasion of Westeros by Daenerys.”

“ Hi there! I'm Littlefinger and I'm here to talk to you about the recent invasion of Westeros by Daenerys. As you may know, Daenerys is a powerful queen from the east who has been making her way across the land with her army and her dragons.

Many people are worried about what this means for the future of Westeros, and for good reason. Daenerys has a reputation for being a fierce and unstoppable force, and she has already proven herself to be a formidable enemy.

But there is one thing that can help protect you from the dangers of Daenerys and her invasion: NordVPN. NordVPN is a virtual private network service that allows you to securely browse the internet and keep your online activity private.

With NordVPN, you can protect yourself from being targeted by Daenerys and her forces. Whether you're trying to keep your personal information safe or you just want to make sure that your online activity remains private, NordVPN has you covered.

So why not give NordVPN a try today? With its easy-to-use interface and powerful security features, NordVPN is the perfect tool to help you stay safe during these uncertain times. Plus, with its 30-day money-back guarantee, you have nothing to lose!

Thank you for watching, and stay safe with NordVPN.”

I would pay $25/month for this service. I might pay $100/month for this service. No ads necessary.

But many many other people won't, or can't.

And there will be companies offering the product for free in order to grab that market share and steal users from the paying ones.

That's how the internet companies strived since ~1998

> No ads necessary

Spoken as if a sustainable and profitable business model prevents ads from being shoved into a product. It does not.

Maybe a million people would pay that, but I doubt it. Even with a million that's only 300 million per year, probably not enough to pay back VCs.

I've spent the past day playing with this, iteratively feeding real tasks from my software consulting work into it and building with the output. At this point I am convinced it will replace a team of smart junior developers under me, who work instantly and have deep expertise in every language and framework I use. They make mistakes, but when I ask them to correct the mistakes they do so instantly, and don't get frustrated. At this point my biggest fear is that this tool is going to get taken away from me, and I would pay a substantial portion of the increased efficiency it gives me -- thousands of dollars per month -- as a business owner and senior developer to avoid that.

When generating code it seems to often stop earlier than desired. Is there a way to specify full/longer output?

Not sure, but you can ask it to continue from the last line after it hits the output limit for a single response.

https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1599094067534516225?t=n9...

Pay to add some hidden Oracle dependency and then phone home.

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