[HN Gopher] OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 486 points
Date : 2025-06-10 17:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| minimaxir wrote:
| ...how? I'd understand a 20-30% price drop from infra
| improvements for a model as-is, but 80%?
|
| I wonder if "we quantized it lol" would classify as false
| advertising for modern LLMs.
| tofof wrote:
| Presumably because the price was about 5x higher to begin with
| than any the competitors at the same tier of performance?
| Perhaps it's better to get paid anything at all than to just
| lose 100% of the customers.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Deepseek made a few major innovations allowing them to achieve
| major compute efficiency and then published them. My guess is
| that OpenAI just implemented these themselves.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me. And even with this price cut it's still
| 4x more expensive than Deepseek R1 is.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Maybe because they also are releasing o3-pro.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Note that they have not actually dropped the price yet:
| https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1932463601119637532
|
| > We'll post to @openaidevs once the new pricing is in full
| effect. In $10... 9... 8...
|
| There is also speculation that they are only dropping the input
| price, not the output price (which includes the reasoning
| tokens).
| sunaookami wrote:
| I think that was a joke. New pricing is already in place:
|
| Input: $2.00 / 1M tokens
|
| Cached input: $0.50 / 1M tokens
|
| Output: $8.00 / 1M tokens
|
| https://openai.com/api/pricing/
|
| Now cheaper than gpt-4o and same price as gpt-4.1 (!).
| rvnx wrote:
| It is slower though
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| No, people had tested it after Altman's announcement and had
| confirmed that they were still being billed at the original
| price. And I checked the docs ~1h after and they still showed
| the original price.
|
| The speculation of only input pricing being lowered was
| because yesterday they gave out vouchers for 1M free _input_
| tokens while output tokens were still billed.
| runako wrote:
| > Now cheaper than gpt-4o and same price as gpt-4.1 (!).
|
| This is where the naming choices get confusing. "Should" o3
| cost more or less than GPT-4.1? Which is more capable? A
| generation 3 of tech intuitively feels less advanced than a
| 4.1 of a (similar) tech.
| jacob019 wrote:
| Do we know parameter counts? The reasoning models have
| typically been cheaper per token, but use more tokens.
| Latency is annoying. I'll keep using gpt-4.1 for day-to-
| day.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| o3 is a reasoning model, GPT-4.1 is not. They are
| orthogonal.
| runako wrote:
| My quibble is with naming choices and differentiating.
| Even here they are confusing:
|
| - o4 is reasoning
|
| - 4o is not
|
| They simply do not do a good job of differentiating.
| Unless you work directly in the field, it is likely not
| obvious what is the difference between "our most powerful
| reasoning model" and "our flagship model for complex
| tasks."
|
| "Does my complex task need reasoning or not?" seems to be
| how one would choose. (What type of task is complex but
| does not require any reasoning?) This seems less than
| ideal!
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| This is true, and I believe apps automatically route
| requests to appropriate models for normie users.
| agsqwe wrote:
| thinking models produce a lot of internal output tokens
| making them more expensive than non-reasoning models for
| similar prompt and visible output lengths
| vitaflo wrote:
| Still 4x more expensive than Deepseek R1 tho.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Personally I've found these bigger models (o3/Claude 4 Opus) to
| be disappointing for coding.
| apwell23 wrote:
| i found them all disappointing in their own ways. Atleast
| deepseek models actually listen to what i say instead of
| ignoring me doing their own thing like a toddler.
| rvnx wrote:
| Opus is really great but through Claude Code. If you used
| Cursor or RooCode it could be normal that you get disappointed
| bitpush wrote:
| This matches my experience, but cant explain it. Do you know
| what's going on?
| eunoia wrote:
| My understanding is context size. Companies like Cursor are
| trying to minimize the amount of context sent to the models
| to keep their own costs down. Claude Code seems to send a
| lot more context with every request and that seems to make
| the difference.
| supermdguy wrote:
| Just guessing, but the new Opus was probably RL tuned to
| work better with Claude Code's tool calls
| jedisct1 wrote:
| I got the opposite experience. Not with Opus (too expensive),
| but with Sonnet. I got things done way more efficiently when
| using Sonnet with Roo than with Claude Code.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| same. i ran a few tests ($100 worth of api calls) with opus
| 4 and didn't see any difference compared to sonnet 4 other
| than the price.
|
| also no idea why he thinks roo is handicapped when claude
| code nerfs the thinking output and requires typing
| "think"/think hard/think harder/ultrathink just to expand
| the max thinking tokens.. which on ultrathink only sets it
| at 32k... when the max in roo is 51200 and it's just a
| setting.
| rvnx wrote:
| I think I could share a trick that could help:
|
| From my experience (so not an ultimate truth) Claude is
| not so great at taking the decision for planning by its
| own: it dives immediately into coding.
|
| If you ask it to think step-by-step it still doesn't do
| it but Gemini 2.5 Pro is good at that planning but
| terrible at actual coding.
|
| So you can use Gemini as planner and Claude as programmer
| and you get something decent on RooCode.
|
| This "think wisely" that you have to repeat 10x in the
| prompt is absolutely true
| rgbrenner wrote:
| I think you misread my comment. I wasn't asking for help.
| I get consistent good output from Sonnet 4 using RooCode,
| without needing Gemini for planning.
|
| Edit: I think I know where our miscommunication is
| happening...
|
| The "think"/"ultrathink" series of magic words are a
| claudecode specific feature used to control the max
| thinking tokens in the request. For example, in claude
| code, saying "ultrathink" sets the max thinking tokens to
| 32k.
|
| On other clients these keywords do nothing. In Roo, max
| thinking tokens is a setting. You can just set it to 32k,
| and then that's the same as saying "ultrathink" in every
| prompt in claudecode. But in Roo, I can also setup
| different settings profiles to use for each mode (with
| different max thinking token settings), configure the
| mode prompt, system prompt, etc. No magic keywords
| needed.. and you have full control over the request.
|
| Claude Code doesn't expose that level of control.
| behnamoh wrote:
| how do we know it's not a quantized version of o3? what's
| stopping these firms from announcing the full model to perform
| well on the benchmarks and then gradually quantizing it (first at
| Q8 so no one notices, then Q6, then Q4, ...).
|
| I have a suspicion that's how they were able to get gpt-4-turbo
| so fast. In practice, I found it inferior to the original GPT-4
| but the company probably benchmaxxed the hell out of the turbo
| and 4o versions so even though they were worse models, users
| found them more pleasing.
