How to best integrate genai features in B2C mobile app?

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Mobile

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AI

Hi everyone,

I am trying to find information on a very specific kind of usage for mobile applications.

You may have heard of the following ones:
-General chats: Chaton, ChatBox, Ask AI, Chat & Ask AI, Chat Nova, etc.
-Image GenAI: Face Dance, Wonder AI, Remini, etc.

Most of those apps are basically improved version of the most popular GenAI solutions. Like to call them "ChatGPT on steroid" or "Dall-E on steroid".

There are different sources of information saying that some of those apps are essentially relying on existing technologies like GPT3.5 or 4 (for the general chats) or largely popular model such as Stable diffusion (for the Image GenAI).

Still, something bothers me: If those apps were just "wrappers" of existing commercial GenAI models, the cost of just calling a commercial API would probably be gigantic considering the high amount of users & the time they spend on apps.

Would anyone here have experience in creating similar B2C solutions that might extensively rely on commercial GenAI API such as the GPT one? I'd like to better understand the rational of using a commercial API rather than self hosting a model like Llama 2 - 3. I assume there are plenty of parameters to considers, the cost but also the technical complexity, time to go to market, operational constraints, etc.

Cheers

What I have tried:

I have made a quick calculation. Popular chat app tend to cost about $5 / user per month when using GPT 3.5 API for conversation mostly. Those apps tend to charge $7.5 / week. So even with the marketing cost to acquire user, we could assume those apps are indeed profitable when just calling GPT API.

But I have no experiences when it comes to deploying & hosting a sophisticated model like Llama. I assume there is a fixed cost to deploy & host the model & a variable cost that evolves depending on the number of users & queries right? I am just not sure where to start with the numbers.

Would it be fair to assume that a app using GPT API is consistent below a certain number of users but above a certain (probably large) number, it makes sense to self host? (I just can't figure out how many users would be the threshold)

Also, would there be a reason to self host image model vs chat model? Looks like GenAI companies have been more active when it comes to self hosting / training image model

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/codeway-uses-cloud-storage-fuse-for-generative-ai-workloads[^]

https://aws.amazon.com/fr/solutions/case-studies/codeway-case-study/[^]