Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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> Almost everybody I know uses ChatGPT at least semi-regularly for all kinds of things.

Ed's perspective is from a nonengineering side, not the typical Hacker News user or LLM API consumer.

> My understanding is that they (on average, including their free users) make money on usage, but lose money on training.

The billion-dollar YoY losses can only be possible with negative marginal profits. Training is expensive but not that expensive.

> I also think OpenAI isn't yet serious about monetizing its products. You can just go to ChatGPT and use it for free

That's just modern software business: have the user try it for free (loss-leading) with an incentive to upsell to a paid product, notably ChatGPT+. And if OpenAI didn't do it, others will as is currently the case now. But in a post ZIRP world that doesn't work as well.

One would think that the difficulty of making a company profitable when it's training larger and larger LLMs, combined with the diminishing returns and model collapse phenomenon, would make it so that companies don't wish to stop training larger models. I assume that they continue training larger models because whichever company stops training larger models would fall behind in the race to win new rounds of funding, but if that is the case what is the ultimate valuation that these companies are trying to achieve being valued in the biliions already?

Diminishing returns means that the user gets less marginal benefit with each larger model, and the model collapse phenomenon means that models trained on new training data might be less good than older models. Have straightforward mitigations been put in place such as filtering out from the training data forums where users like to share AI generated content?

> but if that is the case what is the ultimate valuation that these companies are trying to achieve being valued in the biliions already?

That's why OpenAI/Sam Altman has been memeing AGI. None of this will work unless they make God.

>> Almost everybody I know uses ChatGPT at least semi-regularly for all kinds of things.

> Ed's perspective is from a nonengineering side, not the typical Hacker News user or LLM API consumer.

ChatGPT has 200M weekly active users.

I'm not saying I agree with him that ChatGPT has no practical use. https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1841549631085543850

I’m responding to the suggestion that being on the non-engineering side explains his opinion.

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