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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

#131

Post by emodendroket »

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.

I find it is a quite reliable workflow to ask a strong model to design a plan and then point a weaker one at executing. The agent harnesses themselves are baking in similar concepts though.

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

#132

Post by emodendroket »

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…

Cursor's Auto mode is built on this premise though I can't say how effectively it categorizes with limited experience.

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

#133

Post by swiftcoder »

miyoji wrote: post #113
mnicky wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

> At any point, Amazon could have turned off the expansion engine and turned on the profits

Maybe, but they wouldn't be in the dominant position they are today if they had turned off the expansion early - spending to suppress big competitors like Wallmart in the online shopping market pays dividends.

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

#134

Post by recursivecaveat »

miyoji wrote: post #113
mnicky wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

Yeah they can probably be almost entirely depreciated within 2-3 years, and pretty substantially front-loaded within that. Like, the expensive part of being a CPU company is making new ones, but Intel can't exactly just rest on their laurels and sell Pentiums for the rest of time.

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

#135

Post by EagnaIonat »

kouteiheika wrote: post #50
mattjoyce wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

It's like running a sports car and then complaining it burns through petrol too fast.

The truth is the model while impressive is not needed for much of what people need.

Local models can do the work and just offload heavy lifting to the cloud models.

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

#137

Post by Sammi »

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…

Oh wow deepseek is on par in usage with anthropic: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek

Deepseek has been on a growth spurt recently. Openai is at half and looks almost flat in comparison to anthropic and deepseek.

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

#138

Post by Sammi »

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…

I used 80% of my 5h anthropic usage window on a code review using fable. I tried this twice on two different feature implementations. Same result.

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

#139

Post by ian-clark »

anonym00se1 wrote: post #2

How does OpenAI plan to be profitable?

Surveillance, user data, government contracts, military technology, and ads. I don’t actually know this, just guessing based off other big companies and what they’ve done with the current government.

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

#140

Post by ses1984 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #133
miyoji wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

> At any point, Amazon could have turned off the expansion engine and turned on the profits Maybe, but they wouldn't be in the dominant position they are today if they had turned off the expansion early - spending to suppress big competitors like Wallmart in the online shopping market pays dividends.

But they spent money that was earned already, not money that was raised or borrowed.
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