Comment by hadlock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hadlock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Looking at the fact that third parties are making a profit offering XYZ third party open models on OpenRouter, it stands to reason that OpenAI could turn off their R&D, marketing, hype jedi, legal departments and just sell GPT9.999 and turn a profit.

Again like in the Amazon analogy, I don't think they're done growing, and unfortunately, I think they've positioned themselves (perhaps intentionally) as too big to fail, and need to continue growth at all costs.

I'm glad I'm not OAI's CFO sounds like a stressful job trying to justify/account for whatever Sam says to the board, or whatever the board demands. Sam hasn't said hardly anything since about February so I'm guessing the CFO simply bends to the will of the board these days. But that's speculation.

it stands to reason that OpenAI could turn off their R&D, marketing, hype jedi, legal departments and just sell GPT9.999 and turn a profit.

That rests on 2 assumptions:

1) That inference on OpenAI's frontier models is actually cost competitive with open models. Their high SG&A suggests otherwise.

2) That slashing R&D won't lead to a marketshare collapse when everyone (remaining) moves to Anthropic to get on their frontier models. All evidence suggests otherwise again, with Anthropic already exerting enormous competitive pressure on OpenAI's marketshare.

I think OpenAI is in a terribly tenuous position: they're getting squeezed from Anthropic (on the high end) and open models on the low end. A lot of companies in a lot of industries suffered this fate. Getting stuck in the middle is not a good thing!

It wouldn't surprise me if they have an unadvertised model router. Like, it's extremely clear you're chatting with a lobotomized model if you use voice mode in their app. Wild speculation here but I'm reasonably confident that as a $20/mo user I am not getting the same level of max thinking model that my enterprise account gets for the same question, despite both being labeled as the same model. Nowhere in their literature does it say $20/mo users get the exact same model/thinking effort, either

Reply on news.ycombinator.com