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CobrastanJorji • today at 1:51 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

Figure a "mental health crisis" human conversation takes 30 minutes. Three million incidents per week would require 37,500 qualified mental health counselors on the phones working a 40 hour shift that week. Figure they make $75k/year each. You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response, and you're employing like 10% of all of the health counselors in the US. And all you're providing is 30 minute chats.

Replies

godelski • today at 2:18 AM

  > You're now spending $3 billion per year on crisis response
Honestly? That's really affordable[0]. That would be cheap if these were just for the US but it looks like these are global numbers. We spend $2bn/yr alone on "BREASTFEEDING PEER COUNSELORS AND BONUSES"[1]. I mean let's be serious, even in the article that OpenAI published says that it is a small portion of their users. So it doesn't "need to scale" as the scale is relatively small. But just because it is small doesn't mean it is unimportant.

$3bn/yr is a lot of people money, but it is nothing for government money.

Edit: Last round of OpenAI funding was $122bn[2] and in the same article they are saying that they are generating $2bn in revenue per month. While that's not profit, it is worth mentioning that what you are saying "doesn't scale" is about 12% of the revenue of something that does scale. A single company. And mind you if we implemented what you're proposing it would be available to all the AI companies and more. Making it only a smaller drop in the bucket, not larger.

[0] Not to mention that better mental health care services will result in savings elsewhere. It's always way more expensive to fix a broken pipe that's flooding your house than it is to fix a pipe with a small crack. "Don't fix what ain't broken" is used too broadly. Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, but people just can't seem to understand this.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3510

[2] https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/

Gigachad • today at 1:56 AM

Mark Zuckerberg can spend $80B on the failed metaverse experiment, but can't spare some relative pocket change on solving the psychosis issue his products caused.

intended • today at 9:29 AM

So what?

That underinvestment is the entire reason their stock prices are so high. This is effectively pollution of our information economy and environment, and the costs are offloaded to society.

The fact that we have the first generation with lower education attainment is not a problem for their stock prices or operational profit.

Tech has ungodly profit margins, because they are all about scaling without having to bring people in. Sadly there is no such thing as a free lunch, and if firms are made to clean up their mess?

Oil spills affect Oil firms more than Tech fallout affects Tech firms.