This has been cooking for a while, like since the alarms started getting sounded about an AI bubble; but I had a dream recently where the AI bubble popped, and we were all happy, and the industry really did bottom out, but then peter goddamned thiel ends up basically owning the entire market share, then buys up artistic supplychains and stores and shuts them down entirely to force people on the slop machine.
and reflecting on it, that’s when i kinda came to the conclusion: that’s a real ass possibility.
I think of the 2000s dot com bubble, levelled the landscape, and the companies that survived and the ones that emerged in its wake had staying power, and dominate the technological social landscape to a frankly dangerous degree
the money behind this AI shit is immense, and some of these guys are deranged enough to just force the matter, like who could even contest this?
I’d love to get talked down from this position if it’s more unreasonable than i think but… yeah im kinda anxious about it now.
That’s the neat part: No, it wouldn’t. When they eventually want to make money, OpenAI won’t be able to just offer a flatrate subscription to its users, they would still have to impose severe restrictions on how much you can use it. The power users who currently pay the biggest monthly subscription (like $200/month) are bleeding OpenAI dry because of the unique scaling issue that LLMs have. Usually for software companies, your operating costs don’t drastically increase depending on how much your customers are using the product, but with LLMs they do. There’s no way it will be financially viable for people who use ChatGPT to create spam bots on twitter to continue doing so once every tweet costs them money, so most of them will stop. As for casual users, the difference between “free” and “not free” is massive. A huge amount of people will just go back to googling stuff. Kids will still use it to cheat at school, but instead of every kid asking ChatGPT to do their homework there’s gonna be 2 or 3 kids in class who “have ChatGPT” and they’re gonna let you generate it on their phone.
It’s not gonna go away for good, but its usage is going to fall off a cliff once its appropriately priced.