When I say thank you, I am actually thanking the entity of AI, the tech, the people behind the tech, and all of humanity for the knowledge that makes it worthwhile.
ive spent decades not saying please and thank you to computers. its simply too late to start now and theres also the risk that my microwave or alarm clock could start getting “lofty ideas” if they see how polite im being to LLMs all of a sudden. its just not worth the hassle
I’m one of those who do it so that I’m spared during the robot uprising.
Don’t they charge per token?
So they’re also making money every time somebody says please or thank you…
As far as I know, they lose money on every prompt, even with the $200/mo “Pro” subscription.
Well sure, answering the queries continues to cost the company money regardless of what subscription the user has. The company would definitely make more money if the users paid for subscription and then made zero queries.
I’m not sure how to interpret your counterpoint. Can you clarify? It’s an unprofitable business model unless people pay and don’t use it?
My point was that “lose money on every prompt” would be true in a technical sense regardless of how much people were paying for a subscription. The subscription money is money in, and the cost of calculations is money out. It’s still money out regardless of what is coming in.
As for whether the business is profitable or not, it’s not so easy to tell unless you’re an insider. Companies like this basically never make a ‘profit’ on paper, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t enriching themselves. They are counting their own pay as part of the costs, and they set their pay to whatever they like. They are also counting various research and expansion efforts as part of the cost. So yeah, they might not have any excess money to pay dividends to shareholders, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t profitable.
I am happy to hear that people say please and thank you. When Siri/Alexa came out, we taught the kids to always say please and thank you when addressing them. If you can be polite to an AI, then you can be polite to a human.
its a hammer, do you teach the kids to thank their tools?
I understand teaching the children respect and how to behave, but AI and Siri/Alexa are just tools. They don’t need to be anthropomorphizing ai, IMO that is dangerous on a humanity level scale.
Respecting your tools is a pretty fundamental thing to learn. Whatever that respect looks like for one tool or another.
but dont anthropomorphize your tools. And it’s odd when someone does.
People don’t usually interact with a hammer by talking to it. They interact by holding it, placing it, hammering with it. Respect for a hammer (or similar tool) would be based around those kinds of actions.
Whereas people do interact with a chatbot by talking to it. So then respect for a chatbot would be built around what is said.
People can show respect for a hammer, a house, a dinner prepared by their spouse, their spouse, a chatbot, etc… but respect for each of those things will look a bit different.
