[HN Gopher] GPT4 is up to 6 times more expensive than GPT3.5
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GPT4 is up to 6 times more expensive than GPT3.5
 
Author : behnamoh
Score  : 149 points
Date   : 2023-03-14 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
 
web link (openai.com)
w3m dump (openai.com)
 
| Veen wrote:
| I imagine this price will come down over time. OpenAI has
| repeatedly said that they haven't the infrastructure in place yet
| to handle too much load and expect to be "severely capacity
| constrained", so I assume the high pricing and usage caps on the
| ChatGPT version are to keep the load manageably low for the
| moment.
 
  | jazzyjackson wrote:
  | You're not wrong but I think many people still have an
  | intuition informed by a pre-silicon-capacity-crunch era, it
  | cannot be taken for granted that the demand for GPU / TPU will
  | be met over the next few years.
 
  | avisser wrote:
  | I imagine those dollars from papa Nadella are buying LOTS of
  | capacity as we speak.
 
| albntomat0 wrote:
| This may be because they recently found ways to make GPT3.5 much
| more efficient.
| 
| https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis
 
| sparrc wrote:
| 6 times? My reading of these prices is that it's 45x more
| expensive (for 8K) and 90x more expensive (32k)
 
  | behnamoh wrote:
  | The title compares GPT3.5 (not ChatGPT) with GPT4. Although the
  | question is: If ChatGPT can do almost anything GPT3.5 can do,
  | then why is it priced almost 10x less? Is it because GPT3.5 is
  | less "censored"?
 
    | dragonwriter wrote:
    | > Although the question is: If ChatGPT can do almost anything
    | GPT3.5 can do, then why is it priced almost 10x less?
    | 
    | ChatGPT _is_ GPT-3.5; with specific fine tuning  / chat-
    | oriented training, and without customer fine-tuning (at
    | least, currently) available. It's the particular GPT-3.5
    | interface that OpenAI wants people to preferentially use, so
    | the price structure artificially encourages this.
 
      | eldenring wrote:
      | The ChatGPT API is using a smaller model than the original
      | "GPT 3.5". The original, presumably larger, model is used
      | by Legacy ChatGPT.
 
    | frognumber wrote:
    | If I were to speculate, OpenAI is doing two types of
    | optimizations:
    | 
    | 1) Cost
    | 
    | 2) Function
    | 
    | I suspect ChatGPT is 90% a cost-optimized version of GPT3,
    | and 10% a function-enhanced one.
    | 
    | GPT3 was the first major public wow-able model, and I suspect
    | it was not running on any sort of optimized infrastructure.
 
    | rvnx wrote:
    | Didn't the CEO say during the GPT-4 demos that humans were
    | involved to do the captions during all the images tests
    | (using Be My Eyes volunteers) and that's why it took some
    | time to show the Discord examples ?
    | 
    | If so, it could explain some costs indirectly.
 
      | IshKebab wrote:
      | Wait did they just use Be My Eyes volunteers as AI
      | labellers without telling them? Or were they told? Pretty
      | unethical if not!
 
  | [deleted]
 
| tagawa wrote:
| I think you mean "up to 60" ($0.12 / 1K tokens as opposed to
| $0.002).
 
  | minimaxir wrote:
  | For clarification, $0.002 is the ChatGPT API price, not the
  | text-davinci-003 price ($0.02).
 
    | tagawa wrote:
    | Ah, OK. thanks for pointing that out.
 
| colesantiago wrote:
| No surprise here, this is Classic Microsoft & OpenAI.
| 
| If you know anything about business models this is by design.
| 
| The minute that ChatGPT's pricing came close to free, it was
| obvious they had a way better model.
| 
| It was never about OpenAI having found a more efficient way to
| reduce costs, it was to price out competitors like Google, Meta,
| Open Source, etc with a "good-enough" breakthrough model.
| 
| Then introduce an expensive superior corrected model.
 
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'm more impressed that it's less than 3 times as expensive as
| Davinci GPT3. In usecases where most tokens are in the context
| even only 50% more expensive, while allowing 4x as much context.
| And you can pay a 100% surcharge to get another fourfold increase
| in context size.
| 
| It only looks expensive when compared to the GPT-3.5-Turbo
| ChatGPT offering which is incredibly cheap (or alternatively
| Davinci is overpriced by now)
 
  | tlogan wrote:
  | Can you please explain how GPT-4 is cheaper than davinci GPT3.
  | Maybe I do not understand the pricing here...
 
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Designer leather jackets boutiques world wide are rejoicing.
 
  | aiappreciator wrote:
  | I remember as a young gamer, asking my Dad whether Nvidia or
  | Intel was a bigger company. It seemed obvious to me, since
  | people always bragged about their GPUs online, but never the
  | CPU, that Nvidia is the more important company.
  | 
  | At that time, Nvidia was worth like 1% of Intel.
  | 
  | Today, regarding online discussions, nothing has changed.
  | People still brag about GPUs, never the CPU. But now Nvidia is
  | worth 5 times as much as Intel.
 
