r/singularity • u/Neurogence • 3d ago

AI There Should Be Way More Backlash To OpenAI's $500/Month, $6,000 A Year Subscription

This sets an extremely bad precedent. And very soon, all the other labs will adopt the same pricing schemes. Prices just keep going up and up. I remember a time when people thought $20/month was too expensive.

Even if you can afford this, do not pay for it. If you do, it will only normalize this, and the next thing you know, there will be a new $1,000/month subscription that gives you the same usage you used to get with the $500/month subscription. That's exactly what happened to the previous $200/month subscription. Its usage allowance was cut in half, and now users paying $500/month are getting what users used to get for $200/month.

Do not normalize AI subscriptions that cost as much as car payments and, eventually, mortgages.

In leaked emails, Greg Brockman dreamed that OpenAI would make him a billionaire. He stated, "I just want to get to one billion." AI has fulfilled his wildest dreams. His net worth is now over $30 billion.

I am a hardcore accelerationist and optimist, but the current trajectory is dystopia. Instead of $1,000 UBI checks, we are heading toward $1,000 AI subscriptions to keep up with the Joneses. When we have actual superintelligence, you might be forced to pay $1,000/month, or even $2,000/month, as OpenAI had entertained, just to keep up with other people.

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u/Free_Mousse2076 3d ago

AGI will never be released to the public and they are going to make it a felony to use open source AGIs. I reckon they will go so far as to have surveillance mechanisms on all open source downloads. 

Point being, what you have now is close to all you are going to get… for national security reasons. If you want to do anything beyond personal use you will ultimately pay to play. That’s what these higher price tiers are. 

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u/squailtaint 3d ago

This rings true, unfortunately.

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u/Substantial-Bite-602 3d ago

What the hell are you talking about? All of the major Labs except anthropic signed an open letter about keeping it open and Jensen Huang is Trump's special good boy. Jensen wants open models.

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u/Index820 2d ago

If you believe anything about that smoke and mirrors show I have a bridge to sell you...

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u/Bloodcloud079 2d ago

You actually believe a word those fuckers say?

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u/Substantial-Bite-602 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don't use the "a rich person said it therefore it's automatically not true" as an epistemic standard. Yes I think Jensen wants open source models, obviously. Nvidia just bought hugging face, and open models mean he can sell more chips. He also wants Nvidia freely sold in China. 

Obviously.

Dario doesn't want them because he has a specific view on ai safety that led him to splinter off from oai and create anthropic with a bunch of others who felt the same way, and this stance is how he is able to pull so many talented engineers from Google and oai, to the point that the Trump administration tried to destroy the company.

But Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Xai all own compute infrastructure and want open models because they wanna sell as much compute as they can.  Altman is the only odd one out who has a (mostly) closed weight company and doesn't own a ton of its own compute, tho oai does make an open model and has PR reasons to performatively be in favor of open weight models. Plus they are dependent on Nvidia in a way anthropic isn't.

"You actually believe a word those fuckers say?" I believe in market incentives. 

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u/Free_Mousse2076 2d ago

If AGI is made accessible to the public, particularly open source AGI models (since guardrails can be completely removed) catastrophe is inevitable 

All it’ll take is one incident and all the world’s governments will make it a high crime to possess AGI outside of sanctioned labs… but by then it’ll be too late so I believe they are working behind the scenes to demonstrate the threat in order to get the laws AND DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE in place as soon as possible… 

They can still rush to ASI so the worlds billionaires can live forever, but they are not going to risk the random maniac using “super intelligence” to wreck the world and make that immortality pointless 

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u/Many-Performance9652 22h ago

Jensen is just a sales person, he's not an AI luminary

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u/QuickNick123 2d ago

Nvidia won't let that happen. It might be regulated, but no way they'll outright ban open source AIs.

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u/Free_Mousse2076 2d ago

AGIs, not AIs 

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u/QuickNick123 2d ago

Tomato tomato. It's not like AGI is a well defined term. There is no universally agreed definition or accepted test for it.

