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

OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

developers.openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 352 posts

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#121

Post by blobbers »

The top comment on this thread was about AI models being easily distilled being a stroke of luck.

This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover. This fundamental to the progress of intelligence and understanding.

It should not be surprising that AI can be distilled. It's the logical method of training; I would hope that each frontier model is in fact not trained 'from scratch' each time.

We should expect future frontier models are simply distilled versions trained by specialist models, the same way humans learn from a series of professors, papers and canonical books on each different subject material. Models like this can be trained incrementally, or a so called Mixture of Experts (MoE).

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#123

Post by petercooper »

eigenspace wrote: post #9

The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck. 10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly. Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.…

It reminds me conceptually of the idea of using a ST:TNG replicator to just give you another replicator of your own, or asking a stereotypical genie for "infinite wishes". The genie is indeed out of the bottle in many ways.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#124

Post by AmazingTurtle »

Ringz wrote: post #122

The price difference to Deepseek models (deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp) is still significant while the performance difference is not.

But I'm fine paying +50% more for +5% increased performance because it will pay off.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#125

Post by nozzlegear »

maxgiraldo wrote: post #106
eigenspace wrote: post #9

The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck. 10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly. Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.…

OpenAI could still have a significant moat. ChatGPT occupies most consumers’ minds when they think about AI and has become a household name. Google won because search became a habit-forming product people grew accustomed to using. Bing was once effectively indistinguishable from Google Search, yet still failed to achieve mass adoption because users had already become accustomed to “Googling” things. The same could be…

> If OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, they will maintain similar pricing rather than aggressively undercutting each other, allowing the market to resemble Home Depot and Lowe’s, or cloud computing, where AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure coexist as highly profitable competitors.

Wouldn't that just be price fixing? If they arrive at their prices independently and they all happen to be similar, fine. But if they're all "smart" and coordinate so none of them undercuts the other, that's probably illegal.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#126

Post by cameronh90 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #96
GMoromisato wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who knows" is the right answer, I think. If (a) demand for AI continues to increase, and (b) SpaceX can get to ~$100/kg to orbit, then they will have a ridiculously deep moat. Probably more like 10 years, though. But as you said, who knows.

They will have moat in the satellite launching business, which is not useful in the AI datacenter market. You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg. With lots of solar power available, the option to easily access your hardware and far less radiation issues. The datacenter in space story really only exists to make it possible for Musk to sell X to SpaceX and make more money from the I…

It's not an engineering bet.

Musk's bet is dysfunctional politics will make it impossible to build enough data centres and the energy needed to power them. There are many, many reasons that might be wrong. However, if the economics are even close to viable, they could start throwing up data centres quicker than anyone can build them terrestrially (at least in the democratic west).

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#127

Post by miki123211 »

dlandis wrote: post #100
eigenspace wrote: post #9

The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck. 10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly. Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.…

Hmm, don't people think that if the frontier labs really put enough engineering effort into preventing distillation that they would be able to do that, or at least diminish it significantly? I'm sure there are variety of additional techniques they could use on top of what they already do, but I suspect it just hasn't been at the top of their priorities yet. Maybe that will change soon. Worst case they could add addit…

The frontier labs have competing goals in mind. They want high growth (which means little friction for account creation), API access (because enterprise money is the best money to have), and distillation protection.

Besides, identity verification that actually works at scale is a much harder problem than identity verification which is good enough to satisfy your compliance people and regulators. Especially if the fraudsters have a major world government standing behind them, and if their aim is to be identified as a real customer, not one customer in particular.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#128

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

rsyring wrote: post #108
rootusrootus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like 5.6-Sol is already fairly close to Fable, and in some ways exceeds it. Just the other day I had Fable draw up a solution for me, and then I fed it into 5.6-Sol and said how does this look ... it found an oversight and told me about it, and when I then fed that observation back into Claude it acknowledged the miss. I've noticed also that 5.6-Sol is more concise with output than Fable (and let's not talk…

It's common for different models to find holes in another's work. There are various good reasons for that. FWIW, we use ChatGPT for our primary model and use Claude to do the reviews. This works better than ChatGPT doing it's own review even with a clean session/context.

Agree, but the point is not because Fable is better than Sol, it's because it's .. different .. it just looks at the problem through a different angle.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#129

Post by chasd00 »

adastra22 wrote: post #95
petcat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> long live open source models There are no open source models, at least not useful ones (yet) [0]. Open weight is not the same as open source. The current "open weight" models are just opaque binary blobs you can run on your own computer instead of through a web API. [0] https://allenai.org/

This viewpoint doesn't make any sense to me. The weights + inference code are the "source code" for AI. I literally don't know what else you are demanding for the "open source" label.

> I literally don't know what else you are demanding for the "open source" label.

you need to "literally" go read the definition of open source software or even ask an LLM to define it for you. Weights + inference code are not the source code they're more like the compiled binary. Making modifications to the behavior of a model with additional training is like writing a mod for minecraft. Sure, you can change things but it doesn't make it open source.

Calling these models "open source" is an old trap that software companies use to use. Free to download but then, once you're fully comitted, the trap snaps shut and you must pay up to continue.

Post reply on HN