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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

#51

Post by SilverElfin »

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.

I don’t think Mythos/Fable matter in attracting customers. The typical use is not going to be on the most expensive model, especially with all its frustrating gotchas like refusing harmless prompts and forcing companies to have their data retained.

If OpenAI can offer an alternative to Opus but with better pricing, it will boost their revenue at Anthropic’s cost, in time for the IPO.

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

#52

Post by bushbaba »

boc wrote: post #49
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.

OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

Not necessarily, inference speed also has huge time aspect. For example anthropic takes nearly twice as long as OpenAI models for my tasks with both having similar success rates.

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

#53

Post by LoganDark »

watwut wrote: post #41
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.

Whole SV is subsidizing things to kill competitiom it all the time. L However, Amazon was not racking debt the way these companies are. Both their behavior and financials were miles apart from these ai companies.

Subsidizing is indeed different than burning cash, for sure.

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

#55

Post by bob1029 »

I have a really strong suspicion that there is something different about OAI prepaid tokens in the API vs elsewhere. I've been able to get away with spending less than $150/m on average while many peers are hitting 10x that.

I am curious how many on HN have manually configured their copilot install with a custom OAI token for 5.4/5.5. In my experience, the performance difference over the built in subscription models is immense. This setup tends to solve the problem so quickly and reliably that any desire to have it run while I'm asleep seems absolutely ridiculous. The performance is constant throughout the day and week.

I think what might be happening is that we are chasing the cost optimization rabbit a little bit too hard. Capability is weird dimension to quantify. A weaker model is not weaker in a linear way. It's usually this incredibly tall brick wall of a discrete go/no-go. If the model can't do the task, it doesn't matter how cheap the tokens are. Something approaching the inverse is also largely true.

Focus on the capability (is this giving my customer what they want) instead of the cost, and you will likely find that the cost never reaches a threshold where you even begin to worry about it. Starting from a position of cost optimization tends to spiral into a dark place.

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

#56

Post by mentalgear »

I haven't used OpenAI for months since them supporting the warmongers officially, and I have to say not only don't I miss them - I barely think about them expect for their "please come back" emails from my account I haven't deleted yet unfortunately.

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

#57

Post by skeptic_ai »

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.

Have you seen many corporations complaining and caping usage to 20-200usd per developer per month. I doubt will change much. Many are considering on premise now.

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

#59

Post by xboxnolifes »

swiftcoder wrote: post #43
ses1984 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think Amazon did that…?

Amazon was pretty famous for never actually posting a profit for their first ~10 years of operation

Because they were constantly reinvesting profits...

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

#60

Post by sschueller »

LoganDark wrote: post #42
sschueller wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have 128 GB of unified memory (M4 Max) and the user experience with local inference is still pretty bad. I'm so glad something like llama.cpp exists so I don't have to wrangle Python (which I hate), but OpenCode is entirely disrespectful of the KV-cache so I had to switch to Pi (but Pi is going relatively well actually). Even so, I can't really run at hundreds of tokens per second which is practically table stakes…

Try Kilocode with deepseek v4 (via API directly to deepseek, much cheaper than via kilo).

I have had very good results and compared to others it just costs pennies.

I use something similar to this https://github.com/ScotterMonk/AgentAutoFlow setup and switch between deepseek v4 to flash depending on task.

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