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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32944 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I'm going to shamelessly steal @Scimitar's post from the Friday Fun thread because I think we need to talk about LLMs in a CW context:

A few months ago OpenAI dropped their API price, from $0.06/1000 tokens for their best model, to $0.02/1000 tokens. This week, the company released their ChatGPT API which uses their "gpt-3.5-turbo" model, apparently the best one yet, for the price of $0.002/1000 tokens. Yes, an order of magnitude cheaper. I don't quite understand the pricing, and OpenAI themselves say: "Because gpt-3.5-turbo performs at a similar capability to text-davinci-003 but at 10% the price per token, we recommend gpt-3.5-turbo for most use cases." In less than a year, the OpenAI models have not only improved, but become 30 times cheaper. What does this mean?

A human thinks at roughly 800 words per minute. We could debate this all day, but it won’t really effect the math. A word is about 1.33 tokens. This means that a human, working diligently 40 hour weeks for a year, fully engaged, could produce about: 52 * 40 * 60 * 800 * 1.33 = 132 million tokens per year of thought. This would cost $264 out of ChatGPT.

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11fn0td/the_implications_of_chatgpts_api_cost/

...or about $0.13 per hour. Yes technically it overlooks the fact that OpenAI charge for both input and output tokens, but this is still cheap and the line is trending downwards.

Full time minimum wage is ~$20k/year. GPT-3.5-turbo is 100x cheaper and vastly outperforms the average minimum wage worker at certain tasks. I dunno, this just feels crazy. And no, I wont apologize for AI posting. It is simply the most interesting thing happening right now.


I strongly agree with @Scimitar, this is the most interesting thing happening right now. If you haven't been following AI/LLM progress the last month, it has been blazingly fast. I've spent a lot of time in AI doomer circles so I have had a layer of cynicism around people talking about the Singularity, but I'll be damned if I'm not started to feel a bit uncomfortable that they may have been right.

The CW implications seem endless - low skill jobs will be automated, but which tribe first? Will HR admins who spend all day writing two emails be the first to go? Fast food cashiers who are already on their way out through self ordering consoles?

Which jobs will be the last to go? The last-mile problem seems pretty bad for legal and medical professionals (i.e. if an LLM makes up an answer it could be very bad) but theoretically we could use them to generate copy or ideas then go through a final check by a professional.

Outside of employment, what will this do to human relations? I've already seen some (admittedly highly autistic) people online saying that talking to ChatGPT is more satisfying than talking to humans. Will the NEET apocalypse turn into overdrive? Will the next generation even interact with other humans, or will people become individualized entirely and surround themselves with digital avatars?

Perhaps I'm being a bit too optimistic on the acceleration, but I can't help but feel that we are truly on the cusp of a massive realignment of technology and society. What are your thoughts on AI?

Do you want your ability to think, reason, express yourself, generate insights and connections, to be owned and metered by OpenAI?

It’s hard to get the pro-AI crowd to think critically about these issues, because the assumption that the singularity is near is so prevalent.

“Do you think it’s a good thing for people to outsource the act of thinking itself to SV tech giants?”

“Well the AI is about to become literally God - could happen within the next few days, actually! - so it doesn’t really matter what I think or want. You can’t fight God, so all we can do is prepare for God’s arrival.”

You can’t have a nuanced discussion about social problems with people who think that the very notion of a “problem” itself is about to be dissolved.

Its also hard to take complaints about it seriously because tech has been 'replacing' various human tasks for over a century now, and to become a hardcore luddite only when it impacts writers, vs. all the various laborers and 'lower status' work that has been impacted, seems like a bad-faith special pleading.

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