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I've been turned off with OpenAI and have been actively avoiding using any of their models for a while, luckily this is easy to do given the quality of Sonnet 4 / Gemini Pro 2.5.

Although I've always wondered how OpenAI could get away with o3's astronomical pricing, what does o3 do better than any other model to justify their premium cost?

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It's just a highly unoptimized space. There is very little market consolidation at this point, everyone is trying things out that lead to wildly different outcomes and processes and costs, even though in the end it's always just a bunch of utf-8 characters. o3 was probably just super expensive to run, and now, apparently, it's not anymore and can beat sonnet/opus 4 on pricing. It's fairly wild.

Very few customers pick the model based on cost, for many ChatGPT is the only one they know of.

> Very few customers pick the model based on cost.

What? 3 ou of 4 companies I consulted for that started using AI for coding marked cost as an important criteria. The 4th one has virtually infinite funding so they just don't care.

> 3 out of 4 companies I consulted for that started using AI for coding marked cost as an important criteria.

And those aren't average customers.

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