| esafak wrote:
| Are there any benchmarks that track historical performance?
| behnamoh wrote:
| good question, and I don't know of any, although it's a no
| brainer that someone should make it.
|
| a proxy to that may be the anecdotal evidence of users who
| report back in a month that model X has gotten dumber
| (started with gpt-4 and keeps happening, esp. with Anthro and
| OpenAI models). I haven't heard such anecdotal stories about
| Gemini, R1, etc.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| Aider has one, but it hasn't been updated in months. People
| kept claiming models were getting worse, but the results
| proved that they weren't.
| esafak wrote:
| https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/by-release-date.html
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Updated yesterday... https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
| vitaflo wrote:
| That Deepseek price is always hilarious to see in these
| charts.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| That's not the one I'm referring to. See my other
| comments or your sibling comment.
| benterix wrote:
| > users found them more pleasing.
|
| _Some_ users. For me the drop was so huge it became almost
| unusable for the things I had used it for.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Same here. One of my apps straight out stopped working
| because the gpt-4o outputs were noticeably worse than the
| gpt-4 that I built the app based on.
| lispisok wrote:
| I swear every time a new model is released it's great at first
| but then performance gets worse over time. I figured they were
| fine-tuning it to get rid of bad output which also nerfed the
| really good output. Now I'm wondering if they were quantizing
| it.
| nabla9 wrote:
| It seems that least Google is overselling their compute
| capacity.
|
| You pay monthly fee, but Gemini is completely jammed 5-6
| hours when North America is working.
| baq wrote:
| Gemini is simply that good. I'm trying out Claude 4 every
| now and then and go back to Gemini to fix its mess...
| fasterthanlime wrote:
| Funny, I have the exact opposite experience! I use Claude
| to fix Gemini's mess.
| symfoniq wrote:
| Maybe LLMs just make messes.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I heard that, but I'm getting consistent garbage from
| Gemini.
| dayjah wrote:
| For code? Use the context7 mcp.
| energy123 wrote:
| Gemini is the best model in the world. Gemini is the
| worst web app in the world. Somehow those two things are
| coexisting. The web devs in their UI team have really
| betrayed the hard work of their ML and hardware
| colleagues. I don't say this lightly - I say this after
| having paid attention to critical bugs, more than I can
| count on one hand, that persisted for over a year. They
| either don't care or are grossly incompetent.
| thorum wrote:
| Try AI Studio if you haven't already:
| https://aistudio.google.com/
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| https://ai.dev
| nabla9 wrote:
| Well said.
|
| Google is best in pure AI research, both quality and
| volume. They have sucked at productization for years. Not
| not just AI but other products as well. Real mystery.
| energy123 wrote:
| I don't understand why they can't just make it fast and
| go through the bug reports from a year ago and fix them.
| Is it that hard to build a box for users to type text
| into without it lagging for 5 seconds or throwing a bunch
| of errors?
| edzitron wrote:
| When you say "jammed," how do you mean?
| solfox wrote:
| I have seen this behavior as well.
| mhitza wrote:
| That was my suspicion when I first deleted my account, when
| it felt the output got worse in ChatGPT and I found highly
| suspicious when I saw an errand davinci model keyword in the
| chatgpt url.
|
| Now I'm feeling similarly with their image generation (which
| is the only reason I created a paid account two months ago,
| and the output looks more generic by default).
| beering wrote:
| Are you able to quantify how quickly your perception gets
| skewed by how long you use the models?
| mhitza wrote:
| I can't quantity it for my past experience, that was more
| than a year ago, and I wasn't using ChatGPT daily at the
| time either.
|
| This time around it felt pretty stark. I used ChatGPT to
| create at most 20 different image compositions. And after
| a couple of good ones at first, it felt worse after. One
| thing I've noticed recently is that when working on
| vector art compositions, the results start more
| simplistic, and often enough look like clipart thrown
| together. This wasn't my experience first time around.
| Might be temperature tweaks, or changes in their prompt
| that lead to this effect. Might be some random seed data
| they use, who knows.
| Tiberium wrote:
| I've heard lots of people say that, but no objective
| reproducible benchmarks confirm such a thing happening often.
| Could this simply be a case of novelty/excitement for a new
| model fading away as you learn more about its shortcomings?
| 85392_school wrote:
| I think it's an illusion. People have been claiming it
| since the GPT-4 days, but nobody's ever posted any good
| evidence to the "model-changes" channel in Anthropic's
| Discord. It's probably just nostalgia.
| herval wrote:
| there's definitely measurements (eg
| https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/y95zitmz/release/2 ) but
| I imagine they're rare because those benchmarks are
| expensive, so nobody keeps running them all the time?
|
| Anecdotally, it's quite clear that some models are
| throttled during the day (eg Claude sometimes falls back to
| "concise mode" - with and without a warning on the app).
|
| You can tell if you're using Windsurf/Cursor too - there
| are times of the day where the models constantly fail to do
| tool calling, and other times they "just work" (for the
| same query).
|
| Finally, there's cases where it was confirmed by the
| company, like Gpt-4o's sycopanth tirade that very clearly
| impacted its output (https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-
| in-gpt-4o/)
| drewnick wrote:
| I feel this too. I swear some of the coding Claude Code
| does on weekends is superior to the weekdays. It just has
| these eureka moments every now and then.
| herval wrote:
| Claude has been particularly bad since they released 4.0.
| The push to remove 3.7 from Windsurf hasn't helped
| either. Pretty evident they're trying to force people to
| pay for Claude Code...
|
| Trusting these LLM providers today is as risky as
| trusting Facebook as a platform, when they were pushing
| their "opensocial" stuff
| Deathmax wrote:
| Your linked article is specifically comparing two
| different versioned snapshots of a model and not
| comparing the same model across time.
|
| You've also made the mistake of conflating what's served
| via API platforms which are meant to be stable, and
| frontends which have no stability guarantees, and are
| very much iterated on in terms of the underlying model
| and system prompts. The GPT-4o sycophancy debacle was
| only on the specific model that's served via the ChatGPT
| frontend and never impacted the stable snapshots on the
| API.
|
| I have never seen any sort of compelling evidence that
| any of the large labs tinkers with their stable,
| versioned model releases that are served via their API
| platforms.
| herval wrote:
| Please read it again. The article is clearly comparing
| gpt4 to gpt4, and gpt3.5 to gpt3.5, in march vs june 2023
| Deathmax wrote:
| I did read it, and I even went to their eval repo.
