←back to thread

LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1619 points SwoopsFromAbove | 5 comments | | HN request time: 1.117s | source
Show context
lsy ◴[] No.44568114[source]
I think two things can be true simultaneously:

1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them.

2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume.

There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner), and several that seemed poised to displace both old tech and labor but have settled into specific use cases (the microwave oven). Given the lack of a sufficiently profitable business model, it feels as likely as not that LLMs settle somewhere a little less remarkable, and hopefully less annoying, than today's almost universally disliked attempts to cram it everywhere.

replies(26): >>44568145 #>>44568416 #>>44568799 #>>44569151 #>>44569734 #>>44570520 #>>44570663 #>>44570711 #>>44570870 #>>44571050 #>>44571189 #>>44571513 #>>44571570 #>>44572142 #>>44572326 #>>44572360 #>>44572627 #>>44572898 #>>44573137 #>>44573370 #>>44573406 #>>44574774 #>>44575820 #>>44577486 #>>44577751 #>>44577911 #
alonsonic ◴[] No.44570711[source]
I'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful business model? People use this tools daily, this is inevitable.
replies(11): >>44570725 #>>44570756 #>>44570760 #>>44570772 #>>44570780 #>>44570853 #>>44570896 #>>44570964 #>>44571007 #>>44571541 #>>44571655 #
dbalatero ◴[] No.44570964[source]
They might generate 10b ARR, but they lose a lot more than that. Their paid users are a fraction of the free riders.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

replies(3): >>44571830 #>>44572286 #>>44573506 #
Centigonal ◴[] No.44572286[source]
This echoes a lot of the rhetoric around "but how will facebook/twitter/etc make money?" back in the mid 2000s. LLMs might shake out differently from the social web, but I don't think that speculating about the flexibility of demand curves is a particularly useful exercise in an industry where the marginal cost of inference capacity is measured in microcents per token. Plus, the question at hand is "will LLMs be relevant?" and not "will LLMs be massively profitable to model providers?"
replies(13): >>44572513 #>>44572558 #>>44572586 #>>44572813 #>>44573104 #>>44573394 #>>44573558 #>>44573961 #>>44575180 #>>44575826 #>>44577467 #>>44577474 #>>44582494 #
1. ysavir ◴[] No.44573394[source]
The thing about facebook/twitter/etc was that everyone knew how they achieve lock-in and build a moat (network effect), but the question was around where to source revenue.

With LLMs, we know what the revenue source is (subscription prices and ads), but the question is about the lock-in. Once each of the AI companies stops building new iterations and just offers a consistent product, how long until someone else builds the same product but charges less for it?

What people often miss is that building the LLM is actually the easy part. The hard part is getting sufficient data on which to train the LLM, which is why most companies just put ethics aside and steal and pirate as much as they can before any regulations cuts them off (if any regulations ever even do). But that same approach means that anyone else can build an LLM and train on that data, and pricing becomes a race to the bottom, if open source models don't cut them out completely.

replies(1): >>44574537 #
2. umpalumpaaa ◴[] No.44574537[source]
ChatGPT also makes money via affiliate links. If you ask ChatGPT something like "what is the best airline approved cabin luggage you can buy?" you get affiliate links to Amazon and other sites. I use ChatGPT most of the time before I buy anything these days… From personal experience (I operated an app financed by affiliate links). I can tell you that this for sure generates a lot of money. My app was relatively tiny and I only got about 1% of the money I generated but that app pulled in about $50k per month.

Buying better things is one of my main use cases for GPT.

replies(1): >>44575812 #
3. ysavir ◴[] No.44575812[source]
Makes you wonder whether the affiliate links are actual, valid affiliate links or just hallucinations from affiliate links it's come across in the wild
replies(1): >>44577465 #
4. umpalumpaaa ◴[] No.44577465{3}[source]
It clearly is a 100% custom UI logic implemented by OpenAI… They render the products in carrousels… They probably get a list of product and brand names from the LLM (for certain requests/responses) and render that in a separate UI after getting those affiliate links for those products… its not hard to do. Just slap on your affiliate ID to the links you found and you are done.
replies(1): >>44581004 #
5. ysavir ◴[] No.44581004{4}[source]
ahh, okay. I don't use the service, I didn't realize they had a dedicated UI for it. I assumed it was all just embedded in the text.