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Why is the 32K context only twice as expensive as the 8K context?
| 
| Are they using sparse attention or something? I don't think flash
| attention on it's own can explain it.
| 
| EDIT: Oh right, if the cost is per token so if you actually fill
| the context then it is 8x more, which makes much more sense.
 
  | cscheid wrote:
  | Ask it the other way around, "Why is the 8K context only twice
  | as cheap as the 32K context?" and your original answer is
  | clearer: because they think the demand curve supports it.
  | 
  | Price is not determined by cost, but by how much people are
  | willing to pay.
 
    | sebzim4500 wrote:
    | No I'm just an idiot. Since the price is per token the actual
    | ratio is more like 8x more (assuming you fill both contexts)
    | which is plausibly the ratio between the costs.
 
      | Maxion wrote:
      | In the end the cost for you is how many tokens consumed, if
      | you can get more value out of one request with 32k context
      | that multiple with lower, then it's cheaper (and faster).
      | 
      | Some problems also require a larger context to be able to
      | solve.
 
| speedgoose wrote:
| The OpenAI pricing models seem to be decided by ChatGPT.
 
  | sebzim4500 wrote:
  | How so? They seem reasonable to me.
  | 
  | You have the models which are pretty good that are cheap, and
  | the models which are far ahead of the competition which are
  | expensive.
 
| tlogan wrote:
| The title should be changed to "GPT4 is up to 90x more expensive
| than GPT3.5"
 
| thelittleone wrote:
| Is it conceivable that ChatGPT could review itself and produce a
| superior revision to a human?
 
| obblekk wrote:
| Worth remembering GPT3 was 10-20 times more expensive 2yrs ago.
| There's a super-moore's law type learning function going on here
| and I suspect in 1yr GPT4.5 will be the same cost as GPT3.5
| today.
| 
| It's insane... feels like iPhone 3G to iPhone 4 level quality
| improvement every year.
 
  | behnamoh wrote:
  | That's incorrect information. The original GPT3 price was about
  | x3 times its current price, not 10-20 times.
  | 
  | https://the-decoder.com/openai-cuts-prices-for-gpt-3-by-two-...
 
    | sebzim4500 wrote:
    | I think he means it was 30x more than gpt-3.5 is today.
 
      | stavros wrote:
      | Yeah but that's also 30x times worse. ChatGPT is much
      | worse-performing than davinci-003.
 
        | avereveard wrote:
        | yeah, I used to be able to create valid units for
        | WarStuff with original chatgpt, but now all the unit it
        | creates are full of hallucinated traits and special rules
        | that aren't in the source.
 
        | stavros wrote:
        | If you try davinci-003, it will definitely be able to do
        | it.
 
  | Maxion wrote:
  | GPT-4 is a scary improvement over 3.5, especially for handling
  | code. It will be the literal definition of awesome when these
  | models get a large enough context space to hold a small-medium
  | sized codebase.
  | 
  | I've been playing around with it for an hour seeing what it can
  | do to refactor some of the things we have with the most tech
  | debt, and it is astounding how well it does with how little
  | context I give it.
 
    | int_is_compress wrote:
    | There are already some cool projects that help LLM go beyond
    | the context window limitation and work with even larger
    | codebases like https://github.com/jerryjliu/llama_index and
    | https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain.
 
      | Der_Einzige wrote:
      | The fundamental techniques that they use are highly lossey
      | and are far inferior to ultra-long context length models
      | where you can do it all in one prompt. Hate to break it to
      | you and all the others.
 
        | nico wrote:
        | Where can someone find and try ultra-long context length
        | models?
        | 
        | Any links?
 
        | intelVISA wrote:
        | The longest one that is generally available is always
        | going to be yourself :)
 
        | thelittleone wrote:
        | My context model is getting shorter and fuzzier.
 
        | hombre_fatal wrote:
        | > Hate to break it to you and all the others.
        | 
        | Jeez. Their comment is quite obviously a complementary
        | one in response to the limitation rather than a
        | corrective one about the limitation.
 
    | speedgoose wrote:
    | The 32k tokens version should do fairly well on such
    | codebase. I don't know if it's the one used in ChatGPT.
 
      | Maxion wrote:
      | I'm not even kidding when I say I just did 6h or so of work
      | in around 45 minutes
 
        | worldsayshi wrote:
        | Do you let it refactor your code base? How do you feed
        | the code to it? Just copy paste?
 
