| The cost to run the highest performance o3 model is estimated to be somewhere between $2,000 and $3,400 per task.[1] Based on these estimates, o3 costs about 100x what it would cost to have a human perform the exact same task. Many people are therefore dismissing the near-term impact of these models because of these extremely expensive costs. I think this is a mistake. Even if very high costs make o3 uneconomic for businesses, it could be an epoch defining development for nation states, assuming that it is true that o3 can reason like an averagely intelligent person. Consider the following questions that a state actor might ask itself: What is the cost to raise and educate an average person? Correspondingly, what is the cost to build and run a datacenter with a nuclear power plant attached to it? And finally, how many person-equivilant AIs could be run in parallel per datacenter? There are many state actors, corporations, and even individual people who can afford to ask these questions. There are also many things that they'd like to do but can't because there just aren't enough people available to do them. o3 might change that despite its high cost. So if it is true that we've now got something like human-equivilant intelligence on demand - and that's a really big if - then we may see its impacts much sooner than we would otherwise intuit, especially in areas where economics takes a back seat to other priorities like national security and state competitiveness. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42473876 |