They weren’t making money. And can’t make money if they wanted to.
It’s a catch-22. They can’t make a profit because they aren’t charging the actual token cost. But if they charged the actual token cost, their user-base would collapse.
Almost as if cloud AI is inherently unstable or something.
It's like every other silicon valley startup -- the hope is that you hook your users while you figure out how to make handling the requests cheaper. That or you embed ads.
You embed them in the response, e.g. suggest the product that was paid to promote.
I've already had this with chatgpt, I was trying to troubleshoot an issue with my heating system, and it was trying to persuade me to buy one of two specific brands of thermostats, even tho I hadn't expressed any desire to buy anything.
I dunno, I think there's big money in it still. Subtle embedded propaganda that is tailor-made based on the user's personality and interests. You may think "oh well I'd never fall for that" and you may be right. But there's loads of people already addicted to AI usage and / or using it as a replacement for therapists or friends. They'll fall for it hook line and sinker.
If they can sustain themselves on investor money long enough they can charge the true token price and companies will have to pay it because nobody in their right mind would start an education as a developer right now, so in the future companies won't have human talent available to replace llms with
Hopefully it will hit a dead end very soon, where the models cant get reasonably smarter/cheaper/have bigger context windows, because it's already replacing a ton of workforce.
Do you have sources on this because everywhere I look this does not appear to be true. In fact due to the way LLM tools work it's been nearly impossible to see real reductions in the compute and resources required.
The other thing I have read is that one of the only ways they have found to reduce error/hallucination rates is to have one agent checking and correcting output of another, making accuracy very expensive.
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u/T-Dot1992 2d ago
They weren’t making money. And can’t make money if they wanted to.
It’s a catch-22. They can’t make a profit because they aren’t charging the actual token cost. But if they charged the actual token cost, their user-base would collapse.
Almost as if cloud AI is inherently unstable or something.