[HN Gopher] OpenAI's Foundry leaked pricing says a lot
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       OpenAI's Foundry leaked pricing says a lot
        
       Author : Michelangelo11
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2023-02-28 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cognitiverevolution.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cognitiverevolution.substack.com)
        
       | blibble wrote:
       | phoning customer support is already painful when there's a human
       | on the end
       | 
       | a bot that gives sometimes random answers seems like a
       | particularly cruel form of torture to inflict on your customers
        
       | mc32 wrote:
       | With reports[1] (maybe exaggerated, maybe apocryphal) of
       | companies replacing FTEs with chatGPT, even at these high prices,
       | it may make sense in some use cases, no, tho presumably this
       | kills the playpen use cases.
       | 
       | [1]https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/02/27/009234/survey-
       | claims-...
        
         | buildbot wrote:
         | Nobody is doing this, unless you have a source you would like
         | to link?
        
           | celestialcheese wrote:
           | Here's one anecdotal source confirming this - specifically
           | some copywriting contractors. Significantly less hours needed
           | per month writing. A lot more hours for our editors but it's
           | still significant cost savings when netted out.
        
           | hudsonjr wrote:
           | I think the source was this:
           | https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-4-companies-have-
           | already-...
           | 
           | Now I would ask, what "business leaders" would fill out a
           | random survey for a resume company. Additionally there's no
           | real meaty info provided.
        
             | buildbot wrote:
             | Yeah, not sure I would trust that data...
        
           | mc32 wrote:
           | According to this survey:
           | https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/02/27/009234/survey-
           | claims-...
           | 
           | "Earlier this month, job advice platform Resumebuilder.com
           | surveyed 1,000 business leaders who either use or plan to use
           | ChatGPT. It found that nearly half of their companies have
           | implemented the chatbot. And roughly half of this cohort say
           | ChatGPT has already replaced workers at their companies...."
           | 
           | There are anecdotes elsewhere as well.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | It looks like OpenAI's first mover advantage won't last long,
       | considering the speed at which these models are improving and
       | compacting themselves. Seems like this new 'Moore's law' will be
       | even more steep, at least in the beginning . So steep, that we
       | can hope to be running these in our desktops instead of on
       | someone else's computer.
        
         | sharemywin wrote:
         | but what kind of model will run in the cloud?
        
           | eppp wrote:
           | We could call it a weather model
        
           | interestica wrote:
           | A model that augments the local? Runs above it? A supermodel?
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | I don't think Moore's law is the most important factor, instead
         | algorithmic improvements will enable to have smaller models
         | that are as capable as these humongeous models.
         | 
         | Llama 65b is hopefully just the beginning of this trend. It
         | outperforms OPT-175b.
        
           | buildbot wrote:
           | That holds true if scaling laws don't hold true, otherwise a
           | hypothetical Llama 175b would be even better. So the high end
           | will always be on big clusters.
        
             | [deleted]
        
       | dragonwriter wrote:
       | > This really should not be a surprise, because even the
       | standard-issue ChatGPT can pass the Bar Exam
       | 
       | No, it can't.
       | 
       | The two things that together have sometimes gotten misrepresented
       | that way in "game of telephone" presentations are:
       | 
       | (1) that when tested on the multiple choice component of the
       | multistate bar exam (not the whole bar exam), it got passing
       | grades in two subjects (evidence and torts), not the whole
       | multiple choice section; which is very much _not_ the same thing
       | as being able to pass the exam, and 50.3% overall (better than
       | chance, since its four choices per question, but also very much
       | not passing.)
       | https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4314839
       | 
       | (2) that a set of law professors gave it the exams for four
       | individual law courses and it got an average of C+ scores on
       | those exams, which are minimally-passing grades (but not on the
       | bar exam.) https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/chatgpt-
       | passes-l...
        
