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Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

(www.nytimes.com)
321 points jhunter1016 | 1 comments | 18 Oct 24 11:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.294s | source
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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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zuminator ◴[18 Oct 24 18:07 UTC] No.41881938[source]▶
Where are you getting $2k/person/month? ChatGPT allegedly has on the order of 100 million users. Divide that by $5b and you get a $50 deficit per person per year. Meaning they could raise their prices by less than four and a half dollars per user to break even.

Even if they were to only gouge the current ~11 million paying subscribers, that's around $40/person/month over current fees to break even. Not chump change, but nowhere close to $2k/person/month.

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1. alpha_squared ◴[18 Oct 24 18:40 UTC] No.41882244[source]▶
What you're suggesting is the basic startup math for any typical SaaS business. The problem is OpenAI and the overall AI space is raising funding on the promise of being much more than a SaaS. If we ignore all the absurd promises ("it'll solve all of physics"), the promise to investors is distilled down to this being the dawn of a new era of computing and investors have responded by pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars into the space. At that level of investment, I sure hope the plan is to be more than a break-even SaaS.