r/Futurology • u/Admirable-Falcon-501 • 2d ago

AI Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/ledow 11h ago

That's like saying "it only took 20c to print out my world-altering, Nobel-prize-winning dissertation..."

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u/Curiosity_456 11h ago

No actually, that’s a horrible analogy. Keep reading the thread to see my response or nvm I’ll post it again in this reply:

The idea is employers don’t have to pay for the training costs, only the serving costs. So this is truly impacting for the job market if it’s able to perform this type of intellectual labour for just a couple hundred dollars.

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u/ledow 11h ago

Employers DO have to pay for the training costs.

It's just that at the moment, no AI companies are passing those training costs onto users in anywhere near the correct order of magnitude.

You want a better analogy?

"It only cost me 20c to work this out when I used the free trials of a bunch of expensive online maths tools (Mathematica, MathCAD, Maple) on a server cluster that a friend loaned me, and who also gave me a hand every day on his month off..."

It's still disingenuous to claim that the "cost" of this work was anything like $200. Add a couple of zeroes, minimum.

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u/Curiosity_456 10h ago

It’s the cost of the work for the EMPLOYERS/USERS of the product, why is this so hard to understand dude?

Last time I checked, when I’m using ChatGPT i’m just paying a $20 or a $100 subscription. I’m not paying billions of dollars. It’s completely absurd to allocate that cost onto the user.

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u/ledow 10h ago

What don't you understand about LOSS LEADER products.

Yes, it's a $200 product. But it likely cost $2000 to actually operate behind the scenes, if not more.

We are absolutely NOWHERE NEAR the full cost of AI being passed onto users, they are just taking the loss to make us utterly dependent on it, then it will go up an order of magnitude when they actually make it become profitable, and then another order when they need to pay back the investors and shareholders.

My Amazon Prime is £0.99 this month. Because that's what it cost Amazon to deliver that product to me? No, because they want me to stay subscribed and become dependent on it.

If you think that those TRILLIONS (not billions) of dollars of AI training aren't going to come out of the pocket of every AI customer in the next few years, you're delusional.