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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman's explanation for the restriction is a bit fluffier: https://x.com/sama/status/1895203654103351462

> bad news: it is a giant, expensive model. we really wanted to launch it to plus and pro at the same time, but we've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs. we will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the plus tier then. (hundreds of thousands coming soon, and i'm pretty sure y'all will use every one we can rack up.)

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I’m not an expert or anything, but from my vantage point, each passing release makes Altman’s confidence look more aspirational than visionary, which is a really bad place to be with that kind of money tied up. My financial manager is pretty bullish on tech so I hope he is paying close attention to the way this market space is evolving. He’s good at his job, a nice guy, and surely wears much more expensive underwear than I do— I’d hate to see him lose a pair powering on his Bloomberg terminal in the morning one of these days.

You're the one buying him the underwear. Don't index funds outperform managed investing? I think especially after accounting for fees, but possibly even after accounting that 50% of money managers are below average.

He earns his undies. My returns are almost always modestly above index fund returns after his fees, though like last quarter, he’s very upfront when they’re not. He has good advice for pulling back when things are uncertain. I’m happy to delegate that to him.

you would still be better off in the long run even just putting everything into an MSCI world unless you value being able to scream at a human if markets go down that highly

I’m not saying you’re wrong because I have no idea how to rigorously evaluate the merit of your financial advice. That’s why I have a financial planner instead of going by the most credible sounding comments on the internet.

A friend got taken in by a Ponzi scheme operator several years ago. The guy running it was known for taking his clients out to lavish dinners and events all the time.[0]

After the scam came to light my friend said “if I knew I was paying for those dinners, I would have been fine with Denny’s[1]”

I wanted to tell him “you would have been paying for those dinners even if he wasn’t outright stealing your money,” but that seemed insensitive so I kept my mouth shut.

0 - a local steakhouse had a portrait of this guy drawn on the wall

1 - for any non-Americans, Denny’s is a low cost diner-style restaurant.

Not all investing is throwing cash at an index, though. There's other types of investing like direct indexing (to harvest losses), muni bonds, etc.

Paying someone to match your risk profile and financial goals may be worth the fee, which as you pointed out is very measurable. YMMV though.

Depends who's pitch deck you're reading. Warren Buffett didn't get rich waiting on index funds.

And for every Warren Buffet, there are a number of equally competent people who have been less lucky and gone broke taking risks.

And, crucially, whose loss has in turn become someone else’s gain. A lot of people had to lose big in order to fill Warren buffet’s coffers.

warren buffet got rich by outperforming early (threw his dice well) and then using that reputation to attract more capital and use his reputation to actually influence markets with his decisions / gain access to privileged information your local active fund manager doesn't

I think Warren Buffet doesn't just buy stocks. He also influences the direction of the companies he buys.

Most index funds are synthetic. They would not be possible if it was not possible to beat the index quite reliably.

Care to explain? Genuinely interested.

With a synthetic ETF you are not actually buying the titles of the index. There is a swap with a bank that guarantees you the same earnings as the index. Why would a bank do that if they cannot outperform the index?

I'm just a layperson, so I might be wrong in some way that I don't understand

> each passing release makes Altman’s confidence look more aspirational than visionary

As an LLM cynic, I feel that point passed long go, perhaps even before Altman claimed countries would start wars to conquer the territory around GPU datacenters, or promoting the dream of a 7 T-for-trillion dollar investment deal, etc.

Alas, the market can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent.

That $7 trillion dollar ask pushed me from skeptical to full-on eye-roll emoji land— the dude is clearly a narcissist with delusions of grandeur— but it’s getting worse. Considering the $200 pro subscription was significantly unprofitable before this model came out, imagine how astonishingly expensive this model must be to run at many times that price.

Or, the model is nowhere as expensive as in the api pricing and they want to pump the user value of their pro subscription artificially?

Most people can evaluate whether the model improvements (or lack thereof) are worth the price tag

Sell an unlimited premium enterprise subscription to every CyberTruck owner, including a huge red ostentatious swastika-shaped back window sticker [but definitely NOT actually an actual swastika, merely a Roman Tetraskelion Strength Symbol] bragging about how much they're spending.

Considering that’s the exact opposite of their strategy to date, and they haven’t done anything to indicate that was the case, and they talked about how huge and expensive the model was to run, that is the less reasonable assumption by a mile.

It is true that this does not seem to be their strategy, but the previous strategy to date was actually showing measurable improvements and specific applications, not "vibes". What I said is far-fetched, but still I fail to understand the whole point here, because they do not really explain it.

But maybe we just hit the point that the improvement of performance hit the slowing down part of a logistic curve, while the cost keeps increasing exponentially.

Well, we could ‘maybe’ ourselves to a lot of admirable explanations but lacking specific evidence that any of them are true, Occam’s Razor is the most reasonable way to evaluate this. In the very recent past Altman had shown no meaningful attempt to make this company sustainable. He has worked to increase its growth rate, but that’s a very different goal.

release blog post author: this is definitely a research preview

ceo: it's ready

the pricing is probably a mixture of dealing with GPU scarcity and intentionally discouraging actual users. I can't imagine the pressure they must be under to show they are releasing and staying ahead, but Altman's tweet makes it clear they aren't really ready to sell this to the general public yet.

Yeap, that the thing, they are not ahead anymore. Not since last summer at least. Yes they have probably largest customer base, but their models are not the best for a while already.

Eh, I think o1-pro is by far the most capable model available right now in terms of pure problem solving.

You can try Claude 3.7-Thinking and Grok 3 Think. 10 times cheaper, as good, or very similar to o1-pro.

I haven’t tried Grok yet so can’t speak to that, but I find o1-pro is much stronger than 3.7-thinking for e.g. distributed systems and concurrency problems.

I think Claude has consistently been ahead for a year ish now and is back ahead again for my use cases with 3.7.

They don't even have the largest customer base. Google is serving AI Overviews at the top of their search engine to an order of magnitude more people.

Bad news: Sam Altman runs the show.

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