Per the article the scammers pay a minimum of $8,000/person, plus cost to feed, imprison, etc. Pretty sure that a model that only requires electricity and GPUs to run will work out being less expensive than this especially when you consider that GPT-N (YaLM-1T?) will be able to run as many scams as you have GPUs to run inference on concurrently, increasing your possible take, and won't have to sleep.

I think we can probably rule out OpenAI and equivalent cloud services allowing people to use their APIs to run phone scams. It's even worse PR than bots saying racist things.

And if they need to train their own model, you can get a lot of slaves and poor wannabes for the price of one competent NLP engineer, and the slaves and poor wannabes are less likely to decide they're the brains of the outfit and cut you out of the loop.

Fortunately? Somebody already did the training for them! https://github.com/yandex/YaLM-100B

Good luck to a non-engineer trying to set that up to hold structured conversations around parting people with their money

I am morbidly curious what the locations, salaries and working conditions are like. Because obviously they have to recruit people who have some basic level of English language literacy, so that commands a bit of a wage premium (even in India or Bangladesh) over truly unskilled labor.

The article goes into this a little. Obviously there are different groups doing this with different setups, but in some documented examples it's basically slavery

Assuming they don’t just do machine translation.