this is only a compelling counter-argument if you are referring to a single, individual person who is saying this repeatedly. and there probably are! but the author of this article is not that person, and is also speaking to a very specific loop that only first truly became prevalent 6-9 months ago.
The same same for the human professions, a set of agreed upon guidelines on acting in service of the client, and enforcement of penalties against identifiable instances of prioritizing the interests of another party over the client.
There will always be grey areas, these exist when human responsibilities are set also, and there will be those who skirt the edges. The matters of most concern are quite easily identifiable.
Because generally speaking, it's not a good idea to have machines with possible links to sensitive government data not under the jurisdiction of the government that owns that data.
(Don't get me wrong, I think the existence of DOGE is a farce, but this website is literally just a blog... It's not hosting secrets, and getting caught up in conspiracy theories of it being 'hosted offshore' is missing the forest for the trees)
Edit: After reading https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-... (which lol, what competence!) it sounds like the 'not on american soil' is bowdlerized from the fact that they're running on Cloudflare pages so there isn't a 'server'.
Why? My wife has a ChatGPT $20/mth account, rarely uses now the novelty has warn off (I asked she said twice this month), the only reason she keeps paying for it is to retain the chat history. That's a tiny very rarely used docker container on a server somewhere. Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, but I would just run this the same way we ran digitalocean, all the $5/mth accounts with no activity sit on a box configured for that, once it starts to do stuff it moves to a box with less VMs on it, etc, this is how subscription levels in cloud work, sure it cost us $100MM to get there, but now it just prints cash. If OpenAI decided to stop training models and focused on unit economics, I don't see how they couldn't get it to profitability quite quickly, even with all the competition.
Chat history is a text file. She is paying $20/mo to host a text file. If you pasted that text file back into Whatever... then you would also retain the chat history. How economical.
You're totally right on the last point: if they stopped training models and fully focused on inference efficiency, then they could totally get to profitability (but presumably would be obsolete in the medium-term unless all progress stopped). But right now, inference is very expensive, and your wife's case is the exception not the rule.
would you mind elaborating why you think their assumption doesn't hold?
I have a 6 year old, back then 400EUR (consumer price mind you) GPU that could happily serve 10 "normal" users. sure, we have to add other hardware too, like chassis, power supply, CPU, RAM, ssd etc. so lets 4x that.
Now we're looking at 1600 investment + power cost.
My setup comes down to 0.04 eur per hour of operations, so about ~30 bucks a month (mind you electricity is very likely cheaper wherever else you are). We also need maintenance and operations, eyeballing in large scale at ~2EUR/user/month.
On a 3 year amortisation period we're looking at
investment: 1600
monthly cost to operate: x * 3 + x 2 + 1600/36
monthly revenue: x 20
For x users = 10
monthly cost: 50 + 44.4
monthly revenue: 200
net month result: +105.6
net total result: +3801.6
i know i know thats a napkin calculation but if anything hardware cost will be lower for big providers, which would give them even more profits. just looks like a feasable business model to me.
as long as you can sell those subscriptions
CIA officer Allen Lawrence Pope flew a B-26 bomber targeting civilian merchant vessels in Indonesia as part of an operation to overthrow the Indonesian president by weakening the economy and inspiring local discontent. He personally claimed to have "enjoyed killing Communists". His plane was shot down, and he was eventually returned to the US, where he continued to fly planes for the CIA.
Does this count? Or is the government allowed to indiscriminately kill civilians whenever and wherever they feel like it?
My favorite is that for ~8 years after they killed their theater movie showings service at movies.google.com, that subdomain still pointed to the deprecation notice. They finally must have noticed earlier this year, because it changed to a hacky redirect to https://www.google.com/search?q=movies and now much more sanely points to the Youtube movie storefront. (This drove me crazy for years because I'd always instinctively type in movies.google.com thinking it'd intuitively take me to the Play Store... I was so excited when it finally changed off the deprecation notice.)
Were you using your real information when you signed up? Were you using a disposable / privacy-first credit card? Did you try to obscure your name or register from a VPN? You're very upset at them accusing you of abuse or fraud, but you haven't actually made it clear whether any of the signals you provided them when signing up were aligned with what they'd usually see from abusive or fraudulent users.
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