|
| > At the time of writing, there are two major versions
| available for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 through OpenAI's API, one
| snapshotted in March 2023 and another in June 2023.
|
| openaichat/gpt-3.5-turbo-0301 vs
| openaichat/gpt-3.5-turbo-0613, openaichat/gpt-4-0314 vs
| openaichat/gpt-4-0613. Two _distinct_ versions of the
| model, and not the _same_ model over time like how people
| like to complain that a model gets "nerfed" over time.
| glitch253 wrote:
| Cursor / Windsurf's degraded functionality is exactly why
| I created my own system:
|
| https://github.com/mpfaffenberger/code_puppy
| Kranar wrote:
| I used to think the models got worse over time as well but
| then I checked my chat history and what I noticed isn't
| that ChatGPT gets worse, it's that my standards and
| expectations increase over time.
|
| When a new model comes out I test the waters a bit with
| some more ambitious queries and get impressed when it can
| handle them reasonably well. Over time I take it for
| granted and then just expect it to be able to handle ever
| more complex queries and get dissappointed when I hit a new
| limit.
| echelon wrote:
| Re-run your historical queries, or queries that are
| similarly shaped.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Sounds like a _whole_ thing.
| sakesun wrote:
| They could cache that :)
| echelon wrote:
| That would make for a very interesting timing attack.
| bobxmax wrote:
| My suspicion is it's the personalization. Most people have
| things like 'memory' on, and as the models increasingly
| personalize towards you, that personalization is hurting
| quality rather than helping it.
|
| Which is why the base model wouldn't necessarily show
| differences when you benchmarked them.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I assumed it was because the first week revealed a ton of
| safety issues that they then "patched" by adjusting the
| system prompt, and thus using up more inference tokens on
| things other than the user's request.
| colordrops wrote:
| It's probably less often quantizing and more often adding
| more and more to their hidden system prompt to address
| various issues and "issues", and as we all know, adding
| more context sometimes has a negative effect.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yeah, it's almost certainly hallucination (by the human
| user).
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this is just a psychological phenomenon. When
| a new model is released all the capabilities the new model
| has that the old model lacks are very salient. This makes it
| seem amazing. Then you get used to the model, push it to the
| frontier, and suddenly the most salient memories of the new
| model are it's failures.
|
| There are tons of benchmarks that don't show any regressions.
| Even small and unpublished ones rarely show regressions.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| I suspect what's happening is that lots of people have a
| collection of questions / private evals that they've been
| testing on every new model, and when a new model comes out it
| _sometimes_ can answer a question that previous models couldn
| 't. So that selects for questions where the new model is at
| the edge of its capabilities _and_ probably got lucky. But
| when you come up with a new question, it 's generally going
| to be on the level of the questions the new model is newly
| able to solve.
|
| Like I suspect if there was a "new" model which was best-
| of-256 sampling of gpt-3.5-turbo that too would seem like a
| really exciting model for the first little bit after it came
| out, because it could probably solve a lot of problems
| current top models struggle with (which people would notice
| immediately) while failing to do lots of things that are a
| breeze for top models (which would take people a little bit
| to notice).
| beering wrote:
| It's easy to measure the models getting worse, so you should
| be suspicious that nobody who claims this has scientific
| evidence to back it up.
| risho wrote:
| Quantization is a massive efficiency gain for near negligible
| drop in quality. If the tradeoff is quantization for an 80
| percent price drop I would take that any day of the week.
| behnamoh wrote:
| > for near negligible drop in quality
|
| Hmm, that's evidently and anecdotally wrong:
|
| https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4110
| spiderice wrote:
| You may be right that the tradeoff is worth it, but it should
| be advertised as such. You shouldn't think you're paying for
| full o3, even if they're heavily discounting it.
| code_biologist wrote:
| I would like the option to pay for the unquantized version.
| For creative or story writing (D&D campaign materials and
| such) quantization seems to end up in much weaker word
| selection and phrasing. There are small semantic missteps
| that break the illusion the LLM understands what it's
| writing. I find it jarring and deeply immersion breaking. I'd
| prefer prototype prompts on a cheaper quantized version, but
| I want to be able to spend 50 cents an API call to get golden
| output.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| This is almost certainly what they're doing and rebranding the
| original o3 model as "o3-pro"
| behnamoh wrote:
| > rebranding the original o3 model as "o3-pro"
|
| interesting take, I wouldn't be surprised if they did that.
| anticensor wrote:
| -pro models appear to be a best-of-10 sampling of the
| original full size model
| Szpadel wrote:
| how do you sample it behind the scenes? usually best of X
| means you generate X outputs and you choose best result.
|
| if you could do this automatically, it would be game
| changer as you could run top 5 best models in parallel and
| select best answer every time
|
| but it's not practical because you are the bottleneck as
| you have to read all 5 solutions and compare them
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think the idea is they use another/same model to judge
| all the results and only return the best one to the user.
| anticensor wrote:
| I think the idea is they just feed each to the RLHF
| reward model used to train the model and return the most
| rewarded answer.
| anticensor wrote:
| > if you could do this automatically, it would be game
| changer as you could run top 5 best models in parallel
| and select best answer every time
|
| remember they have access to the RLHF reward model,
| against which they can evaluate all N outputs and have
| the most "rewarded" answer picked and sent
| spott wrote:
| I believe it is a majority vote kinda thing, rather than
| a best single result.
| tedsanders wrote:
| Nope, not what we're doing.
|
| o3 is still o3 (no nerfing) and o3-pro is new and better than
| o3.
|
| If we were lying about this, it would be really easy to catch
| us - just run evals.
|
| (I work at OpenAI.)
| bn-l wrote:
| Not quantized?
| tedsanders wrote:
| Not quantized. Weights are the same.
|
| If we did change the model, we'd release it as a new
| model with a new name in the API (e.g.,
| o3-turbo-2025-06-10). It would be very annoying to API
| customers if we ever silently changed models, so we never
| do this [1].
|
| [1] `chatgpt-4o-latest` being an explicit exception
| ant6n wrote:
| It was definitely annoying when o1 disappeared over
| night, my impression is that was better at some tasks
| than o3.
| thegeomaster wrote:
| Google could at least learn something from this attitude,
| given their recent 03-25 -> 05-06 model alias switcharoo
| with 0 notice :)
| johnb231 wrote:
| That is a preview / beta model with no expectation of
| stability. Google did nothing wrong there. No one should
| be using a preview model in production.
| thegeomaster wrote:
| Hard disagree. Of course technically they didn't do
| anything explicitly against the public guidance (the
| checks and balances would never let them), but naming a
| model with a date very strongly implies immutability.