         | version_five wrote:
         | I know this isnt the same, but:
         | 
         | I've long had it on my list of things to try to train a
         | classifier to predict the answer to multiple choice tests based
         | on embedding of the questions. Many tests I've seen don't
         | require actual intelligence to pass, just a plausible answer
         | relative to the question phrasing
        
           | tshaddox wrote:
           | A lot of multiple choice tests are only there to provide some
           | minimum bar of plausible deniability for the examiner. The
           | multiple choice section of a driving test (at least in the
           | two U.S. states I've taken them) is a great example. The
           | questions are almost entirely of the form:
           | 
           |  _Which of these activities is legally permitted while
           | operating an automobile?_
           | 
           |  _A. Wearing your seatbelt._
           | 
           |  _B. Being intoxicated._
           | 
           |  _C. Driving 120 miles per hour._
           | 
           |  _D. Intentionally colliding with pedestrians._
           | 
           | That way, when someone drives drunk, it clearly isn't the
           | fault of the examiner, because they clearly verified that the
           | person knew that was illegal! (Or at least, if they got that
           | question wrong, they got enough other ones correct.)
        
         | klabb3 wrote:
         | Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't virtually all tests and
         | exams designed to minimize ambiguity, make them fair or easy to
         | grade and questions are designed to have a clear correct
         | answer? This is a stark difference to most real-world human
         | activity.
         | 
         | Add to the fact that LLMs perform _much better_ on questions
         | with a lot of training data.
         | 
         | And also add the hallucinations or more generally: they don't
         | ask for help or admit they don't know, they seem unaware of
         | their own confidence levels.
         | 
         | No doubt GPT is fascinating and exciting, but boy we're
         | oversubscribing their abilities. LLMs are even worse than
         | crypto (from a fad perspective) because we naturally
         | anthropomorphize their higher level abilities, which are
         | emergent and not well understood even by experts. And we're
         | about to plug them straight into critical business flows? Bring
         | the popcorn!
        
           | whatshisface wrote:
           | > _Add to the fact that LLMs perform much better on questions
           | with a lot of training data._
           | 
           | The answer key can get a 100% on the exam.
        
       | ccakes wrote:
       | > Streamline hiring - in such a hot market, personalizing
       | outreach, assessing resumes, summarizing & flagging profiles, and
       | suggesting interview questions. For companies who have an
       | overabundance of candidates, perhaps even conducting initial
       | interviews?
       | 
       | That's a hiring red flag if I've ever seen one. The nightmare
       | dystopia is just around the corner it seems.
        
         | beambot wrote:
         | Just have to jailbreak DAN to force the system to offer you the
         | job...
         | 
         | Modern day Goodwill Hunting interview experience. Retainer!
        
         | 3throwaway3141 wrote:
         | Dystopia? I think of it as a great comedy! We could be only
         | months away from the first-ever hire where both the applicant
         | and the company have automated the entire process and may not
         | even realize there's been an accepted offer.
        
       | sourcecodeplz wrote:
       | Such a great read. Nothing eye opening really but well put and
       | tied together.
       | 
       | At this point any OpenAI leak is THE leak.
        
       | Imnimo wrote:
       | >Handle customer interactions - natural language Q&A, appointment
       | setting, account management, and even tech support, available
       | 24/7, pick up right where you left off, and switch from text to
       | voice as needed. Customer service and experience will improve
       | dramatically. For example, Microsoft will let companies create
       | their own custom versions of ChatGPT -- read here.
       | 
       | If I can prompt-hack your ChatGPT customer service agent into
       | giving me a discount or accepting an otherwise invalid return or
       | giving me an appointment at 3AM, how binding is that? And if the
       | answer is "obviously it's not binding!", why should I trust
       | anything else your bot tells me?
        
         | mike_hearn wrote:
         | That would presumably be treated the same as a human CSA doing
         | the same thing.
        
         | ianmcgowan wrote:
         | Presumably the same is true for social engineering people - the
         | original "prompt hacking"? I've had customer service
         | interactions that didn't go the way I wanted, hung up, and
         | tried again with a friendlier person. Not sure how "binding"
         | most customer service promises are either - have you ever had
         | to call Comcast? Broken promises are the only promises.
         | 
         | Also, if you can lower your customer service costs by 90%,
         | maybe accepting some prompt hacking that erodes margins a
         | little is a good tradeoff?
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | The Foundry pricing, $78,000 for a few months minimum, is
       | absolutely the opposite of Open. It could completely kill my
       | small startup if the API goes from less than a penny per request
       | to requiring a huge up-front investment. It means that anyone
       | bootstrapping is now locked out.
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | That's the risk you take when you create irreplaceable
         | dependencies.
        
