this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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AI isn't free. Right now, an LLM takes a not-insignificant hardware investment to run and a lot of manual human labor to train. And there's a whole lot of unknown and untested legal liability.
Smaller more purpose-driven generative AIs are cheaper, but the total cost picture is still a bit hazy. It's not always going to be cheaper than hiring humans. Not at the moment, anyway.
Compared to human work though, AI is basically free. I've been using the GPT3.5-turbo API in a custom app making calls dozens of times a day for a month now and I've been charged like 10 cents. Even minimum wage humans cost tens of thousands of dollars* per year*, thats a pretty high price that will be easy to undercut.
Yes, training costs are expensive, hardware is expensive, but those are one time costs. Once trained, a model can be used trillions of times for pennies, the same can't be said of humans
You can bet your ass chat gpt won't be that cheap for long though. They're still developing it and using people as cheap beta testers.
I think it's reasonable to assume that AI API pricing is artificially low right now. Very low.
There are big open questions around whether training an AI on copyrighted materials is infringement and who exactly should be paid for that.
It's the core of the writer/actor strikes, Reddit API drama, etc.