|
| It's the same logic of why UB in C/C++ isn't a license to
| do whatever the compiler wants. We're humans and we
| operate on implications, common-sense assumptions and
| trust.
| johnb231 wrote:
| The model is labelled as Preview. There are no guarantees
| of stability or availability for Preview models. Not
| intended for production workloads.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/products?hl=en#product-launch-
| stage...
|
| "At Preview, products or features are ready for testing
| by customers. Preview offerings are often publicly
| announced, but are not necessarily feature-complete, and
| no SLAs or technical support commitments are provided for
| these. Unless stated otherwise by Google, Preview
| offerings are intended for use in test environments only.
| The average Preview stage lasts about six months."
| refulgentis wrote:
| There hasn't been a non-preview Gemini since...November?
| The previews are the same as everyone else's release
| cadance, "preview" is just a magic wand that meant the
| Launchcal (google's internal signoff tool, i.e. "wave
| will never happen again) needs less signoffs. Then it got
| to the point date-pinned models were getting swapped in,
| in the name of doing us a favor, and it's a...novel idea,
| we can both agree at the least.
|
| I bet someone at Google would be a bit surprised to see
| someone jumping to legalese to act like
| this...novelty...is inherently due to the preview status,
| and based on anything more than a sense that there's no
| net harm done to us if it costs the same and is better.
|
| I'm not sure they're wrong.
|
| But it also leads to a sort of "nobody knows how anything
| works because we have 2^N configs and 5 bits" - for
| instance, 05-06 was also upgraded to 06-05. Except it
| wasn't, if you sent variable thinking to 05-06 after
| upgrade it'd fail. (and don't get me started on the 5
| different thinking configurations for Gemini 2.5 flash
| thinking vs. gemini 05-06 vs. 06-05 and 0 thinking)
| johnb231 wrote:
| I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say.
|
| It's a preview model - for testing only, not for
| production. Really not that complicated.
| refulgentis wrote:
| So you don't have anything to contribute beyond, and
| aren't interested in anything beyond, citing of terms?
|
| Why are you in the comments section of a engineering news
| site?
|
| (note: beyond your, excuse me while I'm direct now,
| boorish know-nothing reply, the _terms you are citing
| have nothing to do with the thing people are actually
| discussing around you_ , despite your best efforts. It
| doesn't say "we might swap in a new service, congrats!",
| nor does it have anything to say about that. Your
| legalese at most describes _why they 'd pull 05-06_, not
| _forward 05-06 to 06-05_. This is a novel idea.)
| johnb231 wrote:
| This case was simply a matter of people not understanding
| the terms of service. There is nothing more to be said.
| It's that simple. The "engineers" should know that before
| deploying to prod. Basic competence.
|
| And I mean I genuinely do not understand what you are
| trying to say. Couldn't parse it.
| refulgentis wrote:
| John, do you understand that the thing you're quoting
| says "We reserve the right to pull things", not "We
| reserve the right to swap in a new service"?
|
| Do you understand that even if it did say that, _that
| wasn 't true either_? It was some weird undocumentable
| half-beast?
|
| I have exactly your attitude about their cavalier use of
| preview for all things Gemini, and even people's use of
| the preview models.
|
| But I've also been on this site for 15 years and am a bit
| wow'd by your interlocution style here -- it's quite rare
| to see someone flip "the 3P provider swapped the service
| on us!" into "well they said they could turn it off, of
| course you should expect it to be swapped for the first
| time ever!" _insert dull sneer about the quality of other
| engineers_
| johnb231 wrote:
| How is this so hard to understand? It's a preview service
| for testing only, not intended for production.
|
| I am done with this thread. We are going around in
| circles.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Well, no. Well, sure. You're done, but we're not going in
| circles. It'd just do too much damage to you to have to
| answer the simple question "Where does the legalese say
| they can swap in a new service?", so you have to pretend
| this is circular and just all-so-confusing, de facto, we
| have to pretend it is confusing and/or obviously wrong to
| use any Gemini 2+ at all.
|
| It's a cute argument, as I noted, I'm emotionally
| sympathetic to it even, it's my favorite "get off my
| lawn." However, I've also been on the Internet long
| enough to know you write back, at length, when people try
| anti-intellectualism and why-are-we-even-talking-about-
| this as interaction.
| johnb231 wrote:
| https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms
|
| "b. Disclaimer. PRE-GA OFFERINGS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS"
| WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR
| REPRESENTATIONS OF ANY KIND. Pre-GA Offerings (i) may be
| changed, suspended or discontinued at any time without
| prior notice to Customer and (ii) are not covered by any
| SLA or Google indemnity. Except as otherwise expressly
| indicated in a written notice or Google documentation,
| (A) Pre-GA Offerings are not covered by TSS, and (B) the
| Data Location Section above will not apply to Pre-GA
| Offerings."
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > And I mean I genuinely do not understand what you are
| trying to say. Couldn't parse it.
|
| It's always worth considering that this may be your
| problem. If you still don't get it, the only valuable
| reply is one which asks a question. Also, including "it's
| not that complicated" only serves to inflame.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| There's a very large gulf between "what makes sense to
| Google" and "what makes sense to Human Beings". I have so
| many rants about Google's poor treatment of "customers"
| that they feel like Oracle to me now. Like every time I
| use them, I'm really just falling prey to my own
| misguided idea that _this_ time I won 't get screwed
| over.
| johnb231 wrote:
| The users aren't random "human beings" in this case. They
| are professional software developers who are expected to
| understand the basics. Deploying that model into
| production shows a lack of basic competence. It is
| clearly marked "preview" and is for test only.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| That may be true, but it doesn't make the customer's
| claims _not_ true. What Google did was counter-intuitive.
| That 's a fact. Pointing at some fine print and saying
| "uhh actually, technically it's your stupid human brain
| is the problem, not us! we technically are allowed to do
| anything we want, just look at the fine print!!" does not
| make things better. We are human beings; we are flawed.
| That much should be obvious to any human organization. If
| you don't know how to make things that don't piss off
| human beings, the problem isn't with the humans.
|
| If the "preview release" you were using was v0.3, and
| suddenly it started being v0.6 without warning, that
| would be insane. The only point of providing a version
| number is to give people an indicator of consistency. The
| datestamp is a version number. If they didn't want us to
| expect consistency, they _should not have given it a
| version number_. That 's the whole point of rolling
| release branches, they have no version. You don't have
| "v2.0" of a rolling release, you just have "latest". They
| fucked up by giving it a datestamp.
