AI companies are constrained by the risk that they might not be able to monetize their products effectively enough to recover the insane compute costs of training. As an extreme example, if everyone used free GPT but zero people were willing to pay for a subscription, then investors would become significantly less excited by AI companies, because the potential profits they would expect to recover would be lower than if people are willing to buy subscriptions at a high rate.
So I think it’s better to frame the impact of a subscription not as “you give OAI $20” but rather “you increase OAI’s (real and perceived) ability to monetize its products by 1/(# of subscribers)”.
AI companies are constrained by the risk that they might not be able to monetize their products effectively enough to recover the insane compute costs of training. As an extreme example, if everyone used free GPT but zero people were willing to pay for a subscription, then investors would become significantly less excited by AI companies, because the potential profits they would expect to recover would be lower than if people are willing to buy subscriptions at a high rate.
So I think it’s better to frame the impact of a subscription not as “you give OAI $20” but rather “you increase OAI’s (real and perceived) ability to monetize its products by 1/(# of subscribers)”.
Fair enough.
I still suspect that you may be underestimating marginal AI Safety funding opportunities.