Discussion
gosh who could have predicted that precisely this would happen
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/free-steam-demo-runs-up-usd1-000-daily-ai-bill-and-forces-devs-to-take-out-bank-loan-studio-eyes-local-hardware-models-to-escape-cloud-limits-as-cheaper-automatic-fallback-ai-models-create-problems-game-uses-ai-to-process-your-voice-and-build-responses
archive: https://archive.ph/XsfwS
@davidgerard What's to stop people from botting the game for free to rack up huge bills? 👀
@davidgerard I mean, I can see how this could be a fun party game: kind of a voice activated Goat Simulator, but yeah a hosted LLM does not seem the right tool for the job.
@davidgerard I mashed my thumb on the original link and my phone immediately started getting warm so I closed the page. Went to the archive link and I could feel my phone cooling down as I read the article.
@UpLateGeek no worries, i'll just improve both our timelines
@davidgerard Having briefly looked at it on youtube, it's definitely not putting any voice actors out of work, so. That's something.
@davidgerard You know, I have a feeling this might disprove "no such thing as bad press".
@davidgerard hmm, the article links to another one of theirs, saying that the price of AI is falling faster than other technologies, which seems nonsensical to me https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/the-price-of-ai-is-crashing-faster-than-the-rate-of-moores-law-report-suggests-intelligence-costs-are-in-freefall-outpacing-comparative-technologies-like-compute-dna-sequencing-and-lithium-batteries
@giflian @davidgerard
I dug into the report from Epoch AI that that article was based on. They ran some very complex models to estimate how much a "frontier" model would cost to achieve the same performance on benchmarks as cheaper models. In other words they assume that tokens are getting so much more powerful that increasing prices per token are cheaper, actually.
They're trying to frame it as the "price of thought" which is some real slippery language if you ask me.
https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought
@peter_mcmahan @giflian Epoch are EA grifters largely funded by the AI vendors, so
@davidgerard @giflian
True. I probably should have stared my previous post with something like "I looked at th simulated report text published by a genai marketing firm, and the ideas I was able to ascribe to it were..."
It would be nice if places like tomsharware would not act as legitimacy launderers for this kind of contentless stuff
@davidgerard HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAetc.
@davidgerard my william shatner st:v “excuse me” moment here: exactly why the flying goat brained fuck would one want to have to download local ai models on capable hardware to play a game called “teach my little sister to drive”
@davidgerard since they say there's going to be a set price for the final game and users won't be charged for their token use, they must really believe, deep in their hearts, that tokens are going to get cheaper. That's so sweet.
@davidgerard
It doesn't even sound like they know they're supposed to be finding out now.
@davidgerard lowkey wanting to see the rugpull when token prices go up. But its better if the game just crashed and died (hmmm was pun intended?)
@davidgerard This is bold: "This led its costs to skyrocket to more than a thousand dollars daily, and cheaper fallback AI models have led to slop injected into gameplay"
So what, the AI people are trying to use "slop" specifically to mean *less powerful models*? Never gonna catch on, sorry
@davidgerard "It also said that it’s testing alternative AI models for smoother gameplay in Russia, which does not have easy access to Western models because of sanctions. They might find it hard to find suitable replacement AI models, though, because Ukraine has struck Russia’s largest data center."
@davidgerard
> SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1.
That's a bad, bad, no-good, terrible system to generate dialogue. 431 player count is nothing. This game will crash on release no matter what.
Whose brilliant idea was this??
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@davidgerard Every AI business model seems to be "we lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume!"
Someone should let them know that was supposed to be a joke