Investors are barely breaking even as the venture is hardly making any profits due to a shortage of chips, divided interests, and more.
… OpenAI has already seen a $540 million loss since debuting ChatGPT.
… OpenAI uses approximately 700,000 dollars to run the tool daily.
⚠️ First off, apologies as I didn’t cross check. Take it w/ a grain of salt.
This piece of news, if true, somehow explains why OpenAI has been coming up w/ weird schemes for making $$$ like entering the content moderation space.
On a similar note, I wonder if this had been a key driver (behind the scenes) in the recent investment in open source AI initiatives (Haidra comes to my mind?) Perhaps some corporations who haven’t got enough $$$ to fund their own dedicated research group are looking to benefit from an open source model?
If you look at how much they spend per day (poster quoted $700,000 daily but said unverified), how would it make any sense to provide the service for free? I won’t argue for/against releasing the model to the public, since honestly that argument can go both ways and I don’t think it would make much of a difference anyway except benefit their competitors (other massive companies).
However, let’s assume they did release it publicly, what use would that be for the smaller business/individual? Running these models takes some heavy and very expensive hardware. It’s not like buying a rack and building a computer, these models are huge. Realistically, they can’t provide that as a free service, they’d fail as a company almost immediately. Most businesses can’t afford to run these models themselves, the upfront and maintenance costs would obliterate them. Providing it as a service like they have been means they recoup some of the cost of running the models, while users can actually afford to use these models without needing to maintain the hardware themselves.