Honestly, I think OpenAI messed up by making their service available for free. They were following the normal silicon valley model of providing it free and then figuring out the revenue stream later, often by offering an additional paid tier of questionable value which very few people sign up for. That mostly doesn’t even work when your costs are limited to some not-trivial-but-not-exorbitant web hosting. When your costs are as astronomical as it takes to run an LLM, it’s a really bad idea which I think was just born out of imitation.
If they’d offered GPT-3 as a subscription service that cost $50/month, for use by serious professionals or people with enough cash to spend that on playing around with it, people would have been impressed as hell that it was so cheap. IDK how many people would have signed up, but I can pretty well assure you that they would not be hemorrhaging money like they currently are. Of course, now that they’ve set the expected price point at “free,” there’s no going back.
Honestly, I think OpenAI messed up by making their service available for free. They were following the normal silicon valley model of providing it free and then figuring out the revenue stream later, often by offering an additional paid tier of questionable value which very few people sign up for. That mostly doesn’t even work when your costs are limited to some not-trivial-but-not-exorbitant web hosting. When your costs are as astronomical as it takes to run an LLM, it’s a really bad idea which I think was just born out of imitation.
If they’d offered GPT-3 as a subscription service that cost $50/month, for use by serious professionals or people with enough cash to spend that on playing around with it, people would have been impressed as hell that it was so cheap. IDK how many people would have signed up, but I can pretty well assure you that they would not be hemorrhaging money like they currently are. Of course, now that they’ve set the expected price point at “free,” there’s no going back.