OpenAI Burns the Boats
ethanding.substack.com
OpenAI Burns the Boats
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Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#2This explains why Anthropic cut OpenAI off of their models just before GPT-5 was released.
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#3I don’t think that saying means what you think it does.
Also I have not seen any evidence that OpenAI is pivoting to advertising. And even if they did I’m doubtful that advertising would pay the bills. This is one of the reasons Google did not originally pursue LLMs despite having the technology.
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#4Very interesting article
But why on earth would you not use proper case for your words? ai is difficult to read as everybody else on the planet uses AI! Even the sentences feel weird without their uppercase at their beginning. (At least the final sentence dots were there…)
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#5[deleted]
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#6I mean if Anthropic is really stealing market share from OpenAI in the enterprise space, as this article suggests they are, then what OpenAI is doing makes total sense. They should price competitively to get companies hooked on OpenAI early to build market share. I don't think OpenAI is burning boats because I don't think their position is dire
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#7I don't know where the author gets his information. The GPT-5 is not on par with Claude Opus.
It's still cheaper than Sonnet, but certainly not by 10x. Sonnet, arguably, is still better than GPT-5, although not by much and not in all circumstances.
I read analysis that GPT-5 is better at debugging (super important) and following exact instructions (many people don't quite know what they are asking for anyway, so this could be counter-productive in many cases).
So no, OpenAI did not burn the boats...
(Ok, this is for coding only. I have no information on other uses.)
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#8The lack of capitalization is not only making this hard to read, but it makes the author seem like they don’t really value their own words. If they don’t care, why would I care as a reader?
Also burning the boats means committing to something, without a way to get out of it. The article doesn’t seem to be about that.
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#9Where does the statement that "inference is profitable" come from? Several sources say they are burning cash, I'll quote the most reputable one:
https://www.ft.com/content/3c8cf028-e49f-4ac3-8d95-6f6178cf2... (Jul 25 2025)
"Despite their rapid growth, neither Anthropic or OpenAI is close to being profitable, with both burning cash to pay for the huge amount of computing power needed to train their models. They also face increasing financial demands in a fierce war for talent which has been accelerated by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg offering top researchers packages of $100mn in recent months."
Re: OpenAI Burns the Boats
#10The lack of capitalization is not only making this hard to read, but it makes the author seem like they don’t really value their own words. If they don’t care, why would I care as a reader? Also burning the boats means committing to something, without a way to get out of it. The article doesn’t seem to be about that.
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