They're trying to bark up a tree that might happen to be backed by the People's Republic of China. That's not their league, and even Microsoft would think twice before getting into that kind of kerfuffle.

I think commenters don't know about Bill Gates personally wining and dining Hu Jintao in Medina 20 years ago.

They're also still deep in their loss-making phase, the whole "incumbent squashing upstarts" stance is a lot easier to pull off when you're settled and printing money

$7-8b in costs so they're losing $5b

Does that include R&D?

If running ChatGPT costs $1B/y and they make $3B/y on it, tacking on the cost of R&D on top doesn't seem very fair.

why not? if their product is “SOTA LLM” then they can’t just lay off r&d and coast. Years from now nobody is going to be paying for “that authentic gpt4 sound”. LLMs aren’t guitars.

Afaik it includes inference which they seem to be offering at a loss.