don't talk to me about being thrifty
Like a lot of folks, I'm no stranger to "budgeting," "tightening my belt," "doing without," and all the rest when it comes to the "money required to stay alive under capitalism" ≤ "money capitalism is willing to pay me for my labor" equation. I too was raised to think that making this equation work was a personal virtue, and that if it did not balance, there was something morally wrong with me.
Today I learned that OpenAI burned NINE BILLION DOLLARS this past year. That's $4 billion (with a B) in revenue and another $5 billion on top.
ChatGPT loses money with every prompt it parses or "response" it spits out. It doesn't matter if the user is paying for a subscription or not; even paid customers are paying less than it costs ChatGPT to create those "answers."
We are looking at a business that burns $9 BILLION DOLLARS a year of investor money, has zero use cases that will even come close to generating $9 billion, and we are...throwing more money at it.
Never, ever talk to me about how "good" I am for tightening my budget yet again. We, as a society, obviously do not give a shit about value or numbers. Stop pretending it's a moral virtue to spend less money than you bring in. That's just a lie we pass around to feel better about starving to death while maniac billionaires set money on fire because the planet isn't dying fast enough for them.