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blueSGL t1_j29d1ee wrote

Reply to comment by Kaarssteun in OpenAI might have shot themselves in the foot with ChatGPT by Kaarssteun

> There is no product for them to sell given people now expect this service to be free.

I don't get the argument.

If they want to yoink it and put it behind a paywall where you pay for tokens they could do that today.

If people still want to use it they pay or stop using it.

This has happened before. (look at Dalle2)

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treedmt t1_j29ty59 wrote

That would be awesome for the free competitors though.

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blueSGL t1_j29uv5o wrote

> for the free competitors

Who are the free competitors?

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treedmt t1_j29v2zd wrote

LUCI for one. Not exactly chat format but generative single turn question answering. Http://askluci.tech/QA

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blueSGL t1_j29xsiu wrote

but that's not what ChatGPT is offering.

Anywhere that is able to do the sorts of things that ChatGPT does will be in a 'loss leader' phase to begin with to attract customers. Or a [x] tokens per month are free, or other marketing trick.

Until inference cost is lower than the cash generated via advertising all services will be losing money, at that point it's either start charging or stop the service.

ChatGPT has succeeded in getting the name out. They are losing money by operating (if the training data they are getting from people is worth less than inference costs) so the solution is to start charging money.

Continually running a product that is in the red to prevent competitors products who are also in the red from succeeding seems like poor decision making in the long term.

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treedmt t1_j29yope wrote

LUCI is also built on a fine tuned gpt3.5 model, so pretty close to chatgpt in terms of capabilities.

They have a very different monetisation model afaik. They are tokenising the promise of future revenue to monetise, instead of charging customers up front.

> if the training data is worth less than the inference cost.

The thesis is that training data could be worth much more than inference cost, if it is high quality, unique, and targeted to one format (eg. problem:solution or question:answer)

In fact, I believe they’re rolling out “ask-to-earn” very shortly, which will reward users for asking high quality questions and rating the answers, in Luci credits. The focus appears to be solely on accumulating a massive high quality QA database, which will have far more value in the future.

I’m not aware of any rate limits yet but naturally they may be applied to prevent spam etc., however keeping the base model free is core to their data collection strategy.

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theRIAA t1_j2ejmws wrote

> so pretty close to chatgpt in terms of capabilities

I was impressed that it could give me generic working one-liners, but that is quite far off from writing a working program with 100+ lines of code in all major languages, like ChatGPT can (effortlessly) do. But thank you for the link, it's still very useful.

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