This is just one of the many reasons why I don't think I'm as concerned about AI models as people around me are, either for art, text, or coding.
These technologies today are highly subsidized because the people making them want to create a lot of buzz. Yes, as they mature they're going to get better; but I also suspect they're going to become more limited, harder to use, more narrowly targeted, and more expensive to access.
In general, we rarely use new technology to its full potential, because doing so usually closes off commercial opportunities to exploit that technology. The norm is that new technologies are used to a fraction of their capabilities on the market, and are often locked down and purposefully hindered in order to protect market segments that are built around exploiting those technologies. See the ebook market and voice assistants, just off the top of my head.
Given that so much of this AI training/hosting is happening serverside where access controls are easy to add and where AI as a service is the most obvious monetization model, I would not be surprised at all to see AI go in the same direction.
I'm not sure what will happen with ChatGPT -- this is not a prediction of what I think will definitely happen. But I don't think it's impossible that ChatGPT transitions to focusing specifically on being a platform for other businesses, even if that limits its flexibility and the range of content it can produce, and even if that means it gets priced primarily for large businesses rather than for indies/startups.
It's so weird to me that people don't know that text-davinci-003 and code-davinci-003 exist. OpenAI models available via API and very similar to ChatGPT output in many cases. Also text-davinci-003 was released in a similar time period.
It seems very affordable to me as a startup. I have already coded most of the credits system. https://aidev.codes
> very similar to ChatGPT output in many cases
I kind of disagree with this, I think ChatGPT is a superior system in terms of pure output. It strikes me as the sort of comparisons people make between Open Source voice recognition (which is great for a lot of stuff) vs the serverside systems (which may be more than you need, but are almost always going to produce better output). Opinion me.
> Available via API
The only way that an API gets monetized is through a subscription model or as a loss leader for other content (ads, etc...). Given that AI chat isn't a great fit for advertising (at least not without making it a lot less useful), I strongly suspect that the API model is going to get more expensive in the future.
Again, just something I suspect. Maybe it will get much cheaper to host, but the optimism people have about that is I think more of a hope than a solid expectation. There are much cheaper things to host than an AI system that don't end up being affordable to individuals and end up being primarily marketed towards businesses.
I believe this runs client side, but whether it counts as open source is likely open for debate: