Pretty sure the Antideficiency Act is supposed to prevent this so that agencies can't get stuck with expenses that aren't budgeted if the service decides to start charging, which is probably exactly OpenAI's goal here.

Yeah this is illegal and I'm pretty sure Musk has had his hand slapped doing similar stunts before

@edzitron.com this would probably be a good time to call a lawyer person on and have them explain this and how it could get OpenAI into a ton of hot water

this desperate push to force everyone to use this stuff is like the auto makers bribing governments to take down street cars in the 40s but if cars exploded for no reason regularly

It’s a similar tactic to what Microsoft did to get windows infrastructure in the government, they’ll give it to you for cheap or free and then when that “free” annual licensing is up is when it’s time to pay the piper. Except, you don’t have to use ai and proper integrations aren’t scalable w/ llm’s

yeah windows is useful

Don't worry, Microsoft is working on fixing that post-haste.

Hahaha, I helped a friend set up a new windows 11 machine recently and it was such a slog of ads, forced sign ins and just in general a smattering of options thrown together and they called it windows. They’re actively “fixing” it.

Yeah, I'm hardly a coder but I gave up and swapped to Linux Mint. I'd rather error codes than bloat!

this is what i charge my wife to be married to me what are you implying

Don’t worry about pricing, they’ll make it up in volume.

Someone bet them they couldn't lose money faster?

Pretty much the only gambit is trying to get govt cover the cost of running all those servers it seems like?

Also what you do when you’re in the AI wars against Google, Amazon, Meta, and others

profitability must be only a quarter or two away, at this rate

What’s more worrying is that this is actually what you do when your product is really addictive. Pushing to get people to adopt a product with unstudied and dangerous psychological effects didn’t work out great for opioids, and it won’t end much better for chatbots.

They want to have a huge number of "paid" licenses to tout.

To be fair this is somewhat normal for enterprise software

Some hare-brained attempt to undercut Grok or something

I thought about how the Central Artificial Intelligence Agency would try to conduct a coup in a country based the amount of twitter shitposting and I got a nosebleed

AI is here to stay at a -99% profit margin

Well you see, next year they'll raise the price to $2, and profits will double. Nobody will be laughing then

Use this one neat trick to double your annualized revenue over the course of a single month

And by profit they will mean, slightly less losses.

True, they lose money on their $200/month whales I mean "pro" users, so at $1/year they're losing an extra $2399 annually on those promo rate subscribers vs. "pros". Making that only $2398 next year probably doesn't help much.

Loss leader!

I wonder if they made any changes yet to suppress all woke DEI type answers, like anything to do with black history or that Biden won the 2020 election?

this is like every time I log onto twitter I get 5 adverts offering me discounted twitter blue, success is about momentum

This only works with crack

One has to wonder how many of these weird ultra-discount deals openai has!

Just imagine if everyone on Earth paid OpenAI just one dollar. They’d still be massively in the red, so much so that it wouldn’t even be a drop in the ocean. But think of the fawning writeups it would generate!

Get them hooked and then hit them with the pricey subscription later.

Except the product is flour laced with dry poop

MAU graph has to go up, Ed! 📈

I have long suspected my university probably doesn’t pay much for it either

One also has to wonder how many seats are included in each of these weird ultra-discount deals. How else will we know how much each ultra-discount costs OpenAI?

Hopefully a lot. Just dial up the burn rate. Idiot VCs cant go broke fast enough.

Which means they’re actually burning even more money than we thought. Hm

Gotta make the "paying customers" number go up!

When they win the business, they’ll make up for the lack of sales revenue with addition investment inflow, at least that’s the idea. Blitzscaling!

Ah yes that old economic principle of supply if no demand

That's a centuryalized recurring revenue of 100€, though

Le me break it down for you: the government has billions of dollars and each of those billions is made up of 1 dollars, and they agreed to give you their 1 dollar, so you will receive all the 1 dollars they have and make billions. That’s how ChatGPT explained it to me anyway.

They should just mail out free CD-ROMs.

Hype cycles and taxpayer funded capitlization of exploding rockets in Texas is now THE business model.

This is what you do when you're positioning yourself for a future bailout

American Tobacco gave US soldiers free cigarettes throughout the war which cost them a little at the time but made them millions in the long run

The DARE program also assured me that this was how drugs work.

It's the business model for crack if it made you stupid wo getting you high

Crack dealers don’t get high on their own supply though. But these guys… 😂😱

In 1997 we still weren't using Win95 because it hadn't cleared security checks.

Or when you’re confident you have deeper pockets than your competitors and are prepared to bankroll a loss leader until you own the sector to yourself. See Amazon and the first stage of Enshittification ©️ @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy

Is the idea that if they can embed themselves in government deep enough they'll be too important to let fail?

That plus you basically then have every single computer adding to your computations and iterations? Like folding@home, or hackers who would use fridges to help mine crypto, or botnets.

this is conspiracy theory shit and does not map to what these models do

Alright, I might be fully ignorant on this. Keep in mind I don't see this necessarily as an instant "read and write". But...how do the models get improved without utilizing and tuning using existing interactions? Like if I'm saying dumb crazy shit, this is not me being funny. I want to be corrected

They so transparently want so, SO badly to have an adoption rate high enough that they can start extorting their customers by raising prices or gating essential features behind paywalls. Grifters these days are so terrible at hiding their motives.

I wouldn’t though.

"Only $4B/year after the introductory period."

In tangible goods, we might call this “dumping.”

I mean ICE can now hire 80 yr olds. You can literally smell all the desperation in the air today.

It's a loss leader, like the hot dogs at Costco's food court.

it is absolutely nothing like that, and it is not a loss leader, please look up what a loss leader is!!!!!!

/s

This is NOT GOOD

Why is everything I read nowadays akin to a gigantic flashing warning sign?

Goosing that "paid subscriber" KPI by any means, while making sure the "after costs revenue per subscriber" KPI is probably never even calculated, so they don't have to lie about knowing how bad it is.

altman learned all the wrong things from musk.

This is the kinda short term lock in strategy that could have worked right up until DOGE killed 18F 18F would have built products around this that would have had OpenAI’s API as a critical dependency Anyone in the gov using ChatGPT now will just be using the chatbot directly and can easily switch

Also what you do when you're trying to establish a foothold with a customer base that will offer valuable data to harvest and further improve your market-leading product.

I mean it's how my dealer operates, he gives me a special bargain as long as I can hold out the full week. Is it itchy in here?

Oh my god..... theyre doing the disney plus intro pricing lololllll