         | tikkun wrote:
         | They only require an up front payment if you're renting a
         | dedicated instance.
        
           | wmf wrote:
           | Yeah but will "DV" be available any other way?
        
           | riskneutral wrote:
           | Dedicated instances (and high price tags, like $1.5 million
           | per year) are necessary for large corporations to feel safe
           | about sending their proprietary/private data to OpenAI, and
           | to have performance/availablity SLAs in place if/when they
           | start depending on OpenAI for critical workloads. Right now
           | many companies are blocking access to OpenAI entirely because
           | of the data privacy issues. I wouldn't be surprised if this
           | "leak" is intentional and a way of getting feedback from the
           | market on proposed product/pricing. I also wouldn't be
           | surprised if some larger customers are knocking on OpenAI's
           | door and demanding to run OpenAI's models on their own
           | infrastructure to avoid sending any data outside their
           | network.
        
         | Nifty3929 wrote:
         | $78k is very small, even for bootstrapped companies. Only the
         | very smallest shops would be inhibited by that. And I admit,
         | that's a lot of them! I get it. It sucks to be a solo developer
         | who wants to get involved and doesn't want to spend a bunch of
         | cash.
         | 
         | But still, for even small players $250k annually just isn't
         | that much.
         | 
         | What we might hope for are trimmed down, subsidized options for
         | small shops who want to get started, with the hope to upgrade
         | them to the full option when they are ready.
         | 
         | In the meanwhile, you might consider partnering up with other
         | small startups.
         | 
         | Also, "open" doesn't mean free. Things take a lot of effort to
         | build and maintain, and that effort needs to be accounted for
         | somewhere.
        
           | eindiran wrote:
           | > "open" doesn't mean free
           | 
           | Yeah but none of the other definitions of "open" apply to
           | OpenAI either.
        
             | tiagod wrote:
             | Maybe Microsoft should change their name as well?...
        
             | dragonwriter wrote:
             | The "open for business" sense certainly does.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | That's the general risk of basing a startup on someone else's
         | service without having a solid contractual agreement, though.
         | It's always a gamble, in particular when the underlying service
         | is an entirely new type of business.
        
         | xwdv wrote:
         | Good.
         | 
         | I'm tired of fly by night tech bros flooding the markets with
         | shitty AI business ideas they learned about on Youtube. Pay to
         | play. Take a risk. Like a _real_ entrepreneur.
         | 
         | I hope the price goes even higher.
        
         | inawarminister wrote:
         | It's time to replicate OpenAI services with a real Open Source
         | (or at least source-available, commercial-allowed) licenses.
         | 
         | It's time to make our own Linux. Our own Emacs.
         | 
         | Go to open-assistant.io and other similar initiatives.
         | 
         | Unfortunately GPT-NEOX, LLaMA, and OPT-IML are non-commercial-
         | only. We small scale players should make our own.
         | 
         | Please contact me if anyone is interested in this space.
        
       | gjsman-1000 wrote:
       | So much for "Open" AI.
       | 
       | Open-source algorithm? No.
       | 
       | Open access for free, or reasonable prices? No.
       | 
       | Open emails and conversations of directors (accountability)? No.
       | 
       | Open conversations of issues and ethics? No.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | Open your wallet? Yes.
        
         | HDThoreaun wrote:
         | Open access for a fee? Yes.
         | 
         | The original point of openAI was to make sure google and
         | facebook don't completely dominate AI and keep their work
         | hidden due to the innovator's dilemma they face. Seems like
         | they've absolutely accomplished that. Yes, they've stretched
         | the meaning of "open" but I don't think they've ever tried to
         | claim they had some sort of open source aspirations.
        
         | rnd0 wrote:
         | Thank fuck they weren't called "HomelandAI" or "LibertyAI" or
         | somesuch!
        
           | all2 wrote:
           | I smell a business opportunity. "HomelandAI" sounds rather
           | nationalist.
        
         | honkler wrote:
         | well atleast now they are Open about their intentions
         | 
         | :)
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-02-28 23:01 UTC)