They're not even the first movers here: Anthropic's been doing this with Claude for a few months now. They're just the first to combine it with a reasoning-style model, and I'd expect Anthropic to launch a similar model within the next few months if not sooner, especially now that there's been open-source replication of o1-style reasoning with DeepSeek R1 and the various R1-distills on top of Llama and Qwen.
The problem for them is making enough money for the training runs (where it seems like their strategy is to raise money on the hope they achieve some kind of runaway self-improving effect that grants them an effective monopoly on the leading models, combined with regulatory pushes to ban their competitors) — but it seems very unlikely to me that they're losing money serving the models.
So for example, there is a ratio of 10% paid users and 90% free users (just random numbers, not real). If they want more revenue they want to add more paid users, for example double them. But this means that free users needs to double too. And every real free user requires a lot of compute for his queries. Nothing to be cached, because all are different. No way to meaningfully offer "limited" features because the main feature is the LLM, maybe it is previous gen and a little bit cheaper to run, but not much. They can't offer too old software, because competitors will offer better quality and win.
So there is no realistic way to bring costs down. Analysts forecast they actually need to increase prices a lot to meet OAI targets, or it needs to have a financial intravenous line constantly, like the 500B$ announced by Trump.
If you look at their business strategy, it's top notch, anchor pricing on the 200, 20 sweet spot, probably costs them on average $5/mth to server the $20/mth customers, Take your $50m a year marketing budget and use it to buy servers, run a highly optimized "good enough" model that is basically just wikipedia in chatbot and you don't need to spend a dime on marketing if you don't want to, amazing top of funnel to the rest of your product line. I believe Sam when he says they're losing money on the $200/mth product, but it makes the $20/mth product look so good...
They're really playing business very well.
Mid-term, I believe the only real moat is going to be human labor - that is, RLHF and other funny acronyms that boil down to getting people to chat with the model and rate how they feel about its answers.
Software improvements (architecture, training process, inference) are always one public paper or leak away from being available for free to anyone. Hardware improvements will spread too, because NVIDIA et al. would prefer to sell more chips than less chips. Meanwhile, human labor is notoriously expensive, only getting more expensive as economic conditions of people improve, and most importantly, whatever "spark" of human intelligence/consciousness there is, this is where it cannot be automated away - not until we get to human-level AGI.
Human labor is the one thing that you can only scale by throwing more money at it - which is why modern businesses seek to remove it from the equation as much as possible. Hell, the whole pursuit of AGI is in big part motivated by hope of eliminating labor costs entirely. Except, in this one pursuit, until AGI is reached, labor is a critical resource that has no substitute.
That's my mid-term prediction. Long-term, we'll hit AGI and moats won't matter anymore.
I think you are just wrong here and so everything that follows is wishful.
"Plenty" may be vague, but it's not wrong.
"The data is the moat" was a pretty common belief a few years ago, but not anymore.
There's a problem of "target fixation" about the capabilities and it captures most conversation, when in fact most public focus should be on public policy and ensuring this has the impact that the society wants.
IMO whether things are going to be good or bad depends on having a shared understanding, thinking, discussion and decisions around what's going to happen next.
Let them make their AI if we have to. Let them use it to cure cancer and whatever other disease, but I don't think we should be allowing it to be used for commercial purposes.
Public information and the ability for public to analyze, understand and eventually decide what's best for them is by and large the most relevant aspect. Your decisions are drastically different if you learn soemthing can or cannot be avoided.
You can't dissallow commercial purposes. You can't even realistically enforce property rights for illegal training data, but maybe you can argue that the totality of human knowledge should go towards the benefits of the humans, regardless of who organizes it.
However there's a lot that can be done like understanding the implications of the (close to) zero-sum game that's about to happen and whether they are solvable in the current framework and without a first principles approach.
Ultimately, it's a resource ownership and resource utilization efficiency game. Everyone's resource ownership can't be drastically change but their resource efficiency utilization can as long as the implications are made clear.
This won't mean humans can't earn wages by selling their labor. But it will mean that human intellectual labor will be not valuable in the labor market. Humans will only earn an income by differentiated activity. Initially that will be manual labor. Once robotics catches up, probably only labor tied to people's personality and humanness.
Just keeping sending us money...
But LLMs? Those have already scraped all the data they're going to, and bigger models have less and less impact. They're about as good as they're ever going to be.
this was, is and is going to be a constant thing with every AI company