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Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

> Some oddly defensive reactions here.

They're not odd. These reactions pop up to all criticism of the current tech hype bubble. Happened with metaverse, NFTs, blockchain, etc.

They know that the emperor has no clothes. That the moment people in power start asking "So... where's all the profit on this investment?" it's game over.

AI is supported by massive subsidies and R&D from the big tech giants. Wall Street demanding that Microsoft stop wasting tens of billions on investment in a product that does not generate a profit for Microsoft will kill AI as it exists right now. OpenAI will raise their prices significantly, killing most-to-all of the startups relying on them.

This is especially dire because there's copyright and regulatory changes going on. An AI winter now means there's substantial risk of the next "AI summer" being crippled by actually having to abide by copyright and being subject to regulations.

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> OpenAI will raise their prices significantly, killing most to all of the startups relying on them.

Have you heard the good news? The price per million tokens has fallen from $36 to $0.25 in the past 18 months.

> actually having to abide by copyright

Copyright is being eroded, first by the internet and its copying capabilities, then by the social networks and sharing, and now by generative AI. You can't make a profit owning expression in this distributed and interactive system, copyright was invented in the age of passive consumption of content. When you do a simple search you can find many alternatives to choose from. Any new work has to compete against decades of accumulation.

On top of that, AI is not really infringing, or it's a bad infringement system - it's much slower and more imprecise than just copying, if infringement is what someone seeks. It's a guided remixing tool, there's a human shaping its output. How can a model 1000x smaller than its training set be really infringing, it has no space for all the exact details.

OpenAI accumulates trillions of tokens in chat logs, eliciting experience from its users, it is crawling the tacit knowledge reservoir of its user base. That means it collects better information than web scrapers, information that would be normally lost. They can just sit there and people will bring data, guidance and feedback to the model. Do you see the business value in collecting practical experience and repackaging it?

> Have you heard the good news? The price per million tokens has fallen from $36 to $0.25 in the past 18 months.

Where's that stat from? o1-preview is $15 / $60 per million input / output tokens. And it uses a ton of output tokens.

> AI is not really infringing

Same for me. I wear glasses and I have tinnitus, which means that I can download all the movies I want. As long as I do not fully enjoy them of course.

If what AI startups produce simply involves placing a thin veneer over ChatGPT then they deserve the AI winter that will likely come.

Yeah, these are today's "pets.com", and will be among the first to implode.

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