OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80% • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#281

Post by miki123211 » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #244

34679 wrote: post #226

I'd like to offer a cautionary tale that involves my experience after seeing this post. First, I tried enabling o3 via OpenRouter since I have credits with them already. I was met with the following: "OpenAI requires bringing your own API key to use o3 over the API. Set up here: https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations " So I decided I would buy some API credits with my OpenAI account. I ponied up $20 and started…

This is in part "abuse prevention"[1] and in part marketing . Making customers feel like they're signing up to access state secrets makes the models seem more "special". Sama is well known to use these SV marketing tricks, like invite-only access, waiting lists, etc to psychologically manipulate users into thinking they're begging for entry to an exclusive club instead of just swiping a credit card to access an API.…

Gemini doesn't give you reasoning via API though, at least as far as I'm aware.

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#282

Post by bratao » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:24 AM UTC

34679 wrote: post #226

I'd like to offer a cautionary tale that involves my experience after seeing this post. First, I tried enabling o3 via OpenRouter since I have credits with them already. I was met with the following: "OpenAI requires bringing your own API key to use o3 over the API. Set up here: https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations " So I decided I would buy some API credits with my OpenAI account. I ponied up $20 and started…

You are even luck to be able to verify. Mine give me an error about "Session expired" for months!! Support do not reply.

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#283

Post by jiggawatts » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #281

jiggawatts wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in part "abuse prevention"[1] and in part marketing . Making customers feel like they're signing up to access state secrets makes the models seem more "special". Sama is well known to use these SV marketing tricks, like invite-only access, waiting lists, etc to psychologically manipulate users into thinking they're begging for entry to an exclusive club instead of just swiping a credit card to access an API.…

Gemini doesn't give you reasoning via API though, at least as far as I'm aware.

Works for me?

Maybe you’re thinking of deep research mode which is web UI only for now.

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#284

Post by TZubiri » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #117

bitpush wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is your costs also scale with revenue. Ideally you want to have control costs as you scale (the first you build is expensive, but as you make more your costs come down). For OpenAI, the more people use the product, the same you spend on compute unless they can supplement it with another ways of generating revenue. I dont unfortunately think OpenAI will be able to hit sustained profitability (see Netflix f…

All costs are not equal. There is a classic pattern of dogfights for winner-take-most product categories where the long term winner does the best job of acquiring customers at the expense of things like "engineering to reduce costs". I have no idea how the AI space is going to shake out, but if I had to pick between OpenAI's mindshare in the broadest possible cohort of users vs. best/most efficient model, I'd pick th…

Unlike Uber or whatsapp, there's no network effect. Don't think this is a winner takes all market, there was an article where we had this discussion earlier. Players who get a small market share are immediately profitable proportional to the market share (given a minimum size is exceeded.)

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#285

Post by DrammBA » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

abeindoria wrote: post #268

__float wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're probably more concerned about fake accounts and people finding ways to get free stuff.

What free stuff? It requires a paid API.

With no intention to tarnish your pure world view, paid services with low registration requirements are ideal for account laundering and subscription fraud with stolen credit cards

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#286

Post by mrcwinn » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:32 AM UTC

Only at HN can the reaction to an 80% price drop be a wall of criticism.

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#287

Post by Marsymars » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:40 AM UTC

34679 wrote: post #226

I'd like to offer a cautionary tale that involves my experience after seeing this post. First, I tried enabling o3 via OpenRouter since I have credits with them already. I was met with the following: "OpenAI requires bringing your own API key to use o3 over the API. Set up here: https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations " So I decided I would buy some API credits with my OpenAI account. I ponied up $20 and started…

Oh I also recently got locked out of my linkedin account until I supply data to Persona.

(So I’m remaining locked out of my linkedin account.)

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#288

Post by conradev » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:56 AM UTC

artrockalter wrote: post #277

conradev wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more excited by the process, like, there exists a model out there so powerful it requires KYC which, after using it, fair! It found a zero day

[flagged]

There is an ISO standard for digital ID, the same one used by the TSA, and it’s coming to the web soon! Human verification is going to continue to grow in importance.

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#289

Post by conradev » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:57 AM UTC

__float wrote: post #265

conradev wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more excited by the process, like, there exists a model out there so powerful it requires KYC which, after using it, fair! It found a zero day

I think they're probably more concerned about fake accounts and people finding ways to get free stuff.

I actually think they’re worried about foreign actors using it for…

- generating synthetic data to train their own models

- hacking and exploitation research

etc

Re: OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%

#290

Post by programjames » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 3:00 AM UTC

Davidzheng wrote: post #234

TZubiri wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a PR statement, it's a change in price. Literally putting money where the mouth is.

o3 probably used to have a HUGE profit margin on inference, so I'd say it's unclear how much optimo was done;

I find it pretty plausible they got an 80% speedup just by making optimized kernels for everything. Even when GPUs say they're being 100% utilized, there are so many improvements to be made, like:

- Carefully interleaving shared memory loading with computation, and the whole kernel with global memory loading.

- Warp shuffling for softmax.

- Avoiding memory access conflicts in matrix multiplication.

I'm sure the guys at ClosedAI have many more optimizations they've implemented ;). They're probably eventually going to design their own chips or use photonic chips for lower energy costs, but there's still a lot of gains to be made in the software.