OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money

nytimes.com

26 pointscoloneltcb7 comments

> OpenAI would need to continue raising money over the next year because its expenses grew in tandem with the number of people using its products.

It’s kinda funny how many businesses are coming out and saying they are going to be able to reduce headcount because of AI, but it’s clear we don’t actually know the real costs of this yet, as OpenAI is charging less than it costs to operate.

Today I had a little epiphany. I was writing some code with ChatGPT and I realized that doing that is like being a manager and having someone reporting to you. You explain your assistant what they need to do and they come back with the code a while later. Except that this assistant is way dumber than a person. But also way, way faster. The assistant makes mistakes, lots of mistakes. But you point out the mistakes, and either they fix them, or eventually you fix them. In the end, if you are a good manager, you get things done. And you get things done 10 times faster than with a human assistant.

Most companies did not figure this out yet. They are concerned that there could be security or privacy vulnerabilities. Or maybe they simply didn't play enough with AI to figure out the best way to extract value. Maybe they think AI is some magic pixie dust that will write a Richard Rhodes-level of a non-fiction book. Or they hope that it will evolve to become something like that. It may or it may not, but right now AI is far from this.

But some companies will figure this out sooner or later.

I think many companies have figured this out. It's just that it takes time between the "oh s*t" moment, and operationalizing it in production. The corporate world is a lot more complex than just writing code -- agreeing on which use cases to start with, securing budgets, getting IT teams up-to-speed, hiring consulting companies, rewriting business processes, legal & compliance, user testing, etc, etc.

Of course there will be many false starts, and projects that won't go anywhere, but yes, the impact will eventually be massive.

They will raise their prices in the coming years and companies will gladly pay it.

In the article they said that there goal is to raise it from $20 to $44 so there’s your number. Honestly, I can’t use it for work because of the privacy and confidentiality concerns we have with the prompts.

OpenAI showed the way that AI is great. But, they will also need to improve their service. I don’t know how much time they have until other players come in to eat their lunch. Apples new features look great and run on device. There is also such much time before open source models do 90% of what OpenAI does and run on device. Facebook is giving it away for free. If profitability is going to be achieved in 2029? That’s five years for players(Apple/fb/microsoft) that are making money today to run and catch up.

or the models will become cheaper to run.

Google "don't be evil" speed run

Reply on news.ycombinator.com