Same business model of every tech startups of the late 20 years - use investor cash to pull through years of making no money until you either crash & burn or eliminate all traditional competition and can start charging customers bullshit prices

from the BI article:

In an effort to reduce the cost of running generative AI models, Microsoft is developing an AI chip it calls Athena, The Information first reported. The project, which started in 2019, comes years after Microsoft made a $1 billion deal with OpenAI which required OpenAI to run its models exclusively on Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers.

oh man I can’t wait for this grift tech to strain our global IC manufacturing capability and create chip shortages and eventually a mountain of e-waste when it switches to being hosted on ASIC-powered nodes that can’t be used for anything but this specific grift tech nobody asked for (and of course as long as the grift keeps going, they’ll come up with “better” models that need bigger ASICs, creating more e-waste…)

what fucking year is it? I’m having deja vu

e: not to mention, making this shit ASIC-reliant means it’s incredibly easy to gatekeep who’s able to run these models via patents, licensing, and hostile pricing. a lot of the promptfans who think we’re one hardware accelerator away from running these on mobile devices aren’t just ignoring engineering — they’re arguing in the exact opposite direction of the cloud enshittification the industry has actually been pushing towards for years

Rumor is that GPT-4 is also underpriced; in general, rumors are that OpenAI loses money on all of its products individually. It’s sneerworthy, but I don’t know what it means for the future; few things are more dangerous than a cornered wild startup who is starving and afraid.