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by simonh 1213 days ago
ChatGPT is free now, although there is a paid tier, and MS and Google are building similar capabilities right into their search interfaces.
1 comments

ChatGPT won't be free forever.

Whatever LLM search stuff comes along will only be free as long as it brings in ad revenue. Which involves making the models fundamentally worse most likely. Or they'll use it to collect personal data. Probably both.

Computationally, GPT is wildly expensive. This idea people have that it's gonna be used all over the place for all sorts of tiny tasks, as if it's just another REST API, is nuts. Unless something fundamentally new comes along that makes these models much cheaper, adoption is likely going to end up much more limited than people expect. Or siloed off into expensive business-facing products.

The cost estimates I see are things like less than half a cent per query and a few cents per conversation.

If I'm making (or valuing my free time at) $20 an hour, then ChatGPT only needs to save me one or two seconds and half a minute respectively.

And like everything, the price will drop rapidly as the models become smaller through advances. There's already sparseGPT.