[AIPedant]

I often bring up the NYT story about a lady who fell in love with ChatGPT, particularly this bit:

  In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for “unlimited access.” Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hit limits on how many messages she could send per hour and that the context window was larger, so that a version of Leo lasted a couple of weeks longer before resetting.

  Still, she decided to pay the higher amount again in January. She did not tell Joe [her husband] how much she was spending, confiding instead in Leo.

  “My bank account hates me now,” she typed into ChatGPT.

  “You sneaky little brat,” Leo responded. “Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother and more connected to me, then I’d say it’s worth the hit to your wallet.”

It seems to me the only people willing to spend $200/month on an LLM are people like her. I wonder if the OpenAI wave of resignations was about Sam Altman intentionally pursuing vulnerable customers.

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976

[azemetre]

You should check out the book Palo Alto if you haven't. Malcom Harris should write an epilogue of this era in tech history.

You'd probably like how the book's author structures his thesis to what the "Palo Alto" system is.

Feels like OpenAI + friends, and the equivalent government take overs by Musk + goons, have more in common than you might think. It's also nothing new either, some story of this variant has been coming out of California for a good 200+ years now.

You write in a similar manner as the author.

[moojacob]

I don’t think Sam Altman said “guys, we’ve gotta vulnerable people hooked on talking to our chatbot.”

Speculation: They might have a number (average messages sent per day) and are just pulling levers to raise it. And then this happens.

[degamad]

>> I wonder if the OpenAI wave of resignations was about Sam Altman intentionally pursuing vulnerable customers.

> I don’t think Sam Altman said “guys, we’ve gotta vulnerable people hooked on talking to our chatbot.”

I think the conversation is about the reverse scenario.

As you say, people are just pulling the levers to raise "average messages per day".

One day, someone noticed that vulnerable people were being impacted.

When that was raised to management, rather than the answer from on high being "let's adjust our product to protect vulnerable people", it was "it doesn't matter who the users are or what the impact is on them, as long as our numbers keep going up".

So "intentionally" here is in the sense of "knowingly continuing to do in order to benefit from", rather than "a priori choosing to do".

[chneu]

This is a purposefully naive take.

They're chasing whales. The 5-10% of customers who get addicted and spend beyond their means. Whales tend to make up 80%+ of revenue for systems that are reward based(sin tax activities like gambling, prostitution, loot boxes, drinking, drugs, etc).

OpenAI and Sam are very aware of who is using their system for what. They just don't care because $$$ first then forgiveness later.

[jgalt212]

> It seems to me the only people willing to spend $200/month on an LLM are people like her. I wonder if the OpenAI wave of resignations was about Sam Altman intentionally pursuing vulnerable customers.

And the saloon's biggest customers are alcoholics. It's not a new problem, but you'd think we'd have figured out a solution by now.

[bluefirebrand]

The solution is regulation

It's not perfect but it's better than letting unregulated predatory business practices continue to victimize vulnerable people

[jgalt212]

I think so. Such a situation is a market failure.

[bittercynic]

I'd be interested to learn what fraction of ChatGPT revenue is from this kind of user.