|
| This is an extremely old and well-known problem with
| software interfaces. Either you version it or you don't.
| If you do version it, and change it, you change the
| version, and give people dependent on the old version
| some time to upgrade. Otherwise it breaks things, and
| that pisses people off. The alternative is _not_
| versioning it, which is a signal that there is no
| consistency to be expected. Any decent software developer
| should have known all this.
|
| And while I'm at it: what's with the name flip-flopping?
| In 2014, GCP issued a PR release explaining _It was no
| longer using "Preview", but "Alpha" and "Beta"_
| (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/10/new-
| release-pha...). But the link you showed earlier says
| "Alpha" and "Beta" are now deprecated. But no PR release?
| I guess that's our bad for not constantly reading the
| fine print and expecting it to revert back to something
| from 11 years ago.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >we'd release it as a new model with a new name
|
| Speaking of a new name. I'll donate the API credits to
| run a "choose a naming scheme for AI models that isn't
| confusing AF" for OpenAI.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| What's with the dropped benchmark performance compared to
| the original o3 release? It was disappointing to not see
| o4-mini on it as well
| refulgentis wrote:
| What dropped benchmark performance?
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| o3 scores noticeably worse on benchmarks compared to its
| original announcement benchmarks
| refulgentis wrote:
| Any link / source / anything? You got quite an
| opportunity here, OpenAI employee claiming there's no
| difference and you got something that shows there is.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| Yes, the original announcement for o3 and o4-mini:
|
| https://openai.com/index/introducing-o3-and-o4-mini/
|
| o3 scored 91.6 on AIME 2024. 83.3 on GPQA
|
| o4-mini scored 93.4, 81.4 GPQA
|
| Then, the new announcement
|
| https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-
| release-...
|
| o3 scored 90 on AIME 2024, 81 GPQA
|
| o4-mini wasn't measured
|
| ---
|
| Codeforces is the same, but they have a footnote that
| they're using a different dataset due to saturation, but
| still have no grounding model to compare with
| energy123 wrote:
| Is it o3 (low), o3 (medium) or o3 (high)? Different model
| names have crept into the various benchmarks over the last
| few months.
| tedsanders wrote:
| o3 is a model, and reasoning effort (high/medium/low) is
| a parameter that goes into the model.
|
| o3 pro is a different thing - it's not just o3 with
| maximum remaining effort.
| fragmede wrote:
| Could someone there maybe possibly use, oh I dunno,
| ChatGPT and come up with some better product names?
| tauntz wrote:
| Why's it called o3 then if it's a different thing?
| There's already a rather extreme amount of confusion with
| the model names and it's not clear _at all_ which model
| would be "the best" in terms of response quality.
|
| Here's the current state with version numbers as far as I
| can piece it together (using my best guess at naming of
| each component of the version identifier. Might be
| totally wrong tho):
|
| 1) prefix (optional): "gpt-", "chatgpt-"
|
| 2) family (required): o1, o3, o4, 4o, 3.5, 4, 4.1, 4.5,
|
| 3) quality? (optional): "nano", "mini", "pro", "turbo"
|
| 4) type (optional): "audio", "search"
|
| 5) lifecycle (optional): "preview", "latest"
|
| 6) date (optional): 2025-04-14, 2024-05-13, 1106, 0613,
| 0125, etc (I assume the last ones are a date without a
| year for 2024?)
|
| 7) size (optional): "16k"
|
| Some final combinations of these version number
| components are as small as 1 ("o3") or as large as 6
| ("gpt-4o-mini-search-preview-2024-12-17").
|
| Given this mess, I can't blame people assuming that the
| "best" model is the one with the "biggest" number, which
| would rank the model families as: 4.5 (best) > 4.1 > 4 >
| 4o > o4 > 3.5 > o3 > o1 (worst).
| rat9988 wrote:
| o3 and o3-pro aren't the same thing still makes sense
| though.
| energy123 wrote:
| My guess is this comes from an org structure where you
| have multiple "pods" working on different research. Who
| comes up with the next shippable model and when that
| happens is kind of random and the chaotic naming system
| comes from that. It's just my speculation and could be
| wildly wrong.
| tedsanders wrote:
| o3 pro is based on o3 and its style and outputs will be
| quite similar to o3.
|
| As an analogy, think of it like this:
|
| o3-low ~ Ford Mustang with the accelerator gently pressed
|
| o3-medium ~ Ford Mustang with the accelerator pressed
|
| o3-high ~ Ford Mustang with the accelerator heavily
| pressed
|
| o3 pro ~ Ford Mustang GT
|
| Even though a Mustang GT is a different car than a
| Mustang, you don't give it a totally different name (eg
| Palomino). The similarity in name signals it has a lot of
| the same characteristics but a souped up engine. Same for
| o3 pro.
|
| Fun fact: before GPT-4, we had a unified naming scheme
| for models that went {modality}-{size}-{version}, which
| resulted in names like text-davinci-002. We considered
| launching GPT-4 as something like text-earhart-001, but
| since everyone was calling it GPT-4 anyway, we abandoned
| that system to use the name GPT-4 that everyone had
| already latched onto. Kind of funny how our original
| unified naming scheme made room for 999 versions, but we
| didn't make it past 3.
|
| Edit: When I say the Mustang GT is a different car than a
| Mustang - I mean it literally. If you bought a Mustang GT
| and someone delivered a Mustang with a different trim,
| you wouldn't say "great, this is just what I ordered,
| with the same features/behavior/value." That we call it a
| different trim is a linguistic choice to signal to
| consumers that it's very similar, and built on the same
| production line, but comes with a different engine or
| different features. Similar to o3 pro.
| stonogo wrote:
| This analogy might work better if the Mustang GT weren't,
| in fact, the same car as the Mustang. It's just a trim
| level, not a different car.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you mean that o3 pro is a GT?
| In particular I don't understand how to reconcile what
| you're saying that o3 pro is in some way fundamentally
| different from o3 (albeit based on o3) with this tweet:
|
| > As o3-pro uses the same underlying model as o3, full
| safety details can be found in the o3 system card.
