"I personally chose the price"
Is that how well-run companies operate? The CEO unilaterally decides the price rather than delegating that out to the numbers people they employ?
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
776 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1533 readers
184 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Should have asked chatgpt to play the role of a CEO.
A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.
If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?
load more comments
(4 replies)
far, far, far, far, far, far, far fewer business people than you’d expect/guess are data-driven decision makers
and then there’s the whole bayfucker ceo dynamic which adds a whole bunch of extra dumb shit
it’d be funnier if it weren’t for the tunguska-like effect it’s having on human society both at present and in the coming decades to follow :|
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
Sam, just add sponsored content. The road to enshittification doesn't have to be long! Make it shitty fast so people can move past it and start hosting their own models for their own usage.
load more comments
(3 replies)
losing money because people are using it more than expected
"I personally chose the price and thought we would make some money."
Big MoviePass energy
load more comments
(1 replies)
Much like uber and netflix, all of these ai chatbots that are available for free right now will become expensive, slow, and dumb once the investor money runs out and these companies have to figure out a business model. We're in the golden age of LLMs right now, all we can do is enjoy the free service while it lasts and try not to make it too much a part of our workflow, because inevitably it will be cut off. Unless you're one of those people with a self-hosted LLM I guess.
Not LLM but there Google Assistant has gotten much more stupid over the past several years. They realized that it was too expensive and had to lobotomize it.
load more comments
(6 replies)
This. AI Hype beasts keep saying "This is the worst AI will ever be" and "It'll just get better" but really it's just going to get worse as they actually try to turn the bubble into a profit
load more comments
(15 replies)
$200 a month for a user is losing money? There's no way he's just including model queries. An entire a6000 server is around $800 / month and you can fit a hell of lot more than 4 peoples worth of queries. He has to include training and or R&D.
It includes anything that will keep them from having to pay investors back. Classic tech start up bullshit.
Silicon valley brain rot formula:
Losing money, get billions every month
Making money pay billions back
Which one do you think they pick
I'm honestly fairly surprised as well, but at the same time, they're not serving a model that can run on an A6000, and the people paying for unlimited, would probably be the ones who setup bots and apps doing thousands of requests per hour.
And honestly? Those people are 100% right.
If they can't deliver true "unlimited" for 200 bucks a month, they shouldn't market it as such.
grumble grumble unlimited mobile data grumble grumble
To be fair, unlimited is supposed to mean unlimited for a reasonable person. Like someone going to an "all you can eat buffet". However those purchasing these would immediately set up proxy accounts and use them to serve all their communities, so that one unlimited account, becomes 100 or a 1000 actual users. So like someone going to an "all you can eat" and then sneaking in 5 other people under their trenchcoat.
If they actually do block this sort of account sharing, and it's costing them money on just prolific single users, then I don't know, their scaling is just shite. Like "unlimited" can't ever be truly unlimited, as there should be a rate limit to prevent these sort of shenanigans. But if the account can't make money with a reasonable rate limit (like 17280/day which would translate to 1 request per 5 sec) they are fuuuuuucked.
Yeah, poor wording on my part, proxy accounts being banned is totally fair, but a user using various apps and bots is the type of 'Power User' scenario I'd expect a unlimited plan to cover.
Agreed. Like how fucking difficult is it to see "It costs us X per query, what Y rate limit do we need to put on this account so that it doesn't exceed 200$ per month?". I bet the answer to is hilariously low rate limit that nobody would buy, so they decided to value below cost and pray people won't actually use all those queries. Welp. And if they didn't even put a rate limit, also lol. lmao.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
You can help by asking ChatGPT to produce the most processor intensive prompt it can come up with and then having it execute it repeatedly. With the free version this will burn through your allotment pretty quickly, but if thousands of people start doing it on a regular basis? It'll cost OpenAI a lot of money.
To what benefit?
It'll cost OpenAI a lot of money.
CEO personally chose a price too low for company to be profitable.
