⚫ What is the cost of even Cat level A.I. (CLAI)?

The Information had a good scoop recently. They said recently:

⚫ OpenAI’s losses roughly doubled to around $540 million last year as it developed ChatGPT and hired key employees from Google, according to three people with knowledge of the startup’s financials.

The previously unreported figure reflects the steep costs of training its machine-learning models during the period before it started selling access to the chatbot. Furthermore reports online indicate that ChatGPT costs approximately $700,000 a day just to run, or more.

Even as revenue has picked up—reaching an annual pace of hundreds of millions of dollars just weeks after OpenAI launched a paid version of the chatbot in February—those costs are likely to keep rising as more customers use its artificial intelligence technology and the company trains future versions of the software.

⚫ Reflecting that capital drain, CEO Sam Altman has privately suggested OpenAI may try to raise as much as $100 billion in the coming years to achieve its aim of developing artificial general intelligence that is advanced enough to improve its own.

⚫ A leak out of Google claims that they have no moat against open-source LLMs that could one day overtake them. (Read semianalysis on Sustack for this scoop). simonwillison and LessWrong have blogged about this too.

What is clear is few of even the best Generative A.I. startups today, will even be around in 2030. They will have failed to make money. Which makes all the hype and hubris a bit of a head fake.

Microsoft's investment in OpenAI isn't likely to age well given the pace of innovation in LLMs. Very few companies or even Nation states can easily bear the costs of developing this stuff and they will get disrupted by new tech here rather easily. That won't be a problem for the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI).