I’m surprised by the statement that cost is a limiting factor. If the model produces correct high quality output, 750 words for 2 cents is a bargain! Do you know how long it would take me to write 750 words??? Even if I only spend 10 minutes it’s a no-brained to use this tool to help.
No, it's a real limiting factor and one that's under-discussed.
Firstly you're using the wrong price. For basically any imaginable application you're going to need a fine tuned model, so then it's 12 cents per word + the cost of actually training the model in the first place, which n.b. is not going to be a one off task but rather something you have to do repeatedly to keep its knowledge fresh. So the amortized cost is much higher. ChatGPT itself is a fine tuned model.
Secondly given the current SOTA you probably can't deploy it without a human in the loop who has to read those words, or at least read many of them, and then sometimes correct them. So you're still paying for manual labor - or whoever pays you is. The AI cost is an additional cost, not a replacement cost.
Thirdly we don't really know what the economics of OpenAI are, but it seems unlikely that they're charging a long term price for this. Most likely they're trying to bootstrap the market place and find some exemplar business models, and are willing to engage in market dumping for a while to do that. This is a typical Valley VC business model but it makes it impossible to understand what pricing equilibrium will eventually be reached. As befits a Musk firm their up front investment is astronomical and eventually they'll need to pay back those investors.
Finally, there's no particular reason to believe OpenAI would charge cost+ pricing for this. Given the apparent difficulty of replicating GPT-3 (vs DALL-E), the vast sums they're spending on pushing the state of the art, and the lock-in that comes from having them train and host your fine tuned models, it may be that there'll only be one or two players in this space, in which case they'll be incentivized to engage in maximal value extraction from anyone who builds on their platform. So even if there is a lot of money to be made here (and so far that seems to not be the case), it might end up being OpenAI who make it and not people who build apps on their APIs.
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Disclaimer: the above comment was not written by ChatGPT. It was written by me, a human, and is worth what you paid for it.
