Comment by JumpCrisscross
15 hours ago
Correct. We know these models are producing fucktonnes of revenue. At least some of them can be run at a gross profit, i.e. where marginal power costs and capital costs are less than marginal revenues. (Put another way: if OpenAI were an absolute monopoly and stopped training new models, could it turn a profit?)
What’s unclear is if this is a short-term revenue benefit from people fucking around with the newest, shiniest model, or recurring revenue that is only appearing unprofitable because the frontier is advancing so quickly.
From the little we know about OpenAIs inference infra, I feel like I can confidently say that if training stopped today, and they got cut off Azure subsidies, their $20.00 subscription model would probably not cover the cost of Inference.
I know nothing about the enterprise side of OpenAI but I'm sure they're profitable there. I doubt the subscription cost of a single power user of ChatGPT Plus covers the water they consume as a single user (This is probably an exaggeration, but I think I'm in the ballpark).
It may be that extra-large LLMs don’t make sense for ChatGPT. They’re for enterprise use, like supercomputers. The reason I say “at least some” is I’ve found use in running a local instance of Llama, which seems to imply there is some niche of (legal) activities AI can support sustainably. (Versus, e.g. crypto.)