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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

If I were NVidia, I would be throwing everything I could at making entertainment experiences that need one of these to run...

I mean, this is awfully close to being "Her" in a box, right?

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I feel like a lot of people miss that Her was a dystopian future, not an ideal to hit.

Also, it’s $3000. For that you could buy subscriptions to OpenAI etc and have the dystopian partner everywhere you go.

they don't miss that part. they just want to be the evil character.

The dystopian overton window has shifted, didn't you know, moral ambiguity is a win now? :) Tesla was right.

We already live in dystopian hell and I'd like to have Scarlett Johansen whispering in my ear, thanks.

Also, I don't particularly want my data to be processed by anyone else.

OpenAI doesn’t make any profit. So either it dies or prices go up. Not to mention the privacy aspect of your own machine and the freedom of choice which models to run

> So either it dies or prices go up.

Or efficiency gains in hardware and software catchup making current price point profitable.

Training data gets mired in expensive and they need constant input otherwise the AI‘s knowledge is outdated

OpenAI built a 3 billion dollar business in less than 3 years of a commercial offering.

3 billion revenue and 5 billion loss doesn’t sound like a sustainable business model.

The real question is what the next 3 years look like. If it's another 5 billion burned for 3 billion or less in revenue, that's one thing... But...

How...

Recent report says there are 1M paying customers. At ~30USD for 12 months this is ~3.6B of revenue which kinda matches their reported figures. So to break even at their ~5B costs assuming that they need no further major investment in infrastructure they only need to increase the paying subscriptions from 1M to 2M. Since there are ~250M people who engaged with OpenAI free tier service 2x projection doesn't sound too surreal.

Rumor has it they run queries at a profit, and most of the cost is in training and staff.

If they is true their path to profitability isn't super rocky. Their path to achieving their current valuation may end up being trickier though!

This is exactly the scenario where you don't want "the cloud" anywhere.

Fun fact: Her was set in the year 2025.

Boring fact: The underlying theme of the movie Her is actually divorce and the destructive impact it has on people, the futuristic AI stuff is just for stuffing!

The overall theme of Her was human relationships. It was not about AI and not just about divorce in particular.The AI was just a plot device to include a bodyless person into the equation. Watch it again with this in mind and you will see what I mean.

The universal theme of Her was the set of harmonics that define what is something and the thresholds, boundaries, windows onto what is not thatthing but someotherthing, even if the thing perceived is a mirror, not just about human relationships in particular. The relationship was just a plot device to make a work of deep philosophy into a marketable romantic comedy.

If Silicon Valley could tell the difference between utopias and dystopias, we wouldn't have companies named Soylent or iRobot, and the recently announced Anduril/Palantir/OpenAI partnership to hasten the creation of either SkyNet or Big Brother wouldn't have happened at all.

I mean, we still act like a "wild goose chase" is a bad thing.

We still schedule "bi-weekly" meetings.

We can't agree on which way charge goes in a wire.

Have you seen the y-axis on an economists chart?

Please name the dystopian elements of Her.

One man's dystopia is another man's dream. There's no "missing" in the moral of a movie, you make whatever you want out of it.

The real interesting stuff will happen when we get multimodal LMs that can do VR output.

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