Your cheap cynicism makes OpenAI's lower prices sound like a reason to avoid using them, but that's backwards! It's a better strategy to use them now while prices are low and switch later if necessary. Nobody knows who will have the best prices later, so better to decide later.

I hope everyone recognizes they aim to make you dependent on their intelligence rather than your own.

Or more efficient models/faster hardware close the gap between here and profitability.

I wouldn't be surprised if every $10 you add to the subscription cost halves your audience.

It was obvious indeed, but damn does it feel good to have ridden the May 25 - Aug. 26 gravy train.

Now, let's see how the Anthropic IPO goes.

They won’t be able to. Open models exist and run on a Mac you can buy now or in October.

It is really about data. The endgame is not about hoping devs give them money.

Or to just give users enough usage to find categories in which it is useful for them.

I pay the $200/mo., and don’t regret it for an instant - I have a project manager, an executive assistant, a business analyst, a software developer and an international accountant, for an absolute song.

As long as there is no path to profitability going from subsidized to fully paid tokens we are making them lose money.

The business model works by over provisioning, which means you actually do want to cap the people who will attempt fully utilize the service.

Once you know someone is going to use 100% of the service rather than 25%, you have to charge them full price. That's why you see them fail over to API pricing.

> Seems mostly good

What's not good for the customer is the constant change of rules. It is bait & switch.

You’re going to get multiple tiers (as we already are). You’re always going to pay top dollar for frontier models, but you’re going to find things highly discounted if you’re willing to move off the frontier. See GLM 5.3 Flash, for instance.

It's just doomer nonsense to me.

On the internet you have 4 possible outcomes.

Say things are going to suck and they suck. You look brilliant.

Say things are going to suck, and they don't suck. Nobody cares because it doesn't suck.

Say things are going to be good, and they're good. A few attaboys for getting it right, but nobody cares.

Say things are going to be good, and they suck. You look like a moron.

Because of negativity bias everyone is leaning towards predicting DOOOOOOOOOOM. People aren't even consciously doing this, it's just a factor of the medium, because looking like a moron hurts way more than a few attaboys.

I think in about a year, we're going to see a scad of these ASICS like chat jimmy running year old models on dedicated hardware. Imagine racks and racks full of Astra but running at 15,000 tokens a second or whatever? Imagine swarms of them running the models we have today essentially for "free." That's where we're going to be. The bottleneck will be production, tbh, not demand.

"Hey Astra-Silicon, solve the Goldbach Conjecture!" Sure, it might take a few hours and be totally un-readable to a human being, but the 6m lines of Lean or whatever will be correct. Then what? What can we start doing then?

Ya, setting aside any judgement about what's "right", this strategy doesn't seem profitable. There's no real moat between one model/provider to another, switching is relatively easy. I don't understand how this is supposed to work for them.

It strikes me as similar to UPS / USPS / Fedex -- everyone uses the mail, and they mostly use whichever is cheapest for their requirements. I don't think there's much loyalty to specific services, and people are happy to switch between the options

There is so much competition among frontier labs, but it is a competition to see who can burn the biggest pile of cash. Once your competitors flame out, they are gone, and you are free to raise prices. Think WalMart/Uber tactics.

It should seem obvious they are seeking governmental intervention to limit “unaligned, or unsafe” alternatives.

Opencode Go's value is pretty poor these days. It was better a month or two ago.

I use the $100 which currently doesn't have the 5h limit.

The 5h limit hurts the most on the $20 plan because the limit is already very small (5h is ~15% of your weekly).

I think Sam would be saying something pithier. And the 20x Pro plan absolutely runs at a loss, so I think he would be the last one to promote it.

Hm, it seems like it'd make sense to automate a script to send one small prompt at, say, 7 or 8am so that you get your reset around noon instead of having to wait until 5h or more into the workday.

I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary

I think the people that are saying that mean that the inference is massively profitable. From what I've seen, the margins are between 50 and 90% on an API call. It's the training that's very, very expensive!

As far as I understand, for both OpenAI and Anthropic, currently the majority of their GPUs are being used for training, with only a smaller portion being used for actual customer serving.

I’ve not heard anyone say that the whole thing is profitable. Companies like Anthropic have said that inference is profitable, but I assume that’s only on a steady state basis, which nobody in the industry has ever reached at this point. As far as I know, everyone is still burning cash with data center buildouts and overall training costs.