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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

#141
post #113
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…

I think there's another point of view - let's consider each model as an investment. It is now sufficient that each model earns more than it cost to develop. And this generally holds (I heard that GPT-4.5 was a notable exception).

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

#142
post #137
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Is it that surprising given Deepseek is great enough for most use cases (like implementation) and prices are off by an order of magnitude?

DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.098/$0.196 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.435/$0.87

v/s

Anthropic: Claude Haiku $1/$5 Anthropic: Claude Sonnet $3/$15 Anthropic: Claude Opus $5/$25

Many people (me included) sometimes use Opus-class models to plan then swap to Deepseek and/or local models for implementation. The real AI war is in the pricing/performance ratio, and it doesn't look like any of the US-based models are winning on that front.

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

#143
OpenAI is great for coding, but DeepSeek is also powerful and much cheaper.

I'm doing model training and architecture dev all day. often running loops to monitor training status or executing spec and E2E tests.

I really hope token costs come down.

It would be awesome if OpenAI could double the usage allowance for the Pro subscription.

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

#145
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.

Enterprise / B2B has always been easier and more lucrative. Once a large enterprise integrates with your product, they won’t move away unless there’s an actual issue. So then the “moat” becomes the contract.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is spending ludicrous amounts on things like a Sora-TikTok app in order to create a network effect, and failing at it.

Seems pretty obvious to me what the better strategy is.

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

#146
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it that surprising given Deepseek is great enough for most use cases (like implementation) and prices are off by an order of magnitude? DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.098/$0.196 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.435/$0.87 v/s Anthropic: Claude Haiku $1/$5 Anthropic: Claude Sonnet $3/$15 Anthropic: Claude Opus $5/$25 Many people (me included) sometimes use Opus-class models to plan then swap to Deepseek and/or local mod…

I can use DeepSeek in 80% of my tasks. Let's see how the latest kimi 2.7 helps, because this is even cheaper than deepseek, and supposedly even better. So far it's not worse.

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

#147

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

It reminds me of the Chinese bike wars where everyone was slashing prices trying to keep marketshare until the bubble burst and everyone lost billions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQrEDq8KPiU

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

#148
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it that surprising given Deepseek is great enough for most use cases (like implementation) and prices are off by an order of magnitude? DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.098/$0.196 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.435/$0.87 v/s Anthropic: Claude Haiku $1/$5 Anthropic: Claude Sonnet $3/$15 Anthropic: Claude Opus $5/$25 Many people (me included) sometimes use Opus-class models to plan then swap to Deepseek and/or local mod…

Just because I don't personally know anyone using deepseek. I'm in northern europe. I can imagine there's a big huge chunk of the world that is priced out of using openai or anthropic, and I'm blind to it because of where I am.
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