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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

#81

Post by harrouet »

stingraycharles wrote: post #13
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.

It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users. I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

OpenAI actually never had a focus. Their VC pith was: once the AI is good enough, it will find our business model. They've raised money on that.

With that said you are right, it seems OpenAI got numbed by ChatGPT's initial success and tried to be the go-to brand for consumers... which is Google's playground.

Meanwhile, Anthropic led the B2B market with a clever segmented approach, and got well-paying customers.

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

#82

Post by byzantinegene »

Uptrenda wrote: post #54

Too bad codex still sucks. Anthropic could double their prices tomorrow and I'd probably still pay it.

you're not a corporation, corporations are price-sensitive and the decision-makers are typically not the end-users.

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

#83

Post by atraac »

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.

Unless your job is purely producing code pointlessly, this is not a really good comparison. Most of the time really is spent on understanding the problem and figuring out solutions, not waiting on CPU.

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

#84

Post by grebc »

rich_sasha wrote: post #72

Lots of comparisons to eg. Amazon, and how both were burning money for ages. Maybe the better comparison is Uber? I.e. a commoditised product (taxis on an app), burning money to directly subsidise and gain market share. I always thought it was utterly insane and a waste of money... But you'd be hard pressed to have not made money on Uber. This is my understanding anyway. A LLM-generated summary suggests that anyone w…

It’s all about the equity.

Not sure why people are talking about revenue and profits. Sam & co are about to make ridiculous bank.

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

#85

Post by knollimar »

lelanthran wrote: post #68
boc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. That doesn't imply giving your devs the best laptop makes any difference. How much more productive will your devs be if you upgrade them from a 32GB RAM, 8-core laptop to a 768GB RAM 96-core threadripper? In your analogy, Kimi may not be the…

768GB seems oddly specific for Kimi

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

#86

Post by skeledrew »

LoganDark wrote: post #30
Haven880 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a certain extent, but not completely. OpenAI and Anthropic are taking losses on their entire offering—that is a huge difference. Amazon, for example, has pumped its profits back into R&D for decades. What AI companies are doing right now is running the Uber playbook on an epic scale. In the US, there isn't much competition, so they can maintain a duopoly. But look at what happened in China: Uber collapsed and pull…

I do love the DeepSeek models, they're so incredibly cheap and for functionality that nears Sonnet. Weeks of heavy usage still lands squarely under $10 for me. Compare that with how I pay $200 a month for Claude and am still hitting the limits with any sort of sustained usage. They even have a special usage limit for Sonnet to prevent you from using too much of that either. I'm super frustrated with how slow DeepSeek…

> I do love the DeepSeek models, they're so incredibly cheap and for functionality that nears Sonnet.

> I'm super frustrated with how slow DeepSeek is though. And it's not nearly ready to be unsupervised for long periods of time like Claude is.

Tradeoffs ;). One thing I'm doing is to make my flows properly available on my phone, so I can run and supervise things wherever I may be.

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

#87

Post by mnicky »

lelanthran wrote: post #67
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.

> 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. This specific crown (Best Performing Model) appears to be made out of thorns: pay 100x more for maybe a 10% improvement in capabilities. Not sure what the goal is, here.

It's simple I think - over time the price will go down. According to some analyses the price for equal intelligence declined 10-1000x per year, depending on the domain.

It probably won't be the same again but I still think we can bet on radically cheaper Mythos level intelligence in the future.

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

#88

Post by naveen99 »

byzantinegene wrote: post #62
broodbucket wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's really not much compared to the amount they are spending on training. 100 developers at $200 per month is just $20000

$240,000

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

#89

Post by sfifs »

sschueller wrote: post #60
LoganDark wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deepseek Flash v4 actually runs on 128Gb systems (about 14 tok/sec). Antirez created a fabulous 2 bit quant and a highly tuned LLM server

https://github.com/antirez/ds4

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

#90

Post by daft_pink »

OpenAI seems like such a better product these days. I was someone who jumped to anthropic early on for claude code, but I find myself jumping in the other direction these days.

I completely don’t understand Anthropic’s pricing where you have to pay a monthly fee to access their crappy models and pay per use for access to their top model. If you’re going to go pay per use it should be actually pay per use.

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