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OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users

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

#111

Post by jonfw »

sigmar wrote: post #100
sireat wrote: post #96

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable. I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan. Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours. I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not m…

>As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable. I imagine they track usage and can see whether their habitual users are switching to something else and aren't going to slash prices 'for the hell of it'. just look at public stats on openrouter (obviously not indicative of first party app usage or direct api usage, but there's a huge difference between these…

One token of GPT seems to go farther than an opus token in my experience, those books are a little cooked

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

#112

Post by phil21 »

sireat wrote: post #96

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable. I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan. Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours. I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not m…

Yeah, Codex basically gives me unlimited tokens for my use-case under the Pro plan. Just keep it the same price and keep or increase usage limits and I'm quite happy.

This lets me mess around with random experiments as I "catch up" on how to find various (mostly silly) uses for the technology.

That and much less worry about being banned without warning for not using approved harnesses as I try random stuff is a giant plus as well.

I assume they have lots of spare compute and less demand than Anthropic as it's obvious they are subsidizing my usage for now. But it lets me start off with "giant context window" type playgrounds which give immediate moderate effectiveness, then I can figure out how to tighten it up and reduce token burn from there.

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

#113

Post by miyoji »

mnicky wrote: post #91
lelanthran wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon was pretty famous for never actually posting a profit for their first ~10 years of operation They were spending the profit from each user, not making a loss on each user. It's a big difference. To turn a profit all AMZN had to do was stop spending (and the consumers would not have been affected by the halting of spending). For the AI providers, to turn a profit they have to raise the price.

It’s the same here. Inference alone is profitable. It’s the R&D cost of making a new model that drives up expenses.

This doesn't make sense. Inference alone is profitable but you have to continually train new models. There isn't a point where you will have a model that is the final model and you can just serve inference and profit, you always have to train more models.

It's not at all the same as what Amazon was doing. At any point, Amazon could have turned off the expansion engine and turned on the profits. AI companies don't have that luxury, if they stop training they'll just fall behind and die because they don't have a competitive model. They are locked into training in order to be competitive, they are not by default profitable and choosing growth over profit.

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

#114

Post by timfsu »

phil21 wrote: post #112
sireat wrote: post #96

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable. I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan. Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours. I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not m…

Yeah, Codex basically gives me unlimited tokens for my use-case under the Pro plan. Just keep it the same price and keep or increase usage limits and I'm quite happy. This lets me mess around with random experiments as I "catch up" on how to find various (mostly silly) uses for the technology. That and much less worry about being banned without warning for not using approved harnesses as I try random stuff is a giant…

In contrast, I’m on the $200 max plan for Codex and I hit the 5 hour limit near daily at work. I typically am having it work on about 5 tasks an hour. I’ve never hit a 5 hour limit on Claude on the $200 plan but I have hit my weekly limit.

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

#115

Post by selicos »

rented_mule wrote: post #80
kouteiheika wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I would agree with this. I think it works best when you're using the agent in a more hands-on way with a targeted prompt. If you're obsessive about code quality like I am (so you thoroughly review and, when needed, reprompt or even rewrite what the agent does) then you'll be fine, but if you like to just throw a prompt at the wall and expect it to plan and execute the whole thing perfectly then you'll be disappo…

CodeWhale (formerly deepseek-tui) automates this over DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro. My shallow understanding is that it prompts the model to evaluate the complexity of a given task, then decides on Flash vs. Pro at various reasoning levels for that task. This can help with both cost and speed. If other agent platforms don't already do this, I have to imagine they will at some point. I'm retired and can't justify spendin…

This is in the direction of Mixture Of Export (MOE) setups. A trained 'router' sits on top of different expert models and routes work to the best/most efficient model for that task, and integrates the work into a whole to provide to the user.

At least, that is what I get from the MOE style. Small and fast experts with a router LLM on top to best use them, then the harness to keep it all together.

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

#116

Post by shostack »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #108
sireat wrote: post #96

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable. I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan. Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours. I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not m…

Claude also just updated their privacy policy so they can shove a "please verify your identity" reply in your face after they flag your chat for "malicious activity". This is already common practice with Codex.

And how does this compare to openai which is an ad company now? I am interested in trying codex but I want to know how my data will be used for ads or measurement and training data if I become a paid subscriber. And what happens to that data when I stop subscribing?

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

#117

Post by WarmWash »

broodbucket wrote: post #40
ralph84 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.

Enterprise market is paying by token and using a lot of tokens. Consumer market is paying a subscription that they can't raise too high or they'll lose users to competition. Seems to me that the enterprise market scales a lot higher.

The consumer market by and large pays $20/mo to get tokens in response to stuff like

"My friend hurt my feelings and I don't know how to approach the problem" routed to whatever the default model is.

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

#118

Post by WarmWash »

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.

OpenAI and Anthropic aren't competing against them either.

If you could go out on the street of anytown and find one person using an open model, I'd eat my GPU.

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

#119

Post by ValentineC »

SwellJoe wrote: post #98
sireat wrote: post #96

As long as Codex remains so affordable and useful they do not have to slash prices, just keep Codex usable. I keep meaning to try Claude Code, but I can't seem to run out of limits on Codex on regular pro plan. Meanwhile all my friends on Claude Code are fighting the token limits every few hours. I even switched to using extra high for easy medium level script tasks as a test and besides taking longer there was not m…

I literally never hit usage limits in Claude Code on the $100 plan, and I feel like I'm using it as heavily as I can while still producing useful software. I could certainly make thinky machine go burr by giving it more busy work, but it wouldn't be good code or code that needs to exist. And, I even use `claude -p` pretty regularly for scripted stuff (automated security vulnerability searches), which I thought was no…

> And, I even use `claude -p` pretty regularly for scripted stuff (automated security vulnerability searches), which I thought was now counted at regular API rates, but that doesn't seem to ever run out either.

The billing change starts 15 June:

https://zed.dev/blog/anthropic-subscription-changes

(Couldn't find a direct Claude link that wasn't a Twitter tweet (what is with AI platforms making announcements on that fElon-owned platform?!), so the Zed one seemed best.)

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

#120

Post by poly2it »

nl wrote: post #64
kouteiheika wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A word of caution on this. I've tried this too, and was disappointed. Kimi generally benchmarks at "a bit more intelligent than Sonnet Medium" levels[1] and I'd agree broadly with this assessment. If you have adapted your coding to rely on the agentic style that is doable in Opus 4.7+ then you will find Kimi disappointing. If you are using it in a more targeted way then it can work well. [1] https://artificialanalysi…

Is there any open model that can emulate the agentic experience you get with Opus 4.7?
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