SMS are free (they use up left over space in the signalling protocol a phone needs to use to talk to towers/inform the network of where it can be found - a process you're already charged for). Doesn't seem like phone networks collecting money for no effort (which is why it trends towards free) is a fair comparison to running an expensive supercomputer with very real hardware, energy and real estate costs.

I’ve asked ChatGPT about hardware. Here’s the response:

> As for your specific computer, with 64 GB of RAM and a high-performance GPU like the GeForce 1080 Ti, it should have sufficient resources to run a language model like me for many common tasks.

Based on the models open sourced by OpenAI, they are using PyTorch and CUDA. This means their stack requires nVidia GPUs. I think the main reason for their high costs is a single sentence in the EULA of GeForce drivers: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

It’s technically possible to port their GPGPU code from CUDA somewhere else. Here’s a vendor-agnostic DirectCompute re-implementation of their Whisper model: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper

On servers, DirectCompute is not great ‘coz Windows server licenses are expensive. Still, I did that port alone, and spent couple weeks doing that.

OpenAI probably has resources to port their inference to vendor-agnostic Vulkan Compute, running on Linux servers equipped with reasonably-priced AMD or Intel GPUs. For instance, Intel A770 16GB only costs $350, but delivers similar performance to nVidia A30 which costs $16000. Intel consumes more electricity but not by much, 225W versus 165W. That’s like 40x difference in cost efficiency of that chat.