How long can OpenAI (and Anthropic) incentivize, and keep costs artificially down for tokens to depress investment in private/offline LLMs? It's interesting to watch the cost curves, and burn to see where it stops being venture subsidizes, and the frontier open-weight models become as good.
Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
231–240 of 284 posts
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#232> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re introducing updates to ChatGPT that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for Free users. This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud. Which I think is a fair interpretation of the term. They are general purpose intelligence in that you can get help f…
I found answers from free tier models to be harmful, so helping humans in general isn't what I actually noticed here.
Do you have an example? What type of harm?
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
People tell these models everything . You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that?
> People tell these models everything . You don't think a pretty unethical company can figure out a way to monetize that? I assume research-level questions about scientific topics (with a focus on math and computer science) are not easy to monetize (yes, this is by far the most common kind of question to AI models for me). :-D
I guarantee you're a lot easier to manipulate than you think.
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
That tracks, I wonder what the people who say that the models are too dumb expect to see. Miracles?
Not making mistakes my four years old would not. They are definitely smart enough to be useful, but dumb enough in their weak spots not to deserve the " general intelligence" qualifier.
Well your generally intelligent four year old can't meet the standard you just made, by definition.
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#235How long can OpenAI (and Anthropic) incentivize, and keep costs artificially down for tokens to depress investment in private/offline LLMs? It's interesting to watch the cost curves, and burn to see where it stops being venture subsidizes, and the frontier open-weight models become as good.
Inference is profitable
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#236I think it’s a misread to think the default ChatGPT model switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is available to free users with rate limits). So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier And 5.x instant models were never much to write home…
Claude's rate limits are absolutely shit for free users. 3 chats and its gone for 24 hours.
Yes, but you can create multiple accounts. It has to be inconvenient enough or no one would pay for the higher tiers.
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Terra is awful and not cheap enough to make up for it. I'd suggest using luna or sol.
Terra is far from awful. I've not used Luna enough to judge whether it's significantly better than Luna, but at least via GitHub Copilot, Terra is leaps ahead of Sonnet 5.
It's not awful, but if you are doing research or anything complex and don't want to spend hours fighting it, Sol is not an option.
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI can very plausibly target ads far better than Google can. Email is a good window but lots of people talk in more depth with a chat bot. Search is a good “purchase intent moment” but people are telling a chat bot exactly what they care about in a purchase, rather than making indirect search terms and reading review sites.
> Email is a good window but lots of people talk in more depth with a chat bot. > Search is a good “purchase intent moment” but people are telling a chat bot exactly what they care about in a purchase, rather than making indirect search terms and reading review sites. When I look at my history with AI chatbots, 90 % of the conversations revolve around research-level problems in math and computer science. :-D
Yeah I can easily imagine the “AI for work” version never being ad supported and gradually capturing more of the value created. Thats a very different usage pattern.
But 90% (99%?) of user sessions don’t require a huge amount of reasoning tokens or output; keep in mind LLMs are replacing search for single-turn answers.
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really accurate though? I use Claude in my software job but the majority of my friends do not use it at all. And I never use it for anything other than that either. TBH I don’t find it useful at all for personal use. It’s totally soulless for creative ventures and absolute dogshit at researching the things I want it to be good at (I.e. planning a vacation or finding new music). All that combined with the soci…
+1 to this. Many of my engineer friends don’t use AI even in cases where it could clearly help them. Not out of any principles stance but because they just don’t understand that it could speed up their work. It doesn’t help that the advertising surrounding AI hasn’t communicated its benefits well - either you’ve tried it and you get it or you just don’t know. I would imagine some early horseback riders in the 20th ce…
what industry employs your engineer friends?
Re: Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users
#240I think it’s a misread to think the default ChatGPT model switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is available to free users with rate limits). So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier And 5.x instant models were never much to write home…
I think the main competitor to OpenAI's free tier is Google Search's AI Overview powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite. OpenAI's free tier needs to be notably better than that for people to bother. There's also Gemini 3.6 Flash with a generous free tier.
I'm getting all my questions (3-10 each evening) answered by "Gemini Pro Extended" in the free tier, sometimes with PDFs or photos attached. I wouldn't bother with anything "free" below that, unless I'm agentic coding or something.