The Real Story Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI

Panic is a less likely driver.

I would think entire industries could reform around having an LLM as a first pass on data, with software and/or human error checking at significant cost reduction over previous strategies.

You would think existing megacaps would be all over any new market if there is a profit to be made. Facebook's competition was basically other startups. That said, Google seems to be dropping the ball almost as bad as Yahoo.

But sure, if there's absolutely no way to make money from consumer AI then that will also make it hard for oai to win the game.

But it turns out that with enough funding, you can prioritize growth over profit for a very long time. And with enough growth, you can raise unlimited funds before you get to that point. And going this route is smart and effective if you want to get to a $1T valuation in under a decade.

So yeah, ChatGPT's margins might not be as high as Facebook's. But it doesn't really matter at this point, they're in growth mode. What matters is whether or not they'll be able to turn their lead and their mindshare into massive profits eventually, and while we can speculate on that, it's far too early to definitively say the answer is no.

First, queries from users can be combined and fed into servers in batches so that hundreds of queries can be concurrently served by a single node. Second, people aren't on and asking ChatGPT questions every second of every day. I'd guess the median is more like ~single digit queries per day. Assuming average response length of 100 tokens and throughput of 50 tok/s at batch size 50, that's 25 QPS or 2.1M queries per day, or 420k users served per node at 5 queries per user per day.

Now, a single 8xH100 node is a lot more expensive than $5/mo, so you're directionally correct there, but I'd wager you can segment your market aggressively and serve heavily distilled/quantized models (small enough to fit onto single commodity GPUs, or even CPUs) to your free tier. Finally, this is subject to Huang's Law, which says every 2 years the cost of the same performance will more than halve.

The same percentage at which you stop qualifying to be human and become an unthinking tool, fully controlled by its operator to do whatever they want, without free will of its own and without any ethical concerns about abuse and slavery, like is the case with all LLMs.

(Of course, it is a moot point, because creating a human-level consciousness with chips is a thought experiment not grounded in reality.)

> When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?

Any level thanks to the concept called human rights and freedoms, famously not applied to machines and other unthinking tools.

If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws.

> This would be separate from the contributory infringement claim if the model will output a copyrighted work verbatim

2. Commercial for-profit models were shown to do that, and (other legal arguments aside, such as model and/or its output being a derivative work, etc.) in some cases that was precisely the smoking gun for the lawsuit, if I recall correctly.

I have not seen any conclusive outcome, I suppose it will depend on jurisdiction.

What’s changed is that certain individuals don’t even try to hide privilege any more.

Then please don't make provocative claims in public in the first place. It's just trolling then. As the saying goes, put up or shut up.

From HN comment guidelines:

> The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.

Your claim that this is fiction, without any evidence or "proof", as you put it, is neither substantial nor thoughtful.

I am genuinely curious as to why you would make a splash in the comment section with this and then not explain yourself.

The WSJ isn't some random blog. Regardless of what you think of their opinion pages, their reporting is generally factually legit.

So you seem to be suggesting that their story is, indeed, correct.