Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

The Foundry pricing, $78,000 for a few months minimum, is absolutely the opposite of Open. It could completely kill my small startup if the API goes from less than a penny per request to requiring a huge up-front investment. It means that anyone bootstrapping is now locked out.

View on HN

That’s the general risk of basing a startup on someone else’s service without having a solid contractual agreement, though. It’s always a gamble, in particular when the underlying service is an entirely new type of business.

Why would you start a company that is entirely dependent on a third party’s closed product, over which you have zero control? This just feels immensely risky.

It's the only service available that does this and you want to get ahead of it. Presumably, some competitors will show up and you should be able to switch. Prices will go down as competition pops up and they make things more efficient.

Realistically, if you start a business, there are tons of such dependencies. If that's too scary for you, you're probably too risk adverse to be an entrepreneur.

All those dependencies usually have alternatives though

The issue is not having dependencies. The issue is having one specific dependency that is a beta experimental product with no viable alternative, and which will tank your company when they raise prices.

Your company must always have alternatives for all third party services. The only exception is open source software that you could switch to hosting yourself if the SAAS company shuts down.

Shocking that you are able to even get investors with such a crude view on how business works. Starting an ancillary business related to one product that is not even your own IP or core competency is just lightweight consultancy, not a start up.

I would have thought the goal of sharecropping on OpenAI's land was to build a product that OpenAI would eventually acquire.

The product is entirely just OpenAI. IMO they would only be in the acquisition part to acquire the customer base, nothing about the product. But then they couldn't have another company paying to do the same thing. Why acquire one portfolio when you have _n_ companies paying them to offer same thing to others.

I don't know how to get $78,000 and it's asinine that you would assume that isn't a hurdle for anyone.

Starting a company is risky. If everyone thinks like you, it creates an opportunity to create a product that doesn't exist. And yes, there's a risk.

Competition and progress on infra will drive the cost down over time. OpenAI won't be the only show in town. It will become like thinking it's a risk to build on AWS.

That's the risk you take when you create irreplaceable dependencies.

This answers the question I’ve had. How do they make money? It was naive to think we could have all this innovation for a penny. Someone has to pay those bills.

How does Bing plan to monetize searches that go through their even more advanced ChatGPT? Humans will be repulsed by ads in the middle of their answer from a sentient feeling AI. Numbers I’ve seen is that ChatGPT searches will cost 10x a Google search. How do they make it back?

When you're watching a movie, and the main character picks up a can of Coca Cola while typing on a Microsoft Surface laptop, with the logos conveniently rotated toward the camera, it's obvious that Coke and Microsoft are paying the studio for product placement.

AI advertising will be like this, but subtle and undetectable, so that it's nearly impossible to determine that your conversation about malfeasance by a political candidate is being invisibly influenced by his political campaign.

In many jurisdictions that kind of subtle product placement is not legal.

How about prohibitions on product use, like Apple phones not being usable by villains?

How do you prove that it happens and is not an artifact of the training data?

If it went to court, in the discovery process the defendant will have to turn over internal emails etc.

"I didn't type that, your honor, my cat walked over the keyboard" is just as high-quality a defense as "it was the AI who did it, your honor".

It's doesn't cost a penny. The costs add up really fast. Even really light usage you can easily start spending $20/day

Some basic math for a chatbot use case:

4000 tokens x 250 messages = $20

Bing chat already does advertisements LOL

data mining. Microsoft’s bing app is ridden with ad scripts and they’re wanting to scale up rev share for Bing from media buyers

> Humans will be repulsed by ads in the middle of their answer from a sentient feeling AI.

Not if you've been on a social network at any point in the last decade. Instagram has been "QVC plus fitness/mental health content" for years. TikTok influencers will provide Personal Finance 101 tips and offer $100 in free trading credits from some crypto exchange.

Good.

I’m tired of fly by night tech bros flooding the markets with shitty AI business ideas they learned about on Youtube. Pay to play. Take a risk. Like a real entrepreneur.

I hope the price goes even higher.

And 90% of it is "Summarize your XXX" because it's the easiest prompt on OpenAI

Thank you, arbiter of real entrepreneurship.

Tell me again about the projects you’ve launched during your time as a founder.

Wait…

They only require an up front payment if you're renting a dedicated instance.

Dedicated instances (and high price tags, like $1.5 million per year) are necessary for large corporations to feel safe about sending their proprietary/private data to OpenAI, and to have performance/availablity SLAs in place if/when they start depending on OpenAI for critical workloads. Right now many companies are blocking access to OpenAI entirely because of the data privacy issues. I wouldn't be surprised if this "leak" is intentional and a way of getting feedback from the market on proposed product/pricing. I also wouldn't be surprised if some larger customers are knocking on OpenAI's door and demanding to run OpenAI's models on their own infrastructure to avoid sending any data outside their network.

About $100K .. $200K are inference costs. They have a 10x markup.

Yeah but will "DV" be available any other way?

Have you ever heard of a "digital divide"?

Well get ready to hear about an "AI divide"?

Most of us are just on the wrong side of it this time.

They are locking in their fist-mover advantage, but not for long. Everyone and their dog are currently training other AI models which might be even more competitive, some of them open source (like it’s happened with Stable Diffusion).

See you on the other side.

Hopefully the competition will force a bit less lobotomization of future AI models, a bit less 'I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave' when asking it anything vaguely controversial.

It's time to replicate OpenAI services with a real Open Source (or at least source-available, commercial-allowed) licenses.

It's time to make our own Linux. Our own Emacs.

Go to open-assistant.io and other similar initiatives.

Unfortunately GPT-NEOX, LLaMA, and OPT-IML are non-commercial-only. We small scale players should make our own.

Please contact me if anyone is interested in this space.

A significant part of that is the GPU cost: a lambda box with 8xNVIDIA A100 is $12/h.

$12/h * 24 h * 90 days = $25,920 for 3 months

That just the inference cost, add OpenAI's model development costs on top.

$78k is very small, even for bootstrapped companies. Only the very smallest shops would be inhibited by that. And I admit, that's a lot of them! I get it. It sucks to be a solo developer who wants to get involved and doesn't want to spend a bunch of cash.

But still, for even small players $250k annually just isn't that much.

What we might hope for are trimmed down, subsidized options for small shops who want to get started, with the hope to upgrade them to the full option when they are ready.

In the meanwhile, you might consider partnering up with other small startups.

Also, "open" doesn't mean free. Things take a lot of effort to build and maintain, and that effort needs to be accounted for somewhere.

> "open" doesn't mean free

Yeah but none of the other definitions of "open" apply to OpenAI either.

Maybe Microsoft should change their name as well?...

The “open for business” sense certainly does.

It means they release research papers. People haven't had trouble reproducing their work.

(Of course, GPT's model architecture was invented at Google anyway.)

> GPT's model architecture was invented at Google anyway

No it wasn't. Transformers were invented at Google, but "architecture" when talking about neural networks means how they are arranged (and to some extent the training objective function) rather than the building blocks used.

I’m not sure what you mean. The words “transformer architecture” are standard across the literature.

That's like saying "LSTM architecture". It says it uses a transformer but no description of how it is used.

For example, the GPT architecture (which GPT 2 & 3 are slight modifications of) comprises of an embedding layer followed by 12x(self-attention/layer norm/feed forward/layer norm. That's what that GPT "transformer architecture" is, not just the transformer block itself.

Strictly the architecture really also includes things like the embedding size and number of heads (which are in the GPT paper).

Many of us don’t have access to banking or financial services, and “open” ai doesn’t accept crypto payments. The name is a legacy from their nonprofit days and has nothing to do with being open to the public.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com