What's stopping OpenAI from cranking up the inference pricing once they choke out the competition? That combined with the expanded context length makes it seem like they are trying to lead developers towards just throwing everything into context without much thought, which could be painful down the road
I mean.. the lock in risks have been known with every new technology since forever now, and not just the risk but the actual costs are very real. People still buy HP printers with InkDRM and companies willingly write petabytes of data into AWS that they can’t even afford to egress at current prices.
To be clear, I despise this business practice more than most, but those of us who care are screaming into the void. People are surprisingly eager to walk into a leaking boat, as long as thousands of others are as well.
Psychology and FOMO plays interesting role in walking directly into a snake pit.
Also, with AI there’s not really a “roll your own” option as with Cloud – the barrier of entry is gigantic, which obviously the VCs love, because as we all know they don’t like having to compete on price & quality on an open market.
They can then either act as a distributor and take a marketplace fee or go full Amazon and start competing in their own marketplace.