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Compute is not cheap! I think it is well known (Altman himself has said this) that openAI is burning a lot of money currently, but they are fine for now considering the 10B investment from MSFT and the revenue from subscription and API. It's a critical moment for AI companies and openAI is trying to get as large a share of the market as they can by undercutting virtually any other commercial model and offering 10x the value.

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Additionally, compute has the unique property of becoming cheaper per-unit at a rate that isn’t comparable to any other commodity. GPT-4 itself gets cheaper to run the moment the next generation of chips comes out. Unlike, for example, Uber, the business environment and unit economics just naturally become more favorable the more time passes. By taking the lead in this space, they have secured mindshare which will actually increase in value with time as costs decline.

Of course bigger (and thus more expensive-to-run) models will be released later, but I trust OAI to navigate that curve.

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