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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

Given that they paused signups for their 20x Max plan, your assessment seems overoptimistic.

Their new Broadcom chips seem cool, and they had a nice model release with Astra. But, that doesn't mean they've solved the profitability question during an era of rapidfire open-weight model releases, extreme memory shortages, and intense political pushback.

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I think that implies they're seeing unusual new subscription demand, yes? That's how I'd read it, not least because I worked through four resets this week on Astra, which is un unbelievable amount more inference than I've wanted from openAI really ever, and the highest ratio vs. claude since opus 4 at the very least, probably farther back.

I think there are few moats in the engineering use case, and a single new model can absolutely drive compute demand.

High demand is great, but it doesn't say anything about your margins. If anything, it is probably a weak negative signal that they are pausing signups but not raising prices. In most markets, the answer to excess demand is to raise prices. If you can't meet demand and you can't raise prices, you're a sitting duck waiting to get your lunch eaten by somebody who can absorb that demand. And this is not the kind of market where people will just wait patiently for a differentiated product to be come available.

20x plan is $200, 5x is $100. Pausing $200 plan signups is effectively doubling prices (you can subscribe to two $100 accounts for the same money and get half as much usage), and that's exactly what they did.

I agree with some of your points, but wouldn't memory shortages actually work in OpenAI's favor? Part of the reason for the shortage is them prepurchasing hardware, so higher prices for memory and other chips would make self-hosting and competing inference providers less competitive.

Right but I think it’s due to the shortage of chips (and data centers), instead of shortage of money

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