“I personally chose the price”
Is that how well-run companies operate? The CEO unilaterally decides the price rather than delegating that out to the numbers people they employ?
This answer would be much funnier if that wasn’t his fucking plan.
This is my first experience listening to this guy, and I’ll be darned, it’s a another idiot billionaire.
I’d like to think there are intelligent billionaires but honestly folks, if you win that big and haven’t cashed out to do something more meaningful with you’re life, you’re an idiot.
A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.
If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?
Is that what Ayn Rand is about? All I really remember is that having a name you chose yourself is self-fulfilling.
Oh boy I got a fun video for you: https://youtu.be/GmJI6qIqURA @26:50
Atlas Shrugged is so bad that if you didn’t know anything about the author, it could be read as a decent satire.
Ayn Rand is about spending your whole life moralizing a social philosophy based on the impossibility of altruism, perfect meritocratic achievement perfectly distributing wealth, and hatred of government taxation, regulation, and social welfare programs…
… and then dying alone, almost totally broke, living off of social security and financial charity from your former secretary.
far, far, far, far, far, far, far fewer business people than you’d expect/guess are data-driven decision makers
and then there’s the whole bayfucker ceo dynamic which adds a whole bunch of extra dumb shit
it’d be funnier if it weren’t for the tunguska-like effect it’s having on human society both at present and in the coming decades to follow :|
I think I remember Jeff Bezos in “The Everything Store” book seeing a price they charged for AWS and went even lower for growth. So there could be some rationale for that? However, I think switching AI providers is easier than Cloud Providers? Not sure though.
I can imagine the highest users of this being scam artists and stuff though.
I want this AI hype train to die.
In tech? Kinda yeah. When a subscription is 14.99 $£€/month it’s a clear “we just think it’s what people think is a fair price for SaaS”.
The trick is that tech usually works on really weird economics where the fixed costs (R&D) are astonishingly high and the marginal costs (servers etc) are virtually nil. That’s how successful tech companies are so profitable, even more than oil companies, because once the R&D is paid off every additional user is free money. And this means that companies don’t have to be profitable any time in particular as long as they promise sufficient projected growth to make up for being a money pit until then. You can get away with anything when your investors believe you’ll eventually have a billion users.
… Of course that doesn’t work when every customer interaction actually costs a buck or two in GPU compute, but I’m sure after a lot of handwaving they were able to explain to their investors how this is totally fine and totally sustainable and they’ll totally make their money back a thousandfold.
CEO personally chose a price too low for company to be profitable.
What a clown.
well, yes. But also this is an extremely difficult to price product. 200$/m is already insane, but now you’re suggesting they should’ve gone even more aggressive. It could turn out almost nobody would use it. An optimal price here is a tricky guess.
Although they probably should’ve sold a “limited subscription”. That does give you max break-even amount of queries per month, or 2x of that, but not 100x, or unlimited. Otherwise exactly what happened can happen.
What the LLMs do, at the end of the day, is statistics. If you want a more precise model, you need to make it larger. Basically, exponentially scaling marginal costs meet exponentially decaying marginal utility.
despite that one episode of Leverage where they did some laundering by way of gym memberships, not every shady bullshit business that burns way more than they make can just swizzle the numbers!
(also if you spend maybe half a second thinking about it you’d realize that economies of scale only apply when you can actually have economies of scale. which they can’t. which is why they’re constantly setting more money on fire the harder they try to make their bad product seem good)
Wait but he controls the price, not the subscriber number?
Like even if the issue was low subscriber number (which it isn’t since they’re losing money per subscriber, more subscribers just makes you lose money faster), that’s still the same category of mistake? You control the price and supply, not the demand, you can’t set a stupid price that loses you money and then be like “ah, not my fault, demand was too low” like bozo it’s your product and you set the price. That’s econ 101, you can move the price to a place where your business is profitable, and if such a price doesn’t exist then maybe your biz is stupid?
I believe our esteemed poster was referencing the oft-seen cloud dynamic of “making just enough in margin” where you can tolerate a handful of big users because you have enough lower-usage subscribers in aggregate to counter the heavies. which, y’know, still requires the margin to exist in the first place
alas, hard to have margins in Setting The Money On Fire business models
please explain to us how you think having less, or more, subscribers would make this profitable
Yeah, the tweet clearly says that the subscribers they have are using it more than they expected, which is costing them more than $200 per month per subscriber just to run it.
I could see an argument for an economy of scales kind of situation where adding more users would offset the cost per user, but it seems like here that would just increase their overhead, making the problem worse.
LLM inference can be batched, reducing the cost per request. If you have too few customers, you can’t fill the optimal batch size.
That said, the optimal batch size on today’s hardware is not big (<20). I would be very very surprised if they couldn’t fill it for any few-seconds window.
The plagiarism power virus is too expensive to operate? I’m shocked I tell you
really looking forward to how these multi-billion dollar AI datacenter investments will work out for big tech companies
that said I’m pretty sure most of that capacity is reserved for the surveillance state anyway
Hmm, we should get together some funds to buy a single unlimited subscription, and then let it continuously generate as large and complex prompts as the rate limitting allows.
On one hand, heck yes. On the other, part of the reason its so expensive is because of the energy and water usage, so sticking it to the man in this way also is harmful to the environment :(
Normally the people talking about water use have no idea what they are talking about. Normally data center cooling is closed loop, much like a cars cooling system. So they don’t use significant amounts of water at all.