        | Maxion wrote:
        | Yup, it's a bit of a learning curve how to get it to
        | output the most useful stuff with the least amount of
        | prompts.
        | 
        | Figure out what your goal is, and then start by giving a
        | wide context and at first it will give wrong answers due
        | to lack of context. With each wrong answer give it some
        | more context fro what you think the solution provide is
        | missing the most. Eventually you get 100% working code,
        | or something so close to it that you can easily and
        | quickly finish it yourself.
        | 
        | This is one strategy, but there are many that you can use
        | to get it to reduce the burden of refactoring.
 
        | [deleted]
 
        | intelVISA wrote:
        | I'm worried it's going to decimate the already wobbly jr
        | market - who are the sr devs of tomorrow to wrangle the
        | LLM output after it replaces the jr's job of coding all
        | day?
 
    | woeirua wrote:
    | The only thing holding this back now is lack of enough
    | context. That's the big nut to crack. How do you hold enough
    | information in memory at once?
 
  | alfalfasprout wrote:
  | Keep in mind OpenAI is able to lose money on GPT*. Inference
  | for the same predictive power will indeed improve (Facebook's
  | recent model is a step in the right direction) but efficiency
  | of running on given hardware likely won't follow moore's law
  | for long.
 
    | Raidion wrote:
    | Are there truely top tier ML optimized chips? I would imagine
    | the hardware space still having room to grow if just because
    | most of the brainpower having been focused on x86, etc.
 
      | moffkalast wrote:
      | There are analog neural net accelerators that can get
      | around lots of existing limitations, but still have a few
      | of their own that need to be figured out.
 
| icapybara wrote:
| Well just the other day people were shocked at how cheap GPT3.5
| was.
 
| jsyolo wrote:
| Can GPT be used for something like feeding it a 2000 page PDF of
| pure text(not english) and ask questions about its contents?
 
  | Kiro wrote:
  | This supports up to 2000 pages: https://www.chatpdf.com/
 
  | jimmyechan wrote:
  | Not yet, but my bet is that we will be able to in the near
  | future. The gpt-4-32k (with a 32K context window) allows for
  | about 52 pages of text
 
  | wmf wrote:
  | No. In the near future they will support ~50 pages.
 
| fswd wrote:
| It's $3.80 for the full 1000 prompt tokens plus 32k token long
| context. But OpenAI doesn't have a monopoly on long context, RWKV
| is free and open source and has virtually an unlimited context
| (as long as you remind it every once and a while). However
| ChatGPT really cannot be matched at this point perhaps except
| LLaMa _Alpaca_ 7B
| 
| EDIT: I accidentially typed Alpine, it's Alpaca.
| https://github.com/tatsu-lab/stanford_alpaca
 
  | sebzim4500 wrote:
  | Alpaca is supposed to be roughly comparable to GPT-3.5, which
  | means it is probably far worse than GPT-4.
 
    | stavros wrote:
    | But also gpt-3.5-turbo is far worse than davinci-003.
 
      | sebzim4500 wrote:
      | By what metric? For most stuff 3.5 is better in my
      | experience. Assuming you are trying to complete an actual
      | task rather than have fun.
 
        | stavros wrote:
        | I've tried to make an assistant with ChatGPT, because
        | it's cheaper, and it's abysmally worse than davinci-003
        | at following instructions and reasoning.
 
        | artdigital wrote:
        | 3.5-turbo is already worse than 3.5-legacy, you can try
        | this with chatgpt plus. Use the normal (turbo) model and
        | then use the legacy model, you will almost certainly feel
        | a difference in quality
        | 
        | Turbo prioritizes speed (probably due to cost?), the
        | legacy model has far higher quality of output. You can
        | confirm this on Reddit where none of the chatgpt plus
        | userbase seems happy with turbo and the general
        | recommendation is to switch it back to legacy.
        | 
        | I tried porting a mini project from davinci to the new
        | turbo api and quickly reverted it, turbo output is a lot
        | more all over the place and very hard to get into
        | something useful. It's a fun chatbot though and still
        | great for simple tasks
        | 
        | You get what you pay for, and there's a reason 3.5-turbo
        | is so cheap
 
  | Metus wrote:
  | There is also https://open-assistant.io by LAION.
 
| Mizza wrote:
| Does anybody have their hands on it? Is it actually 6 times
| better at performing tasks, or are we paying more for improved
| corporate-friendly bumper bowling?
 
  | nonfamous wrote:
  | If you've used Bing Chat, you've used GPT-4:
  | https://blogs.bing.com/search/march_2023/Confirmed-the-new-B...
 
    | wetpaws wrote:
    | _heavily lobotomized version of GPT-4_
 
      | sp332 wrote:
      | GPT-4 has a knowledge cutoff from 2001. Bing can talk about
      | current events.
 
        | stevanl wrote:
        | 2021*
 
    | alchemist1e9 wrote:
    | Bing Chat is more useful in many cases because it provides
    | references that connect to it's responses. I don't like the
    | mobile UI and that it doesn't save your chats for you. Maybe
    | I should try the web interface.
 
