OpenAI and ChatGPT Could Very Well Collapse and Shut Down Later This Year (Huge Losses, Sagging Usage Levels, and Massive Debt)
OpenAI, which became (in)famous mostly for ChatGPT in its capacity as a Microsoft proxy, is perishing. Below we illuminate the suppressed observations that Microsoft-sponsored publishers and cheaply-made slop (LLM spew disguised as "news") try to distract from.
Background readings
June 2024: The Bubble Has Burst. OpenAI.com Traffic Plunges 60% in One Month, Tracker Shows.
July 2023: Turns Out Microsoft Chatbots Are, Indeed, a Passing Fad (Userbase Down Sharply)
Reality strikes
A cofounder and many senior staff already leave. "Company insiders explain why safety-conscious employees are leaving," a recent report said and there are also severe financial issues. An associate reminds us: "There was a recent article in [Daily] Links about how each ChatGPT search burns as much electricity as running a lightbulb for 20 minutes (for some value of 'lightbulb')."
We'll revisit this later.
Media bites
Even less than a year ago (at "peak hype") the media said "OpenAI may have lost more than half a billion dollars over the past year", "ChatGPT costs $700,000 to run daily, OpenAI may go bankrupt in 2024", and "OpenAI could go bankrupt by 2024 as ChatGPT costs over Rs 5 crore to operate everyday" (it's probably more expensive now, for a variety of reasons including legal costs, staff costs, and scale).
Usage falls
In May the access to the "openai" domain had fallen by about 60% and last month it fell again by nearly 30%. Microsoft tried to fake "demand", seeing that usage levels of the chatbot had plunged, by interjecting/plugging it into everywhere in Windows, 'Webapps', and so on.
Does this seem like a real strategy or rearranging the seats on the deck of the Titanic in panic?
Nobody even asked for this. Many are so pissed off by it that they delete Windows completely and move to GNU/Linux.
Google not doomed
At the end of 2022 and start of 2023 Microsoft-sponsored media kept telling us all that Google was doomed due to chatbots. Nearly 2 years have passed and the market share of Bing is estimated to have actually fallen in Australia (since the LLM hype began). In some countries it is only up slightly, but in about half the countries it is either the same or lower. In fact, the same is true in Europe (Bing down), where Yandex is nearly more popular than Microsoft... it nearly caught up by now.
There's no sober person who nowadays insinuates ChatGPT will "kill" Google. It can kill the Web by filling it with slop (trash), but that just kills search in general, not Google. It pollutes the world with plagiarism, which is a moral problem and a legal problem (more lawsuits and regulatory actions).
It has gotten worse
Instead of improving over time, some people observe that the opposite is true. Having exhausted what they could train the LLMs on (e.g. Wikipedia), now they're chewing up their own slop and it results in worse performance. As someone said earlier this year in openai.com:
Then January came and it became ‘lazy’. It would just summarise in a short paragraph without much details. I had to give several prompts over and over again to get it to give me the answer in detail as it used to. However, all is well as my GPTs were doing okay.Now my GPTs are NOT working too. It doesn’t listen to its custom instructions and my answer is short and vague. When I asked it to re-do, it f**king replies, “Unfortunately, I can’t fulfill this request.”
Even old prompts that used to work are no longer working. It either give short or vague responses, or it repeats whatever was generated beforehand.
Not just me, my friends who are using ChatGPT have said the same. ChatGPT has deteriorated. It is as if OpenAI decides that from 2024 onwards they will reduce token usage and make the answer more summarised, vague and ‘stubborn’. My friends are even speculating whether openAI is doing this on purpose to force us to use up our prompts until it hits the cap limit quickly.
I have never felt so frustrated with ChatGPT before. This is just horrible. At this point I feel it is even pointless to have a chatGPT Plus subscription.
It is a threat to human knowledge, but eventually it'll probably perish because not only training but also querying LLMs is far too expensive and people lose interest. openai.com will probably be offline within years or a decade. There's no business model there, just hype. █