|
| https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1932530423911096508
| tedsanders wrote:
| Yeah, I totally get the confusion here. Unfortunately I
| can't give the recipe behind our models, so there's going
| to be some irreducible blurriness here, but the following
| statements are all true:
|
| - o3 pro is based on o3
|
| - o3 pro uses the same underlying model as o3
|
| - o3 pro is similar to o3, but is a distinct thing that's
| smarter and slower
|
| - o3 pro is not o3 with longer reasoning
|
| In my analogy, o3 pro vs o3 is more than just an input
| parameter (e.g., not just the accelerator input) but less
| than a full difference in model (e.g., Ford Mustang vs
| F150). It's in between, kind of like car trim with the
| same body but a stronger engine. Imperfect analogy, and I
| apologize if this doesn't feel like it adds any clarity.
| At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how it
| works - what matters is if people find it worth using.
| csomar wrote:
| I think the parent-parent poster has explained why we can't
| trust you (and work on OpenAI doesn't help they way you
| think it does).
|
| I didn't read the ToS, like everyone else, but my guess is
| that degrading model performance at peak times will be one
| of the things that can slip through. We are not suggesting
| you are running a different model but that you are
| quantizing it so that you can support more people.
|
| This can't happen with Open weight models where you put the
| model, allocate the memory and run the thing. With
| OpenAI/Claude, we don't know the model running, how large
| it is, what it is running on, etc... None of that is
| provided and there is only one reason that I can think of:
| to be able to reduce resources unnoticed.
| rfoo wrote:
| An (arbitrarily) quantized model is a totally different
| model, compared to the original.
| Reubachi wrote:
| I'm not totally sure how you at this point in your online
| presence associate someone stating their job as a "brag"
| and not what it really is, providing
| transparency/disclosure before stating their thoughts.
|
| This is HN and not reddit.
|
| "I didn't read the ToS, like everyone else, but my
| guess..."
|
| Ah, there it is.
| fastball wrote:
| Anecdotal, but about a week ago I noticed a sharp drop in
| o3 performance. For many tasks I will compare Gemini 2.5
| Pro with o3, running the same prompt in both. Generally for
| my personal use o3 and G2.5P have been neck-and neck over
| the last months, with responses I have been very happy
| with.
|
| However starting from a week ago, the o3 responses became
| noticeably worse, with G2.5P staying about the same (in
| terms of what I've come to expect from the two models).
|
| This alongside the news that you guys have decreased the
| price of o3 by 80% does _really_ make it feel like you 've
| quantized the model or knee-capped thinking or something.
| If you say it is wholly unchanged I'll believe you, but not
| sure how else to explain the (admittedly subjective)
| performance drop I've experienced.
| IanCal wrote:
| Are you sure you're using the same models? G2.5P updated
| almost exactly a week ago.
| fny wrote:
| Unrelated: Can you all come up with a better naming scheme
| for your models? I feel like this is a huge UX miss.
|
| o4-mini-high o4-mini o3 o3-pro gpt-4o
|
| Oy.
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| Just because you work at openAI doesn't mean you know
| everything about openAI especially as strategic as nerfing
| models to save costs
| mliker wrote:
| Where are you getting this information? What basis do you
| have for making this claim? OpenAI, despite its public drama,
| is still a massive brand and if this were exposed, would tank
| the company's reputation. I think making baseless claims like
| this is dangerous for HN
| beering wrote:
| I think Gell-Mann amnesia happens here too, where you can
| see how wrong HN comments are on a topic you know deeply,
| but then forget about that when reading the comments on
| another topic.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Is this what happened to Gemini 2.5 Pro? It used to be very
| good, but it's started struggling on basic tasks.
|
| The thing that gets me is it seems to be lying about fetching a
| web page. It will say things are there that were never on any
| version of the page and it sometimes takes multiple screenshots
| of the page to convince it that it's wrong.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| The Aider discord community has proposed and disproven the
| theory that 2.5 Pro became worse, several times, through many
| benchmark runs.
|
| It had a few bugs here or there when they pushed updates, but
| it didn't get worse.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Gemini is objectively exhibiting new behavior with the same
| prompts and that behavior is unwelcome. It includes
| hallucinating information and refusing to believe it's
| wrong.
|
| My question is not whether this is true (it is) but why
| it's happening.
|
| I am willing to believe the aider community has found that
| Gemini has maintained approximately equivalent performance
| on fixed benchmarks. That's reasonable considering they
| probably use a/b testing on benchmarks to tell them whether
| training or architectural changes need to be reverted.
|
| But all versions of aider I've tested, including the most
| recent one, don't handle Gemini correctly so I'm skeptical
| that they're the state of the art with respect to bench-
| marking Gemini.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| Gemini 2.5 Pro is the highest ranking model on the aider
| benchmarks leaderboard.
|
| For benchmarks, either Gemini writes code that adheres to
| the required edit format, builds successfully, and passes
| unit tests, or it doesn't.
|
| I primarily use aider + 2.5 pro for planning/spec files,
| and occasionally have it do file edits directly. Works
| great, other than stopping it mid-execution once in a
| while.
| code_biologist wrote:
| My use case is mostly creative writing.
|
| IMO 2.5 Pro 03-25 was insanely good. I suspect it was also
| very expensive to run. The 05-06 release was a huge
| regression in quality, most people saying it was a better
| coder and a worse writer. They tested a few different
| variants and some were less bad then others, but overall it
| was painful to lose access to such a good model. The just
| released 06-05 version seems to be uniformly better than
| 05-06, with far fewer "wow this thing is dumb as a rock"
| failure modes, but it still is not as strong as the 03-25
| release.
|
| Entirely anecdotally, 06-05 seems to exactly ride the line of
| "good enough to be the best, but no better than that"
| presumably to save costs versus the OG 03-25.
|
| In addition, Google is doing something notably different
| between what you get on AI Studio versus the Gemini site/app.
| Maybe a different system prompt. There have been a lot of
| anecdotal comparisons on /r/bard and I do think the AI Studio
| version is better.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| You can just give it a go for very little money (in Windsurf
| it's 1x right now), and see what it does. There is no room for
| conspiracy here, because you can simple look at what it does.
| If you don't like it, so won't others, and then people will not
| use it. People are obviously very capable of (collectively)
| forming opinions on models, and then vote with their wallet.
| resters wrote:
| It's probably optimized in some way, but if the optimizations
| degrade performance, let's hope it is reflected in various
| benchmarks. One alternative hypothesis is that it's the same
| model, but in the early days they make it think "harder" and
| run a meta-process to collect training data for reinforcement
| learning for use on future models.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| It's a bit dated now, but it would be cool if people
| submitted PRs for this one:
| https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/by-release-date.html
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Dated? This was updated yesterday
| https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| My link is to the benchmark results _over time_.
|
| The main leaderboard page that you linked to is updated
| quite frequently, but it doesn't contain multiple
| benchmarks for the same exact model.
| carter-0 wrote:
| An OpenAI researcher claims it's the exact same model on X:
| https://x.com/aidan_mclau/status/1932507602216497608
| segmondy wrote:
| you don't, so run your own model.
| EnPissant wrote:
| The API lists o3 and o3-2025-04-16 as the same thing with the
| same price. The date based models are set in stone.
| hyperknot wrote:
| I got 700+ tokens/sec on o3 after the announcement, I suspect
| it's very much a quantized version.
|
| https://x.com/hyperknot/status/1932476190608036243
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Or maybe they just brought online much faster much cheaper
| hardware.
| az226 wrote:
| Or they are using a speedy add-on decoder.
| zackangelo wrote:
| Is that input tokens or output tokens/s?
| beering wrote:
| Do you also have numbers on intelligence before and after?
