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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

An interesting possibility is if the cost of generation will go down on something akin to the pace of Moore’s Law, then making $10 of revenue and losing $20 per user per month becomes profitable in a little over 3 years, assuming most of the costs are compute.

Throw in a little efficiency gain and the value of learning about the overall space and I think it’s a wise investment for Microsoft to be going full speed ahead here in order to fight to preserve its long term relevance as a tech leader.

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That seems… unlikely given that moores law itself doesn’t really hold any more and the costs involved here are almost entirely incurred in the data center.

Unless model size/computing cost grows at the same pace or faster. As cool as GPT 3.5 seemed when it came out it's horribly inadequate compared to 4.0 for many use cases so I doubt we'd be content using current models in 3 years.

Which use cases? Are there any use cases where the reverse is true that you know of?

It's much cheaper and faster (at least on the web frontend) so if you don't need high accuracy/have simple tasks/etc. and have a lot of data it's probably a better option than 4.0

profitability is determined by competition, not by Moore's Law. If the cost of generation goes down prices will go down as service providers battle for users, as they do everywhere else.

And given that the tech itself is rapidly proliferating and effectively just public research and compute, including open source not being far behind, the fact that they're not even making money right now when they do have somewhat of a monopoly is kind of a bad sign.

The much more likely scenario is that these systems will run locally on commodity hardware soon, it'll be free because every large company offers it, and they'll end up slapping ads on it or sell enterprisey stuff to businesses.

Interesting. It seems that Copilot is presented in Github as a "separate" solution to the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. Do you think the competition will happen with new integrations to Visual Studio on the app tooling side or on the enterprise apps?

I never thought about the current computing infrastructure as a new frontier for Moore's Law. I suppose the competition will happen in that space. What I am not sure about is if Moore's Law applies to this new infrastructure as whole when compared against the advancements in computers in general.

Microsoft almost look to be building out a single copilot product across a bunch of their products (ie the eventual goal could be to share context between office365, Windows, sales, security, dynamics, Bing and github). If this were the case, it'd make sense to keep it separate

It also means they won't need to be the best for any one use, just "good enough" (and available enough) and they'll become the de facto ai for business (in the same way teams beat slack etc)

Yeah. It is sad to be forced to work with "just good enough". I work in tech support and everyone asks for a Teams meeting to share screens. And Teams has improved a lot in the last 6 or 7 years, but, for the purposes of sharing screen for technical support, it is just good enough.

> If the cost of generation goes down prices will go down as service providers battle for users, as they do everywhere else.

Do you think this holds durably true if the cost of generation is higher than the selling price?

Or they blow a bunch of money and we all end up having these running on device for nothing ?

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