Simply keeping ChatGPT running costs OpenAI $700,000 daily

The incredible popularity of the ChatGPT neural network is extremely expensive for its creators. According to SemiAnalysis experts, OpenAI pays up to $700,000 a day to maintain the infrastructure. We are talking about GPT-3, for which you can gather at least some information, while the situation with GPT-4 is full of unknowns. But in any case, it is clear that the commercial attractiveness of these services for their creators tends to negative values.

Miracle did not happen – last week the director of OpenAI, Sam Altman, admitted the collapse of the concept of giant neural networks. Technically, ChatGPT works fine and the system is in high demand, but as it grows, it becomes increasingly expensive to maintain the model. Introducing an actual price tag for using a neural network would scare away a large part of the audience at once, but even worse, it would reduce the resource for training it. ChatGPT works well as long as it has plenty of work and data to develop, and vice versa.

OpenAI’s financial capacity allows it to keep ChatGPT running indefinitely, but there is no happy financial future for this project. You can draw an analogy with Wikipedia, which is very useful, but exists mainly on donations of enthusiasts, and therefore is very limited in development opportunities. And it is no coincidence that Microsoft, which has invested so much in OpenAI, is thinking about creating its own hardware platform for neural networks.

From what we know about the Athena project, we can conclude that Microsoft is trying to create its own specialized chip for neural networks. Initially they were built on affordable hardware, like video cards from Nvidia with high performance, which are expensive in themselves, plus costly to operate. Now that the situation has cleared up and it is clear what consumers need, it is possible to make specialized equipment for AI. Time will tell how this approach will prove itself.

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