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Related, when o3 finally came out ARC-AGI updated their graph
| because it didn't perform nearly as well as the version of o3
| that "beat" the benchmark.
|
| https://arcprize.org/blog/analyzing-o3-with-arc-agi
| beering wrote:
| The o3-preview test was with very expensive amounts of
| compute, right? I remember it was north of $10k so makes
| sense it did better
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Point remains though, they crushed the benchmark using a
| specialized model that you'll probably never have access
| to, whether personally or through a company.
|
| They inflated expectations and then released to the public
| a model that underperforms
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| They revealed the price points for running those
| evaluations. IIRC the "high" level of reasoning cost tens
| of thousands of dollars if not more. I don't think they
| really inflated expectations. In fact a lot of what we
| learned is that ARC-AGI probably isn't a very good AGI
| evaluation (it claims to not be one, but the name
| suggests otherwise).
| ctoth wrote:
| From the announcement email:
|
| > Today, we dropped the price of OpenAI o3 by 80%, bringing the
| cost down to $2 / 1M input tokens and $8 / 1M output tokens.
|
| > We optimized our inference stack that serves o3--this is the
| same exact model, just cheaper.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Hw about testing same input vs output with same seed on
| different dates. If its a different model it will return
| different output.
| zomnoys wrote:
| Isn't this not true since these models run with a non-zero
| temperature?
| smusamashah wrote:
| You can set the temperature too.
| luke-stanley wrote:
| I think the API has some special IDs to check for
| reproducibility of the environment.
| tedsanders wrote:
| It's the same model, no quantization, no gimmicks.
|
| In the API, we never make silent changes to models, as that
| would be super annoying to API developers [1]. In ChatGPT, it's
| a little less clear when we update models because we don't want
| to bombard regular users with version numbers in the UI, but
| it's still not totally silent/opaque - we document all model
| updates in the ChatGPT release notes [2].
|
| [1] chatgpt-4o-latest is an exception; we explicitly update
| this model pointer without warning.
|
| [2] ChatGPT Release Notes document our updates to gpt-4o and
| other models:
| https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-...
|
| (I work at OpenAI.)
| az226 wrote:
| Even classic GPT-4 from March 2023 was quantized to 4.5 bits.
| rfoo wrote:
| I don't work for OAI so obviously I can't say for them. But we
| don't do this.
|
| We don't make hobbyist mistakes of randomly YOLO trying various
| "quantization" methods that only happen after all training and
| claim it a day, at all. Quantization was done before it went
| live.
| visiondude wrote:
| always seemed to me that efficient caching strategies could
| greatly reduce costs... wonder if they cooked up something new
| xmprt wrote:
| How are LLMs cached? Every prompt would be different so it's
| not clear how that would work. Unless you're talking about
| caching the model weights...
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| A lot of the prompt is always the same: the instructions, the
| context, the codebase (if you are coding), etc.
| amanda99 wrote:
| You would use a KV cache to cache a significant chunk of the
| inference work.
| biophysboy wrote:
| Do you mean that they provide the same answer to verbatim-
| equivalent questions, and pull the answer out of storage
| instead of recalculating each time? I've always wondered if
| they did this.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| The prompt may be the same but the seed is different
| every time.
| biophysboy wrote:
| Could you not cache the top k outputs given a provided
| input token set? I thought the randomness was applied at
| the end by sampling the output distribution.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I bet there is a set of repetitive single, or two,
| question user requests that makes out a sizeable amount
| of all requests. The models are so expensive to run, 1%
| would be enough. Much less than 1%. To make it less
| obvious they probably have a big set of response
| variants. I don't see how they would not do this.
|
| They probably also have cheap code or cheap models that
| normalize requests to increase cache hit rate.
| xmprt wrote:
| Using KV in the caching context is a bit confusing because
| it usually means key-value in the storage sense of the word
| (like Redis), but for LLMs, it means the key and value
| tensors. So IIUC, the cache will store the results of the K
| and V matrix multiplications for a given prompt and the
| only computation that needs to be done is the Q and
| attention calculations.
| hadlock wrote:
| I've asked it a question not in it's dataset three different
| ways and I see the same three sentences in the response, word
| for word, which could imply it's caching the core answer. I
| hadn't previously seen this behavior before this last week.
| HugoDias wrote:
| This document explains the process very well. It's a good
| read: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-caching
| xmprt wrote:
| That link explains how OpenAI uses it, but doesn't really
| walk through how it's any faster. I thought the whole point
| of transformers was that inference speed no longer depended
| on prompt length. So how does caching the prompt help
| reduce latency if the outputs aren't being cached.
|
| > Regardless of whether caching is used, the output
| generated will be identical. This is because only the
| prompt itself is cached, while the actual response is
| computed anew each time based on the cached prompt
| singron wrote:
| > I thought the whole point of transformers was that
| inference speed no longer depended on prompt length
|
| That's not true at all and is exactly what prompt caching
| is for. For one, you can at least populate the attention
| KV Cache, which will scale with the prompt size. It's
| true that if your prompt is larger than the context size,
| then the prompt size no longer affects inference speed
| since it essentially discards the excess.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > OpenAI routes API requests to servers that recently
| processed the same prompt,
|
| My mind immediately goes to rowhammer for some reason.
|
| At the very least this opens up the possibility of some
| targeted denial of service
| xmprt wrote:
| Later they mention that they have some kind of rate
| limiting because if over ~15 requests are being processed
| per minute, the request will be sent to a different
| server. I guess you could deny cache usage but I'm not
| sure what isolation they have between different callers
| so maybe even that won't work.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| 15 requests/min is pretty low. Depending on how large the
| fleet is you might end up getting load balanced to the
| same one and if it's round robin then it would be
| deterministic
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| So the doc mentions you can influence the cache key by
| passing an optional user parameter. It's unclear from the
| doc whether the user parameter is validated or if you can
| just provide an arbitrary string.
