Why? I don't see a practical argument for why Google would want to offer this service at a massive loss.
Not everything can be reasonably available to everyone if it is cost prohibitive.
Money don't grow on the trees. Someone has to work or take debt. The question is should rich countries sponsor poor? Probably yes. How much? Trump decided enough is enough. EU want US to keep sponsoring the war. You know, they want it to continue but don't want to pay for it. So they try to hijack US government again by attacking Trump personally.
Immigration can be solved by border control. That's what dems fought so hard against trying to get more voters in. Another reason: they control food distribution.
Normally software has a near 0 marginal cost. This allows sellers to offer steap discounts because they cost the seller almost nothing. In many cases, sellers are better off having you use their software without paying instead of not using it; because they are out almost no money, but have increased their odds of a future sale
High end LLMs are different. Sellers are not setting their price to maximize revenue. They are setting their price to cover the marginal cost of providing the service plus margin.
Lowering their price is not a matter of price discrimination. It is a matter of engineering a cheeper product.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
² Nor do they cost the same everywhere.
³ In the sense that it’s not a subscription. I get that in the US you may be paying for student loans for an unreasonably long time, but that’s not normal for the rest of the world.
Of course, someone from a low income nation is most likely to go to university in their own country which is a whole lot cheaper (and a lot of low and middle income countries have free or subsidised university education - which is why British hospitals were historically had lots of South Asian doctors, and now Africans). If their own country does not offer the right degree or demand for limited places is very high they can study in another low or middle income country (I know Sri Lankans who have studied in India).
You can't compare the cost of a degree in the US with how much that person would pay in their country (even for a top uni there)
And even if you literally compare US costs, that person would probably be eligible to scholarships etc (if they manage to be selected, of course)
The actual cost of a CS degree varies a lot depending on the country, but here in Vietnam I think it's about $1000 per term at public universities. That's not cheap, it's about a year at minimum wage here. But it's a long, long way from your claim of 124 years.
And to forestall the obvious next claim: Vietnamese education is quite good actually. Maybe you won't be going to Harvard but there's plenty of universities in the top 1000 worldwide with a few in the top 200 (no idea for the ranking for CS specifically though).
£9,535/year * 3 year degree / 124 years ~= £231/year ~= 310 USD/year
UN estimates GDP/capita of Yemen and Burundi were less than this, that Tajikistan has lower gross average monthly wages. Those are nominal, not PPP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
The World Bank numbers here are adjusted for cost of living, say that 1.31% of the world population are living on a dollar a day: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...
It's an international economy problem, not an AI problem.
Just remember that a Wal Mart $50 phone is faster than a supercomputer from the 70s/80s. Prices will go down.
1. the companies don’t get any cheaper compute because a user is from a low-income country.
2. this is an AI subscription, it’s purely a luxury product. We do not need this to survive. If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.
- The latest concept sports car costs a few lifetimes of income in low-income countries
- Aircraft carrier costs 200 GDP of Tuvalu
I thought China fixed this for most of the world, at least for Africa it's fixed. It's the Internet access being the bottleneck now.
How is it fixed for Africa? Africa has a ton of phones, but it does not have a lot of smart phones. There is a reason that SMS and USSD are corner stones of the african digital economy.
There are more than 8 billion people on this world. By your own account, 3 billion of them do not have smart phones.
> The device hurdle is gone.
Evidently not. There are a lot of countries that still have a smartphone penetration rate of <50%.
We're talking about people with low income here. We're talking about people that cannot even afford bicycles for transportation.
No. The imputed value of goods produced for self-consumption is included in GDP calculations.
The UN SNA term of art is own final consumption: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/SNA2008.pdf
If 2000 USD / month would replace a developer, then it would be a fair price.
Problem is that none of existing models are capable to replace a developer. They all need babysitting. And I am saying that as a probable customer who would actually pay something between 200-2000USD for AI junior developer which can actually work and understand what it is doing. Either those models will start doing what has been promised by tech CEOs, or AI winter is upon us.
Median people from the Democratic Republic of Congo will have to work for 6 years to pay a PG&E bill.
Have a look at industrial accident data globally, considering underreporting in developing nations.
- Same, environmental accidents.
- Same, WMD proliferation, including chem, bio and nuclear.
- Same, malicious cyber.
Now, ask yourself if we have enough problems aligning & regulating AI at the moment?
Are we sure that in the name of laudable egalitarian ideals that we are prepared for the second and third order effects of broad global accessibility to AI, including frontier models?
However, inference infrastructure is anything but free, and I'd estimate that cost to currently dominate the fraction of dollar per token.
There is an access gap to almost everything including water when we extend to low income countries.
Also, don't forget that Google for decades have provided free Google search that has allowed the world to search for information for free.
someone has to pay for the servers at the end. are you asking for openai to subsidize ChatGPT Pro for low-income countries? Since OpenAI is for-profit entity focussed on profits, I don't think it might be a wise idea financially for OpenAI to do so.
As LLM subscriptions become more expensive simply hiring folks from low income countries becomes a more cost effective solution.
There are still many countries where digital literacy is very low.
So first step is to ensure everyone has internet/mobile phone/laptop and knows how to use them.
Not that the rural third world don’t already have phones. Whether they are engineering to be as addictive as crack like in the west I’m not sure.
Messages above ~65k tokens are rejected. Messages between about 50k-65k are accepted, but the right-side of the text is pruned before the LLM call is made. Messages just below ~50k are accepted, but are then partly "forgot" on any follow up questions (either the entire first prompt is excluded, or the left-side of the text is chopped off).
Realistically, it's a 55-65k token limit (40k token question, 15k token response).
They want you to attach your context so they can use RAG.
I can't even be bothered filing a bug report, because I know this shit is intentional. The mistakes always run in a favorable direction.
(GPT-5-Pro is a genuinely good model however, and usage limits are generous)
Albeit I'm no economist, I'm quite sure you should compare salaries to costs, not gdp/capita. Whether unemployed/retirees and children can afford a ChatGPT pro subscription seems irrelevant.
Let's take Madagascar, GDP per capita is $ 538. But the average salary is above $ 150/ month.
What interests us really though is not really the average salary in the country, rather the white collar (the end user's) worker's one.
In Madagascar software engineering salaries seems to range from an average $ 850/month for junior roles to well beyond $ 2000 per senior/specialized roles.
And this further ignores that such expenses are generally paid by employees, often with bulk discounts compared to B2C customers.
Which leads us to conclude that if ChatGPT Pro is such a performance multiplier, it is worth the price even in the poorest of the poorest countries in the world.
A person in a low-income country would also need to work for 38.6 months ($2400?) to afford to hire one of my electricians for two days of labor. Things in high-income countries are expensive, who would’ve guessed??
If I lived somewhere that the average income is $200/month, there’s a lot of things on Maslow’s Hierarchy that come before ‘ChatGPT Pro’… like um a stable electrical grid, clean water, sewer system, etc.
Seriously, what is the point of this observation? Few if any workers earning low wages have any use for a ChatGPT Pro subscription?
But tbe chart on that page shows very high productivity
