Other than the potential liability, cost may also be a factor.
Back in April 2025, Altman mentioned people saying "thank you" was adding “tens of millions of dollars” to their infra costs. Wondering if adding per-message timestamps would cost even more.
I think "thank you" are used for inference in follow-up messages, but not necessarily timestamps.
I just asked ChatGPT this:
> Suppose ChatGPT does not currently store the timestamp of each message in conversations internally at all. Based on public numbers/estimates, calculate how much money it will cost OpenAI per year to display the timestamp information in every message, considering storage/bandwidth etc
The answer it gave was $40K-$50K. I am too dumb and inexperienced to go through everything and verify if it makes sense, but anyone who knows better is welcome to fact check this.
Altman was being dumb; being polite to LLMs makes them produce higher quality results which results in less back-and-forth, saving money in the long run.
What fascinates me is how someone at MSFT managed to get their own button (the Copilot) button approved. Having your own button or tab is a big deal (I remember we debated having our own shopping tab on the Instagram app while I was at Meta - and we had to abandon it when it didn't get the traction we were hoping for).
These people have a UI button AND a hardware button on actual consumer devices, and it doesn't do anything. How?
"I cut my healthcare costs by 90% by canceling insurance and doctor visits."
In all seriousness, this is a recurring pattern on HN and it sends the wrong message. It's almost as bad as vibecoding a paid service and losing private customer data.
There was a thread here awhile ago, 'How We Saved $500,000 Per Year by Rolling Our Own “S3' [1]. Then they promptly got hacked. [2]
You just need to vibe configure your server too so that it matches your application.
Seriously, I think for most services Hetzner is the better option. No provider lock-in, easier configuration (you cannot tell me AWS/Azure configuration is easier than system administration, these services change every 3 months and use non-standard tools).
Most services can stomach a technical fault. Recoverability is more important. There are some exceptions to this and that highly depends on the nature of the service. Nobody here described the nature of their services, so we can only speculate.
Even after reading the source, it doesn’t seem like they were hacked? Or if they were, they were not accused of such.
I do think hand rolling your own thing is fraught. But it is very confusing to equate one mother’s complaint to “they have been hacked”.
PS: The people who made their own s3 rans a baby monitor company. News article is about a mother reporting hearing a weird voice from the baby monitour.
As a former Meta employee (also dealt with Shopping and Ads), I am quite shocked at the percentage of "commerce" scams in my Instagram feed now. Easily 9 out of 10 promoted "buy" posts use AI videos of non-existent products leading to scammy sites. Any current employees willing to chime in?
Back in April 2025, Altman mentioned people saying "thank you" was adding “tens of millions of dollars” to their infra costs. Wondering if adding per-message timestamps would cost even more.