At 2 cents per 1000 tokens (~750 words), unless you're doing it a lot that should be quite manageable? That's ~$13 for 1000 cards of 500 words (prompt + card + tags). The smaller models are cheaper still and might perform well enough.
I guess you are generally right. My prompts are lengthy, since I let GPT-3 handle the full html syntax of both sides, mathjax and so forth. I found the ada model to be not sufficient, but have not tried the other two models, I will try those!
There is room for improvement on my side.
From a budget-conscious student's perspective, this amounts to roughly $20 per semester in my case, just for the tags. Despite this, I am still fascinated by the automation possibilities offered by GPT-3.
That's totally fair, I should be more conscious about different positions (and not get stuck in "as someone with a stable income..." thinking) and you're right these things can build. Curie as a model should cost 1/10th of Davinci - also the recent models are all better I think so if you've not tried them since the GPT-3.5 release it might be worth trying the smaller ones again. If you could get that to $2/semester it's a lot more palatable, as long as the quality isn't too bad. Maybe there's a flow where you can identify low performing cards/subsets so you can do 90% in Curie and 10% in Davinci.
I think my expectation of this kind of service (on demand huge network) is fixed monthly fees, call us for pricing, etc. It's cool that it's approachable as a student. It'll be very interesting as costs for these things drop and/or performance improves at the same price points.