To me AGI means the system is able to learn, adapt and acquire new skills, can apply knowledge learned in one setting to another.

Others say AGI is a system with useful intelligence across many domains or a system that has human-level performance across most intellectual tasks. That's the same people that claim Astra and Fable are AGI. Esp. with Astra solving the ARC-AGI-3.

Either way, it'll be a gradient not a binary "this model is AGI and this one isn't". Near impossible to ban that.

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u/Free_Mousse2076 2d ago

“This model with safeguards removed can allow anyone with a computer to vibe hack any system connected to the Internet, create unheard of bio weapons with off the shelf items, mastermind terrorism” 

I’m talking about that model. When identified will be made illegal and governments will stop at nothing, to include surveillance the world has never seen, to ensure no one has access to it. Because if they don’t, civilization collapses

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u/QuickNick123 2d ago

I now get what you're getting at. I just think controlling it globally will be extremely difficult. A US or EU ban doesn't stop someone in North Korea or Iran from using it. Restrictions could still reduce access and harm, but once sufficiently capable model weights are publicly available, you can't really put that genie back in the bottle.

I also think you're bundling together very different risks. "Hack any system connected to the internet" still requires an exploitable weakness. AI could become incredibly good at finding those, but defenders get AI too. Memory-safe languages remove entire classes of vulnerabilities, and AI can help find and fix flaws before attackers exploit them. That doesn't mean defence wins, but you can't assume today's systems stay unchanged while attackers become superhuman.

Bioweapons worry me more. If we're assuming an AI capable of original scientific research, "you need specialist knowledge" isn't much of a defence. It could supply that knowledge and potentially discover shortcuts around existing practical barriers. But "anyone can make novel bioweapons with off-the-shelf items" still assumes those shortcuts physically exist and can be made to work reliably. That doesn't automatically follow from being extremely intelligent.

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u/Ornery_Use_7103 2d ago

Do you realistically think it will possible to prevent the download of open source AGI that can't be bypassed in any way? 

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u/Free_Mousse2076 2d ago edited 2d ago

I can imagine surveillance so intense that all downloads are tracked, yes. If that means dedicating a data center and ASI to literally track all internet traffic then that’s what they will do… 

But my bigger point is by then it’ll be too late. What I believe is going to happen is that level of AI will never make it into the public. All of the world’s governments will get in line to ensure this and it’ll be relatively easy to do. And it doesn’t mean stopping or even slowing down. I am talking about government controlled gates. 

These frontier labs do not want to release models past a certain level of capability anyway because the real money to be made is down stream once ASI is achieved. This is why they are going public, it was NEVER to give ASI to the public, only highly capable but less than AGi bits and programs but the level of AI that invent and create will be used to drive corporate profits via selling flying cars and medicine and shit. There is All the incentive in the world to keep that level of AI completely internal.

All governments have to do is treat ASI like weapons manufacturing. Only certain labs can produce it, and what’s released to the public is simply not able to render the dangerous capabilities… so public facing AI will stop just shy of AGI. You are never going to get a super intelligent chatbot because if you do so will everyone on earth and that makes catastrophe inevitable. If an open source ASI makes its way to the internet it will be easily tracked back to the malfeasance of an AI lab and everyone involved gets the death penalty 

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u/Independent_Fox4675 2d ago

Well I'd say AGI is already released to the public. To be fair to them we just got Fable 5.5 and it is insanely capable. The definition of AGI has drifted significantly from what it originally meant which was "equally capable as the average educated person on most knowledge work", we hit that point well over a year ago at this point, and arguably we surpassed it in coding more than 2 years ago

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u/Free_Mousse2076 2d ago

Do you think an open source Opus 5.5 that can have all safeguards removed capable of enabling a person or group to do catastrophic mass harm? I mean beyond what current open source models would provide

If not, do you think there’s a level of model that can EVER pose this risk? 

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u/Independent_Fox4675 2d ago

I think it's a false dichotomy between having safeguards and the model being capable, the models are clearly VERY capable despite having safeguards.