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Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. The best things in life or the best AI at least aren't actually free. From American

public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT have caught on like wildfire.

In large part because they are impressive and also because they're free or nearly free for

the public to use. But just because a service doesn't charge doesn't mean it doesn't have a cost

and sophisticated large language models cost a lot to build and maintain. A price tag AI

companies are going to have to recoup eventually. Says Will Oremis who wrote about this recently

for the Washington Post. So there's a huge initial cost when you're training the models.

But then that cost in the long run is actually dwarfed by the cost of just running the models.

The computing cost every time you use a chatbot or every time you call on one of these models.

And it runs only on specific high end chips called GPUs for a set of GPUs that can run AI

applications can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. And it's not just chatbots. I mean,

Microsoft is putting GPT type software into everything from Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint,

Bing, Skype, you know. And so the proliferation of these large language models across all kinds

of applications just racks up more and more and more computing cost.

Yeah. And I mean, in the case of chat GPT, this has sort of been referred to as like the most

quickly adopted technology in history, you know, in a matter of months got 100 million users.

And people using it for just all kinds of silly things probably without kind of considering

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