A ChatGPT Pro subscription costs 38.6 months of income in low-income countries(policykahani.substack.com) |
A ChatGPT Pro subscription costs 38.6 months of income in low-income countries(policykahani.substack.com) |
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
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.
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.
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...
> if you made a metric like 'Number of Nobel laureates per large bodies of water'
That's a strawman argument.
Why does doing the morally sound thing always have to be easier, better, and cheaper than ruining the world and creating human misery? Why must the morally superior argument be financially unassailable?
I'm getting older and angrier and I've grown tired of meeting greedy, disingenuous adversaries halfway just to have my hand slapped away after they get what they want. Since we've established that conservatives will absolutely put up with pain to harm outgroup bogeymen, I don't listen to their appeals for things that I hope will reduce human misery in the world.
With that in mind: Tax the rich like it's the 1950s, healthcare for all, stop burning fossil fuels, etc. Do it all and see what works, darn it.
We could pay to run LLMS at highly subsidized rates for the global poor. Or we could take the money we would have spent running those LLMs and just give it to the poor. I'm not saying direct cash infusions is the best way of spending that money. But doubling their income seems a lot more effective that a ChatGPT subscription.
Relative to the topic of this thread, providing access to LLMs at a loss would not be at the top of my list of ways to right moral wrongs either. But more broadly, taxing the rich costs nothing, unless one believes that Reagan economic theory is backed by actual empirical evidence. Some actions in civic life are done for symbolic reasons. People doff their hats and apply their right hand to their precordium for symbolic reasons. We can progressively tax all to symbolize something about economic fairness and opposition to the winner-take-all ethos.
Now that I think about it, I'm not quite sure where to put cost-effective LLM access in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-country
A lot of people do though. There are lots of international students, many from low and middle income countries. Obviously from high income families.
> It's normal for international student tuition fees to be inflated by many universities, they try to collect some extra revenue based on a perceived extra prestige,
In the UK the government heavily subsidises the fees of British students (basically defined as having lived in the UK for the previous three years, other than on a student visa - there are some other complexities but that is the simple version) whereas overseas fees are the full market rate.
> Similar to charging different prices for tourists than for locals.
Not a thing in the UK.
Sadly, no, £9k/year is the price for UK students. International students studying in the UK have much higher costs: https://www.uniadmissions.co.uk/international-students/inter...
> Why would someone in Yemen have to go to UK to get a CS degree when they have multiple universities offering the same course.
Same reason they'd be using an American AI company instead of a cheaper one that e.g. runs on their phone.
You are factually wrong, a Yemeni does not need to pay 100+ years of salary to get a CS degree, end of story.
Also, I've been a researcher and have few scientific papers published (you can search for my name on scholar: Enrico Polanski) and I've seen ZERO evidence that a student from Harvard or Imperial to be more knowledgeable than one in unnamed universities from the third world you've never heard about. None.
It's way too personal and student dependent. Plenty of people in ivy league famous colleges study to ace exams and don't remember shit few weeks later. Plenty of people in unnamed universities are genuinely curious.
Your college makes very little difference in how prepared you will be. Single teachers/courses may have an impact, but the location very little.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I never said anything about it being a good thing for people to be unable to code without ai or any other such nonsense.
???
> You are factually wrong, a Yemeni does not need to pay 100+ years of salary to get a CS degree, end of story.
So far as I can tell, the like-for-like comparison is as per the other commenter you responded to: here's a fancy thing rich people in rich countries use, therefore the comparison is to a rich country's degree.
This is because you also don't need to pay 38.6 months of income to get access to an AI. Not even to access OpenAI's best. And even the downgrade after usage limits is not terrible.
Of course, if you don't like this comparison, then sure, I'd accept what you say. I'm disagreeing about the assumptions of what's comparable here.
> I've seen ZERO evidence that a student from Harvard or Imperial to be more knowledgeable than one in unnamed universities from the third world you've never heard about.
Mm. Tempted to agree even without looking you up: I'm British, so my reference point for "fancy university isn't automatically great" is half the British politicians.
OTOH, after I graduated, I did live in Cambridge (UK) for nearly a decade, and I do miss how incredibly densely packed it was with nerds, it's not something I found in other places.
