this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Comparitively speaking, a lot less hype than their earlier models produced. Hardcore techies care about incremental improvements, but the average user does not. If you try to describe to the average user what is "new" about GPT-4, other than "It fucks up less", you've basically got nothing.

And it's going to carry on like this. New models are going to get exponentially more expensive to train, while producing less and less consumer interest each time, because "Holy crap look at this brand new technology" will always be more exciting than "In our comparitive testing version 7 is 9.6% more accurate than version 6."

And for all the hype, the actual revenue just isn't there. OpenAI are bleeding around $5-10bn (yes, with a b) per year. They're currently trying to raise around $11bn in new funding just to keep the lights on. It costs far more to operate these models (even at the steeply discounted compute costs Microsoft are giving them) than anyone is actually willing to pay to use them. Corporate clients don't find them reliable or adaptable enough to actually replace human employees, and regular consumers think they're cool, but in a "nice to have" kind of way. They're not essential enough a product to pay big money for, but they can only be run profitably by charging big money.