I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit of the companies that are each investing hundreds of billions and hope to see a net return. How many developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as each is more productive) or enterprises you work for paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?
No idea, and not my problem. I’m surprised I’ve been downvoted so much in these comments. I’m not saying OpenAI et al is a good company or good financial scenario, or good investment.
The technology is amazingly powerful. Full stop.
The constraint that drives cost is technical — semiconductor prices. Semiconductors are manufactured commodities over time, those costs will drop over time. The Sun workstation I bought for $40k in 1999 would get smoked by a raspberry pi for $40.
Even if everyone put their pencils down and stopped working on this stuff, you’d get a lot of value from the open source(-ish) models available today.
Worst case scenario, LLMs are like Excel. Little computer programs will be available to anyone to do what they need done. Excel alone changed the world in many ways.
