😺 AI breaks the bank

PLUS: Sam Altman's take on the future of the world.

Welcome, humans.

Yesterday was the first Sunday we’ve taken off in 2023!

Instead of typing away, we found ourselves immersed in the odd spectacle known as American Football: huge men in costumes shouting cryptic phrases and engaging in a ritualistic form of group hug.

Weird. Needless to say, we’re happy to be back. :)

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Microsoft is losing money by offering some AI services.
Sam Altman says AI will create tremendous disruption.
New research from Anthropic helps us understand AI models better.
Replit made its AI coding assistant totally free!

AI Costs A Lot To Power, So It Might Cost A Lot To Use.

AI is really darn expensive … even if you’re a trillion-dollar empire.

The reason is that AI models are super-duper complex calculators … that require super-duper powerful computers … that cost a lot of $$$ … which hurts everyone except Nvidia.

“Using [AI] to summarize an email is like getting a Lamborghini to deliver a pizza.”

WSJ

AI is so expensive that Microsoft is actually bleeding $20/month/user just by offering its AI coding assistant.

= investors no happy

So this means two things:

1. Companies will cut AI costs.

Microsoft + Zoom are already developing cheaper AI models instead of relying on (expensive) ChatGPT.
Microsoft is building its own AI chips, and OpenAI has similar plans.

2. AI gets expensive to use. Think $30/month, and that's on top of whatever you're already shelling out for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

We expect compute costs to dip eventually.

Our advice for now is to "only pay for what you need" (hat tip to Liberty Mutual). That means opting for ChatGPT Plus or Microsoft 365 Copilot if you're a 365 kinda team.

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Sam Altman: AI Can Solve Many Global Problems.

From July: We all know Sam Altman of House OpenAI, the first of his name, King of Silicon Valley, breaker of writer's block, and father of ChatGPT.

(biased, but this line was a banger…)

And so were Sam’s insights from his recent 156-minute interview with Joe Rogan. TLDR:

AI will dramatically disrupt society.
This disruption could be extraordinary.
But it will be incredibly complex to manage.

Unrelated: We listened to the entire pod at 2x speed, but you could have summed it up in 156 seconds with the help of AI.

Take a transcript of any podcast → feed it to claude.ai → use this prompt:

“I will provide a transcript of a podcast episode. Generate a concise summary in bullet point format that highlights the main topics, key ideas, and most important points from the podcast. Make the summary clear and easy to understand.”

Use this prompt for summaries of any video/audio/PDF. We also recommend Glasp, a YouTube extension that spits out summaries in a single click.

Around the Horn.

Replit just made their AI coding assistant free for everyone.
An overview of large language models (LLMs) in 2023.
Walmart is equipping its 1.6M employees with AI tools to boost productivity.
Google is helping healthcare workers access information quicker using AI.
Anthropic drops big research making it easier for humans to understand (and therefore control) AI models