The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)
Did you pay for the AI service you used to do that and if it hadn’t been available would you have just started reading the online resources the AI trained on and got to the same place eventually?
No and no. The barrier to entry would have been too high. I don’t have hundreds of hours to track down the answers I was looking for. It’s not that I’m incapable of finding the information I was looking for in forums. It’s that its such basic knowledge to most tech forum users that I probably would have been seen as a leech. Have you been to tech forums lately? Its a bunch up people telling you to be a better programmer and calling you a fucking idiot. That’s why stack exchange is failing.
Access to information should be free. That’s partially why we’re all here. Everything that we post could be scraped by an LLM and used for free. When it becomes an issue is when AI crawlers quadruple server load.
So the fact you didn’t pay kind of leads I to where I was going, that model isn’t sustainable for AI, would you subscribe to get access to that information? How much would you pay? Because that is what those pushing AI want to happen, they want yo be the gatekeeper and you have to pay the toll to access information.
As for the usefulness of AI for technical questions. Well I’m the other side of the learning curve from you, I need detailed answers to complicated technical questions and AI fails to provide a correct answer 9 times out of 10 and worse is misleading in its answers with basic mistakes or out of date information which would trip up inexperienced users or lead them into bad practices.
It’s only useful in giving me a direction to start, I still have to go to the likes of stack exchange and read and understand the primary sources it was trained on to get a useful answer and understanding. In general it saves me very little time and isn’t that helpful.
For the current quality of information? No. If the quality improves then maybe $5/mo. Purchase lifetime access with a guaranteed open source copy if they were to go bankrupt? Yeah. But for now, I get free access to ChatGPT for Teachers until like 2027.
But even as of right now there’s plenty of open sourced AI models. I just don’t have the hardware to run complicated models efficiently. I don’t game on a PC so my current setup is just an Intel 14100 and 32GB of ram. So if OpenAI decides to inject ads or force subscription on me, I’ll just upgrade to a 14600F and get a 3060. Then its just a matter of deciding which open source LLM I like best.
Sounds like you’re probably doing that for a job and in which case I would strongly advise against AI reliance for work tasks. At least not without training it on your personal work or technical knowledge.
That’s best practice when using AI output for more technical projects anyway. It probably isn’t saving you much time because you’re already proficient. In my case, it saved months of work. I see it as a tool that lowers the barrier of entry to a ton hobbies or areas of knowledge.