Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 148 posts

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#41

Post by watwut »

LoganDark wrote: post #17
ses1984 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think Amazon did that…?

Amazon would absolutely take a loss on certain products in order to dominate the category, squeeze out competitors and then bring the price back up. It's one of the reasons they're so dominant in general now. Also one of the reasons why Amazon Basics has basically everything that exists and they're usually at or near the top of their respective categories -- third-party sellers simply can't compete.

Whole SV is subsidizing things to kill competitiom it all the time. L

However, Amazon was not racking debt the way these companies are. Both their behavior and financials were miles apart from these ai companies.

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#42

Post by LoganDark »

sschueller wrote: post #33
LoganDark wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon would absolutely take a loss on certain products in order to dominate the category, squeeze out competitors and then bring the price back up. It's one of the reasons they're so dominant in general now. Also one of the reasons why Amazon Basics has basically everything that exists and they're usually at or near the top of their respective categories -- third-party sellers simply can't compete.

Amazon wasn't competing against open and free models that are starting to be good enough running on existing laptops. OpenAI and Anthropic's moat is filling with cement faster than they can dig.

I have 128 GB of unified memory (M4 Max) and the user experience with local inference is still pretty bad. I'm so glad something like llama.cpp exists so I don't have to wrangle Python (which I hate), but OpenCode is entirely disrespectful of the KV-cache so I had to switch to Pi (but Pi is going relatively well actually).

Even so, I can't really run at hundreds of tokens per second which is practically table stakes for my work. Even if I did manage to run that fast, the model would probably be completely braindead and stomp all over the task.

Wish I could afford an M5 Max but I've been between jobs for months without even a single interview. Sucks to be a developer these days.

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#43

Post by swiftcoder »

ses1984 wrote: post #15
tty456 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long did AMZN do it for?

I don’t think Amazon did that…?

Amazon was pretty famous for never actually posting a profit for their first ~10 years of operation

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#44

Post by istvan0 »

They cut prices and get more customers who are going to move to the next vendor that cuts prices even more or when they jack up the prices again.

I am not complaining, I like my investor subsidised tokens, I don't see what these companies see as their end goal when it's becoming more and more possible to run a competent LLM locally(even with today's RAM prices).

I am surprised that there is no Claude or ChatGPT machine that I could buy, I feel like they should be opening up that model, but I guess subscriptions look better on balance sheets.

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#46

Post by mk89 »

pseudosavant wrote: post #9
Overpower0416 wrote: post #6

This pre-IPO battle is very entertaining. Curious how it all ends

Increasingly it looks like it will end with a bubble bursting. LLMs and AI will survive, like the internet survived the dotcom bubble. But OpenAI and Anthropic could just be today's AOL and Yahoo.

I used to think of a bubble too.

However, I think actually that while it won't give the results expected (AI agents run the company, build all features, etc.), it will nevertheless become a developer tool like IDEs, something "you have to have".

It's here to stay but probably with more realistic expectations than some CEO/CTO are pushing for (agents for everything, nobody writes 1 LOC, self healing systems, etc).

So the market expectations will be probably resized, but these tools are here to stay. Be it for cybersecurity (from CVEs to cyber warfare) alone, that's already worth all the money they are throwing a it.

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#48

Post by d--b »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #11

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release. The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable. If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

The benchmark is not everything, the LLMs have their “personality” and GPT is annoying AF.

Also, I don’t about others, but I personally strongly dislike OpenAI’s leadership’s hypocrisy. I find them losing the race highly satisfying.

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#49

Post by boc »

mattjoyce wrote: post #28
WhitneyLand wrote: post #11

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release. The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable. If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

At the right price, these model don't need to be the best, good enough will do. I think we're fast approaching good enough for most users.

OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

Re: OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

#50

Post by kouteiheika »

mattjoyce wrote: post #28
WhitneyLand wrote: post #11

The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release. The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable. If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.

At the right price, these model don't need to be the best, good enough will do. I think we're fast approaching good enough for most users.

This. Here's a quick experiment I did yesterday.

I got a new $20 Claude subscription to try the new Fable model. I gave it a single prompt, and it barely finished, using up my whole session quota (it was at ~95% when it finished) and 10% of my weekly quota.

For comparison, with the Kimi Code $40 subscription I can pretty much constantly run two/three agents in parallel for the whole week, and I never run out of quota. I can blindly throw it at anything and everything without worrying about hitting the limits. (And it's not exactly a cheap model to run -- it has 1 trillion parameters!)

Is Kimi as good as Claude? Of course not. But you don't need the absolute state-of-art for most things. If I don't have exceptionally difficult tasks it makes no sense to use it. Just throw Kimi at it, and even if it needs to run 2 or 3 times longer in the background I don't care, because I'm not running out of tokens there.

Post reply on HN