Will Open AI’s $5bn gamble on chatbots pay off? Only if you use them

The ChatGPT maker is betting big, while Google hopes its AI tools won’t replace workers, but help them to work better

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What if you build it and they don’t come?

It’s fair to say the shine is coming off the AI boom. Soaring valuations are starting to look unstable next to the sky-high spending required to sustain them. Over the weekend, one report from tech site the Information estimated that OpenAI was on course to spend an astonishing $5bn more than it makes in revenue this year alone:

If we’re right, OpenAI, most recently valued at $80bn, will need to raise more cash in the next 12 months or so. We’ve based our analysis on our informed estimates of what OpenAI spends to run its ChatGPT chatbot and train future large language models, plus ‘guesstimates’ of what OpenAI’s staffing would cost, based on its prior projections and what we know about its hiring. Our conclusion pinpoints why so many investors worry about the profit prospects of conversational artificial intelligence.

In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims, they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting … Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

Part of what’s tricky about us talking about it now is that we actually don’t know exactly what’s going to transpire. What we do know is the first step is going to be sitting down [with the partners] and really understanding the use cases. If it’s school administrators versus people in the classroom, what are the particular tasks we actually want to get after for these folks?

If you are a school teacher some of it might be a simple email with ideas about how to use Gemini in lesson planning, some of it might be formal classroom training, some of it one on one coaching. Across 1,200 people there will be a lot of different pilots, each group with around 100 people.