Hacker News Reader

Comment by prodigycorp | Hacker News Reader

This could and probably is me projecting, but the enthusiasm was tepid. The Opus 5.5 mog cast a pall on the room.

The stuff that came off as potentially exciting was the ultrafast stuff available only to Pro 500 users.

The reset button stuff was an embarrassment. Everything that was released today, in respect to the hype that the team projected on twitter, was a failure. The internal OpenAI slack is a hell of an echo chamber.

View on HN

I also have a feeling that $200 was where most users will draw the line. $500 looks like such a slippery slope in the field where all the recent SOTA models, including Chinese ones, are considered good enough for most work.

$6k/year/seat is not particularly expensive for a dev tool if (very big if) you can measure the value and demonstrate it's worthwhile. That's the missing piece. People look at cheaper options because they don't know if the expensive one is working.

If OpenAI can show that a $6k tool nets $50k in productivity or quality or speed they have no problem selling it. Companies will take the easy-but-expensive option over a cheaper alternative. The problem is that's really hard to measure and seemingly they've put no effort into trying.

6k/year is a fortune. Almost no companies or organisations will pay that. It’s like throwing a MacBook in the bin each quarter.

There also doesn't seem to be a lot of differentiation between the tiers. They claim (or previously claimed) that the $200 plan was 20x usage, but now they say $500 is 25x usage.

They've since taken down the 20x usage mention on their pricing page. https://archive.is/bCZav

Yes, they explicitly claim pro-200 is 10x going forward.

I suspect the $500 will sell well. Maybe not for the staff developer, but I can definitely see the exec who thinks he can replace all his developers by vibe coding things himself inbetween meetings seeing a 6x speed up button and buying without a second thought.

Didn't you see the crowd Wooo-ing and clapping when Sam Altman said "Today, we're announcing Dots"?

The crowd lost their minds before Sam even told them what Dots were.

He even called them out on it when announcing 6.1 Sol "You don't even know what it is yet"

Aren’t these crowds mostly people that work at the company? So you’re really cheering for the thing you built?

(I remember that being the explanation of why people would cheer at very lame things at Apple events.)

If that's true that restores my faith in humanity maybe they're cheering for stuff their friends were working on. Otherwise, the consumerism has reached a point where giving up on society and waiting for the next flood seems like a reasonable option.

Yeah, the front dozen rows were reserved for OpenAI employees.

It’s called a circle jerk.

> The crowd lost their minds before Sam even told them what Dots were.

Maybe they were cheering on The Muppets inspired AI avatars, resembling Kermit, Scooter etc.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1002033/...

It's all Anthropic's fault! :)

We pay them money so that they would put a new model in the bag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com