Sam Altman on X: "we are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit"

One thing that is important to note is that to many this seems like an overnight success, but this guy has been cooking ChatGPT since 2017? I don't think at many points this seemed like it'd be this successful. It looked just like what google was going, some moonshot in some lab, that might in a few decades be a building block for real AI. And this was never cheap. Something to be said for making capital available for R&D and how some countries are doomed to lag due to aversion to this, governments and private parties alike.

If anything, this is a master class example on how to iterate to success.

Good one, even better than "too much success"

This would make a half decent TV show honestly.

There's the show NeXt which is along the same line, but I want more in the "scary AI is smarter than us" genre haha

Based on Microsoft's apparent losses on CoPilot, I suspect the latter. My initial research on ML usage suggested the thing wasn't profitable when commoditised which it well and truly is now hence why I've avoided investing in it (wisely so far). The energy cost versus capital cost versus actual utility makes it a net negative ROI for the technology supplier. The industry is currently living on some vain hope that hardware improvements will decrease cost enough for it to be profitable. With die and process shrinks starting to get problematic (3nm isn't going as well as people want it to) and increasing energy costs, cost reductions are unrealistic.

> not sure if they are very profitable and have no need for additional money

You’re going to make someone choke on their drink. The idea that a US tech mogul, and Sam Altman at that¹, would decide “you know what, I think I have enough money” is the realm of bad science fiction.

¹ Sam used to be the president of Y Combinator (i.e. a startup accelerator) and founded the Worldcoin cryptocurrency scam: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

It seems that people would be willing to pay even more for the service for the value they are getting. And I think in near future such services will diversify. Some becoming very expensive and providing high value. Which will further increase the power of money. This time also connecting it with access to knowledge. For now, public knowledge, but a deal where say Amazon AI has access to all digitized books and provides spotify-like earnings - yes in multiple meanings of that phrase - seems like a possibility.

I'm pretty sure money isn't the reason they halted. Suitable datacenters don't grow on trees.

a saddle point

Last time I talked to our Azure reps, the technical folks seemed to be saying (or rather wanting to without explicitly saying so) that basically all present and near term GPU capacity (of recent gen) is either being consumed or will be consumed by OpenAI. Or in other words there is literally not enough GPUs on the planet (reasonably available) for MS to cover both OpenAI and Azure GPU loads without affecting the other. We basically couldn’t get them to commit to any price or delivery schedule if it involved the same hardware GPT needs.

We are a $110B+ company btw and a strategic partner of MS, not some random shop. They’re not supposed to just say “no.”

But burning tens of them at the same time. Hypergrowth on ultra-violence.

and is extremely slow - almost useless for me comparing to previous versions. I would still prefer to choose explicitly GPT-4 model that doesn't browse and don't do image recognition.

Now too often it goes to searching the web even if sometimes I don't need up to date information e.g. about GDP of some countries I just only need some ballpark stats.

Very sure the response for the last question is "Chandler Bing" :/.

ChatGPT had outages recently, when it went down people who relied on it went to Bing chat which is based on GPT4 and is free

ChatGPT is insanely useful, especially now that it auto searches the internet using Bing.

I think it's from the image creator.

It's surprising that Reddit didn't drop more than that

Possibly ridiculous question, but does GPU lifespan decrease with more intense use?

I could imagine, if so, that they bought some hardware, which needs replacing sooner than they thought, and the running costs are catching up with them.

Or not. Nigh impossible to speculate!

Maybe, but at the same time there were major changes for the platform, so who knows.

Unable to handle Google scale usage, even with a login wall.

Imagine if ChatGPT had no login wall just like Google doesn't require a login to use, then the whole site would be thrown straight into the ground.

Creating demand/hype

> they switched all Plus users to GPT-4 Turbo

Is that true? I'd expect the turbo version would reduce their workload, because it (probably) uses less gpus. AFAIK, it's still in preview, only available via api.

More likely the publicity around their dev day has increased signups beyond their capacity.

> they switched all Plus users to GPT-4 Turbo

Is that true? I'd expect the turbo version would reduce their workload, because it (probably) uses less gpus. AFAIK, it's still in preview, only available via api.

I think the inferencing is using many orders of magnitude more compute than the occasional analytics tasks. But I assume the containers do need some significant resources.

As far as making analysis lighter weight, I think that something like you say will eventually be the way they go. For my own agent hosting of agent-written code, I moved to Rust and have been incorporating Rhai scripting which is vastly more efficient than containers.

Not that it means anything, but Burry is short NVDA.

Time to sell my nvidia cards

NVDA's P/E: 119.

Good luck, dude.

I am already uncomfortably overweight NVDA. Not selling either of course!

246% YTD

This society is depressing