What a clown.
They're still in the first stage of enshittification: gaining market share. In fact, this is probably all just a marketing scheme. "Hi! I'm Crazy Sam Altman and my prices are SO LOW that I'm LOSING MONEY!! Tell your friends and subscribe now!"
I’m afraid it might be more like Uber, or Funko, apparently, as I just learned tonight.
Sustained somehow for decades before finally turning any profit. Pumped full of cash like it’s foie gras by Wall Street. Inorganic as fuck, promoted like hell by Wall Street, VC, and/or private equity.
Shoved down our throats in the end.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(24 replies)
This 100% answers my question from another thread. These businesses have cooked the books so bad already that they thought this was gonna save them and it doubled down on em.
load more comments
(1 replies)
When has "not profitable" ever stopped a tech startup lmao
So people are really believing Altman would publish these damning statements without ulterior motives? Are we seriously this gullible? Holy shit, we reached a critical mass of acephalous humans, no turning back now.
sam altman proving once again that he is not only a tech genius but also a business genius. make sure to let him scan your eyeballs before it’s too late.
The plagiarism power virus is too expensive to operate? I'm shocked I tell you
Now imagine if they actually paid for the training data as well.
What are people using the $200 plan for that makes it worth it? You only get their model with their training, you don't have any access to weights or training. And with how nerfed openai makes its models, nothing even remotely nefarious can be done with it. All you can do is process simple data. Which having a purposed trained model seems the most valuable for.
Probably mostly fake social media profiles and YouTube/Tiktok AI slop.
You could use it to create hundreds of real-looking fake accounts on reddit or other social media site. OpenAI's site doesn't have this kind of fake user function built into its app, but it should be easy enough with an API. Just have a bot randomly scroll reddit's most popular posts. Then have it find the most popular comments on those posts over a certain length. Feed the text of that comment to OpenAI, instructing the LLM to make a disagreeing/concurring/answering reply. Then have the bot post OpenAI's output as a comment on reddit. Have each account comment not at superhuman speed, but at the speed that a normal human user would post.
Use these tools to build up an arsenal of hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands of sockpuppet accounts. Each will have years of post history behind them, so they will pass typical subreddit filters like "account must be this old or have X comment karma" to post. Just keep these bots constantly running and available.
Then, when you want to use them, use them. Don't even dramatically switch their persona. Want to use your bot network for politics? Have your 10,000 fake users mostly comment on random banal stuff. But every 10th post or so have them post a comment for whatever politician or cause you support. You might even have them regularly post content of that political persuasion as a normal part of their operation. Same thing with advertising. Have them mostly post random stuff, but have them occasionally post a glowing review for a product, film, or service.
The real use for OpenAI's software is as a vector for very effective and difficult to detect and filter astroturfing campaigns. Hell, just getting your name out there can be advantageous. Are you a nobody, but with a lot of cash, that wants to launch a political career? Higher such a bot net to sprinkle your name across social media. Even if all the bots do is mention you, neither praising or condemning, it gets your name out there. The next election cycle, when people start talking about potential primary candidates for a particular office, real people will suggest your name, simply because they heard it somewhere. Name recognition is a powerful thing.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Sooooo, wanna tell us how much the cost really is per prompt?
Good riddance. We never asked for it, and we didn’t deserve it forced on us.
Why is same personally picking subscription prices anyway? Should there be some accountant doing that math? Wtf
Their accountant is probably three GPTs in a trench coat that’s being fed prompts by an unpaid intern or some poor dude in India.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I cancelled a 20$ subscription I started because it was arguably useful for me and served exactly one use-case. Now I don't need it anymore.
Of course, they had a form asking feedback/why. I chose "ChatGapT is nott advanced enough" as that was one of the alternatives. Hopefully it will lead to them putting more resources into development and burn through investor money faster.
"Trust me bro, just 200m dollars more"
- Sam Altman, probably
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›