ChatGPT is a much-needed tool that people can use to write reviews, code and even letters quickly and easily. However, running ChatGPT can become an expensive venture as it is powered by an expensive tech infrastructure. Chief analyst of semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis, Dylan Patel, estimates that running ChatGPT can cost as much as $700,000 a day. The costs accounts for efficient servers which are needed to calculate responses properly.
In fact, according to Patel and Afzal Ahmad, another analyst at the same research firm, operational expenses, or inference costs far exceeds training costs when deploying a model at a reasonable scale. This cost-inefficiency is well known to Latitude, a startup behind an AI dungeon game. Its CEO admitted that running OpenAI’s language models cost them about $200,000 a month, making human employees look more feasible in comparison.
For this purpose, Microsoft has begun a project called Athena. Started in 2019, around 300 Microsoft employees have been involved in the project, and soon, both Microsoft and OpenAI could use this chip. Its ultimate goal is two-fold; to match the capabilities of tech-giants Google and Amazon, while also providing a more cost-efficient alternative than running AI models on Nvidia’s chips.
ChatGPT is OpenAI’s natural language processing algorithm which release its latest model, GPT-4, last year. Since its launch, the model has been supported by Turing Award winning Professor Yoshua Bengio and tech investor Sam Altman, who is the current CEO of OpenAI. With OpenAI’s novelty comes success as ChatGPT has garnered attention from heavyweights such as Microsoft, who is currently looking to optimize their intuitive AI services.
This is why Dylan Patel is so important to the game – he is the driving force behind the immense change of ChatGPT and understood the potential of GPT-4. His and his colleagues’ insights on the effects of the expensive servers and technology has opened the eyes of many people who wish to use AI for natural language processing purposes. It is through his expertise and ambition, ChatGPT can potentially continue to revolutionize the way people use technology.