It does though.
1. As one of "the rich" that progressives target continuously, I still can't afford a house in CA. I'm moving to Washington and CA will lose many median Californians' worth of income.
2. Nearly every EU country that attempted wealth taxes (another form of "taxing the rich") recalled them due to capital flight that offset the tax income.
3. California has passed the peak of its Laffer curve, where higher taxes don't provide higher returns due to capital flight. https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/californias-laffer-cur...
4. I personally don't feel the value in working harder or smarter to earn more, because the marginal returns are so low due to taxes. Discouraging innovation is not good for the country.
> We can progressively tax all to symbolize something about economic fairness
Despite the common memes the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world. https://manhattan.institute/article/correcting-the-top-10-ta...
Anyways, "taxing the rich" simply doesn't get us there:
1. You could liquidate every billionaire, including all their assets, and you wouldn't fund the government for 9 months.
2. The rest of us that progressives consider "rich" are W-2s that already pay a fuckton in taxes. If you look at the sources above, this is explained clearly.
3. Contrary to the meme, the biggest objective gap in tax income is not on the rich but on our middle class, which does not pay its fair share wrt our EU counterparts (explaining the gap necessary to fund the desired social services, which taxing the rich would not cover due to its comparatively small size). 40% of Americans pay no federal income tax! https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ten-myths-about-the-u-s-tax...
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Finally, at the core of your assumption is the idea that more taxes help. As someone that has worked in both government-funded labs and government contracting, I can promise you they don't. The sheer wastage is mind boggling, honestly sickening. It makes the our tech mega corps look tiny. I used to have a progressive view on taxation until I saw the infinite money black hole that was government spending.
Your pearl clutching about government waste seemed weird to me until I read your links. Manhattan Institute? You're citing positions from right-wing think tanks after Project 2025?
Unless you need guidance for how to kidnap gardeners or stop women from voting, anything coming these organizations is dangerously ridiculous.
What an excellent demonstration of shutting off factual information to support your own biases.
- You know nothing about the CA housing market vs income and income tax, or my personal situation, but you simply assume I'm lying.
- You're intentionally sticking your head in the sand because you think the paper is from a "right wing think tank" - regardless of the fact that an extremely well-respected fiscally liberal podcast, Freakonomics, supported the findings.
- You're somehow asserting that because I find the findings in an economic paper compelling, I must support the erosion of civil liberties, in an attempt to reduce my argument to the absurd and insult my character.
It shocks me that people can engage in discussions so simplistically and maliciously. HN has deteriorated so much because of comments like yours. Please just refrain from participating entirely if you're going to yell into the void and then not engage in good faith. Reddit is that way.
Let's look at "rich flight" through the lens that is not colored with difference to the affluent. The idea here is that, if you make rich folk pay more taxes, they'll pack up their hoard pile of gold, jewels, and dwarf skeletons and fly away to somewhere they're less taxed and more appreciated.
That sounds great until you realize that rich people have massive roots in the places they live. Their expensive homes and professional lives are very closely tied to the community in which they're located. This flight is something that gets threatened very frequently and acted upon very rarely. If past performance is any indicator of future returns, then I'd gladly take my chances that those jerks stick around and pay their fair share.
>You're intentionally sticking your head in the sand because you think the paper is from a "right wing think tank" - regardless of the fact that an extremely well-respected fiscally liberal podcast, Freakonomics, supported the findings.
My disgust comes from actually looking through the Mahattan Institute and seeing it's every bit as trash-flavored as the Heritage Foundation. I absolutely don't need to entertain their disingenuous, fascist-adjacent prattle. After the last few months, it's advisable to write off anything that still claims to be conservative. They've squandered all benefit of the doubt and, for the sake of our own survival, should be reviled at every opportunity.
On a more targeted note, you are switching between "I find this idea intriguing" and "this idea is a fact that's supported by the liberals on Freakonomics" so fast I'm getting whiplash over here. Freakonomics, while entertaining, has been spectactularly wrong enough times that it's more entertainment than anything else. You're appealing to an authority that has a predilection for results that are "surprising."
I don't know if you support the erosion of civil liberties, but it seems like you enjoy repeating things from folks that do.