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Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

(www.nytimes.com)
321 points jhunter1016 | 7 comments | 18 Oct 24 11:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Roark66 ◴[18 Oct 24 12:02 UTC] No.41878594[source]▶
>OpenAI plans to loose $5 billion this year

Let that sink in for anyone that has incorporated Chatgpt in their work routines to the point their normal skills start to atrophy. Imagine in 2 years time OpenAI goes bust and MS gets all the IP. Now you can't really do your work without ChatGPT, but it cost has been brought up to how much it really costs to run. Maybe $2k per month per person? And you get about 1h of use per day for the money too...

I've been saying for ages, being a luditite and abstaining from using AI is not the answer (no one is tiling the fields with oxen anymore either). But it is crucial to at the very least retain 50% of capability hosted models like Chatgpt offer locally.

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1. singularity2001 ◴[18 Oct 24 12:21 UTC] No.41878727[source]▶
people kept whining about Amazon losing money and called me stupid for buying their stock...
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2. bmitc ◴[18 Oct 24 12:35 UTC] No.41878830[source]▶
Why does everyone always like to compare every company to Amazon? Those companies are never like Amazon, which is one of the most entrenched companies ever.
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3. ben_w ◴[18 Oct 24 12:41 UTC] No.41878877[source]▶
As I recall, while Amazon was doing this, there was no comparable competition from other vendors that properly understood the internet as a marketplace? Closest was eBay?

There is real competition now that plenty of big box stores' websites also list things you won't see in the stores themselves*, but then also Amazon is also making a profit now.

I think the current situation with LLMs is a dollar auction, where everyone is incentivised to pay increasing costs to outbid the others, even though this has gone from "maximise reward" to "minimise losses": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

* One of my local supermarkets in Germany sells 4-room "garden sheds" that are substantially larger than the apartment I own in the UK: https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/

4. ben_w ◴[18 Oct 24 12:42 UTC] No.41878888[source]▶
While I agree the comparison is not going to provide useful insights, in fairness to them Amazon wasn't entrenched at the time they were making huge losses each year.
5. bigstrat2003 ◴[18 Oct 24 17:38 UTC] No.41881679[source]▶
And for every Amazon, there are a hundred other companies that went out of business because they never could figure out how to turn a profit. You made a bet which paid off and that's cool, but that doesn't mean the people telling you it was a bad bet were wrong.
6. insane_dreamer ◴[18 Oct 24 18:44 UTC] No.41882287[source]▶
Amazon was losing money because it was building the moat

It's not clear that OpenAI has any moat to build

7. empath75 ◴[18 Oct 24 20:00 UTC] No.41882942[source]▶
Depending on when you bought it, it was a pretty risky play until AWS came out and got traction. Their retail business _still_ doesn't make money.