  | caturopath wrote:
  | It's difficult to be sure exactly what six times "better"
  | means, but I wouldn't expect something to have to be six times
  | better necessarily to be six times better to be six times more
  | valuable. I wouldn't expect a pitcher making $30MM/yr to be 6x
  | better than one making $5MM/yr, but I could buy that they were
  | 6x more valuable to have on your team.
 
  | VWWHFSfQ wrote:
  | In my anecodotal experience, GPT-4 is at least a million times
  | better than GPT-3.
  | 
  | It's like night and day.
 
    | alchemist1e9 wrote:
    | How are you trying it? I'm ChatGPT Plus subscriber but don't
    | see any change.
 
      | logical_proof wrote:
      | You should have the option when you start a new chat to use
      | default or 4
 
        | alchemist1e9 wrote:
        | Yes now it gave me that. Not sure why it didn't before.
 
  | simonw wrote:
  | Not the API, but if you pay for ChatGPT Plus you can try it out
  | there.
  | 
  | It's very, very impressive so far - I've tried a bunch of
  | things I've previously run against GPT-3 and got noticeably
  | better results - maybe not a 2x or 6x multiple in "quality"
  | (depending on how you measure that) but still very clearly
  | improved.
  | 
  | Posted a few examples here:
  | https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/110022949941148725
 
    | ThrowawayTestr wrote:
    | Those coffee puns are surprisingly good.
 
    | Mizza wrote:
    | Thanks for the reply. I'm not all that impressed by "what
    | is"/information retrieval tasks, is it any better at
    | "thought" tasks like explanatory reasoning and ideogensis?
    | For instance - "How might an agoraphobic kleptomaniac satisfy
    | both of their desires simultaneously?"
 
      | kenjackson wrote:
      | That's a tough question even for me. The answer it did give
      | me was to steal something online. Which was better than
      | anything I was thinking. What did you have in mind?
 
        | Mizza wrote:
        | Ah, interesting! It's a tough question and not one that
        | has an obvious answer, which is what makes it a good
        | test, it requires a little creativity. In my tests,
        | ChatGPT/3 can't/won't answer it.
 
        | kenjackson wrote:
        | GPT-3.5 for me also didn't answer the question, and also
        | gave me a MUCH longer response. I guess score a win for
        | GPT-4.
 
        | djbusby wrote:
        | Steal from a friends house?
 
        | sebzim4500 wrote:
        | You'd still have to go outside to get to said friends
        | house.
        | 
        | I think GPT4 gave the better answer here.
 
| lewdev wrote:
| And website still says "openai."
 
  | newZWhoDis wrote:
  | Maybe they mean "open" as in "open your wallet"?
 
    | saberd wrote:
    | At last they didn't call it freeai
 
  | icapybara wrote:
  | Should they not be able to make money off a world changing new
  | technology they bet billions on?
  | 
  | Does your company offer all its products for free?
 
    | JohnFen wrote:
    | The problem with the name isn't that they're charging. It's
    | that they're implying that they're something in the ballpark
    | of open source when they're not.
 
      | djbusby wrote:
      | OpenTable isn't Open Source. Open, as a word, has more than
      | one context.
 
        | JohnFen wrote:
        | But OpenTable was never open source to begin with, so
        | that association was never made.
        | 
        | Open AI started with a commitment to being open source
        | (thus the "open"), but then they changed their minds and
        | went closed source. I think in this context, keeping the
        | "Open" in their name is a bit deceptive.
        | 
        | It's not the biggest issue in the world, admittedly, but
        | it does leave a bad taste in the mouth.
 
        | djbusby wrote:
        | Oh! that's new information for me. That case does feel
        | like a -n-switch.
 
        | evilduck wrote:
        | OpenTable references restaurants tables and times that
        | are still open to be reserved.
        | 
        | What contextual definition of "open" does OpenAI have? A
        | website open to subscribers?
 
        | wmf wrote:
        | _A website open to subscribers?_
        | 
        | You can scoff at this but Google's models weren't
        | available at any price before today.
 
        | icapybara wrote:
        | An open API you can build products off of. Consider the
        | alternative. They could not let anyone use their models
        | and just release AI products (their own search engine,
        | their own version of Teams, their own self driving car
        | software, their own photoshop competitor, etc).
 
        | jackmott wrote:
        | [dead]
 
    | sebzim4500 wrote:
    | I think it was borderline defensible for them to not release
    | the weights, but now they aren't even telling people the size
    | of the model.
    | 
    | From their website:
    | 
    | >Our mission is to ensure that artificial general
    | intelligence benefits all of humanity
 
    | OmarAssadi wrote:
    | I pay for ChatGPT Plus and have paid a fair bit in OpenAI API
    | fees; I don't care that they are making money. The problem is
    | the openwashing, not the monetization.
 
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