| tasuki wrote:
| > Every prompt would be different
|
| No? Eg "how to cook pasta" is probably asked a lot.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| It's going to be a race to the bottom, they have no moat.
| rvnx wrote:
| Especially now that they are second in the race (behind
| Anthropic) and lot of free-to-download and free-to-use models
| are now starting to be viable competitors.
|
| Once new MacBooks and iPhones have enough memory onboard this
| is going to be a disaster for OpenAI and other providers.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I'm not sure they're scared of Anthropic - they're doing
| great work but afaict running into some scaling issues and
| really focused on winning over developers at the moment.
|
| If I was OpenAI (or Anthropic for that matter) I would remain
| scared of Google, who is now awake and able to dump Gemini
| 2.5 pro on the market at costs that I'm not sure people
| without their own hardware can compete with, and with the
| infrastructure to handle everyone switching to them tomorrow.
| itomato wrote:
| Codex Research Preview appeared in my account in the early
| AM.
| piuantiderp wrote:
| Google is going to lap them. The hardware muscle they have
| has not even started flexing
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| What do you mean, Google is number 1
| aerhardt wrote:
| OpenAI are second in the race to Anthropic in some benchmarks
| (maybe?), but OpenAI still dwarves Anthropic in distribution
| and popularity.
| ratedgene wrote:
| That's slowly changing. I know some relatively non-tech
| savvy young people using things like Claude for various
| reasons, so people are exploring options.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Very, _very_ slowly.
|
| OpenAI vs Anthropic on Google Trends
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m
| &q=...
|
| ChatGPT vs Claude on Google Trends
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m
| &q=...
| rvnx wrote:
| This is such a big difference, thank you for sharing it,
| I didn't expect the gap to be _that_ huge
| sndean wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is brand name? Like Kleenex.
| Non-tech people might not search for LLM, generative AI,
| etc. ChatGPT may just be what people have heard of. I'm
| assuming OpenAI has a large advantage over Anthropic, and
| the name helps, but I bet the name is exaggerating the
| difference here a bit. Not everyone buys Kleenex branded
| Kleenex.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| You are not going to find Claude when googling for
| ChatGPT
| jdprgm wrote:
| While mac unified ram inference is great for prosumers+ I
| really don't foresee Apple making 128GB+ options affordable
| enough to be attractive for inference for the general public.
| iPhone even less so considering the latest is only at 8GB.
| Meanwhile the best model sizes will just keep growing.
| paxys wrote:
| Third behind Anthropic/Google. People are too quick to
| discount mindshare though. For the vast majority of the
| world's population AI = LLM = ChatGPT, and that itself will
| keep OpenAI _years_ ahead of the competition as long as they
| don 't blunder away that audience.
| slashdev wrote:
| Thrid for coding, after Anthropic, and Gemini, which was
| leading last I checked.
| joshuajooste05 wrote:
| There was an article on here a week or two ago on batch
| inference.
|
| Do you not think that batch inference gives at least a bit of a
| moat whereby unit costs fall with more prompts per unit of
| time, especially if models get more complicated and larger in
| the future?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Batch inference is not exclusive to OpenAI.
| mrweasel wrote:
| My understanding was that OpenAI couldn't make money at their
| previous price point, and I don't think operation and training
| cost have gone down sufficiently to make up for those short
| comings. So how are they going to make money by lowering the
| price by 80%?
|
| I get the point is to be the last man standing, and poaching
| customers by lowering the price, and perhaps attract a few
| people who wouldn't have bought a subscription at the higher
| price. I just question how long investors can justify pouring
| money into OpenAI. OpenAI is also the poster child for modern
| AI, so if they fail the market will react badly.
|
| Mostly I don't understand Silicon Valley venture capital, but
| dumping price, making wild purchases for investor money and
| mostly only leading on branding, why isn't this a sign that
| OpenAI is failing?
| simonw wrote:
| OpenAI's Adam Groth credits "engineers optimizing
| inferencing" for the price drop:
| https://twitter.com/TheRealAdamG/status/1932440328293806321
|
| That seems likely to me, all of the LLM providers have been
| consistently finding new optimizations for the past couple of
| years.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| LLM inferencing is race to the bottom but the service layers on
| top isn't. People always pay much more for convenience, those
| are the thing OpenAI focuses on and is harder to replicate
| Szpadel wrote:
| for sure they are no longer clear winners, but they try to be
| just barely on top of others.
|
| right now new Gemini surpassed their o3 (barely) in benchmarks
| for significantly less money so they cut pricing to be still
| competitive.
|
| I bet they didn't released o4 not because it's not competitive,
| but because they are doing Nvidia game: release new product
| that is just enough better to convince people to buy it. so IMO
| they are holding full o4 model to have something to release
| after competition release something better that their top horse
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| You know. because LLMs can only be built by corporations... but
| because they're so easy to build, I see the price going down
| massively thanks to competition. Consumers benefit because all
| the companies are trying to out run each other.
| codr7 wrote:
| And then they all go out of business, since models cost a
| fortune to build, and their fan club is left staring at their
| computers trying to remember how to do anything without getting
| it served on a silver plate.
| merth wrote:
| Investors pouring money, its probably impossible to go out of
| business, at least for the big ones, until investors realise
| this is wrong hill to die on.
| codr7 wrote:
| Which they will eventually; so the point stands, no matter
| how unpopular with the AI excusers out there.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I expect they don't go out of business: at worst they don't
| start their next training run quite as aggressively and
| instead let their new very good model be profitable for a
| minute
|
| Many many companies are currently thrilled to pay the current
| model prices for no performance improvement for 2-3 years
|
| We still have so many features to build on top of current
| capabilities
| croes wrote:
| Easy doesn't mean cheap.
|
| They need lots of energy and customers don't pay much, if they
| pay at all
| briian wrote:
| Exactly,
|
| The developers of AI models do have a moat, the cost of
| training the model in the first place.
|
| It's 90% of the low effort AI wrappers with little to no
| value add who have no moat.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| OpenAI dropped the price by so much that the server also went
| down.
| pbasista wrote:
| Is the price drop really the reason for their recent outage?
|
| Or is the price drop an attempt to cover up bad news about the
| outage with news about the price drop?
| johanyc wrote:
| > Or is the price drop an attempt to cover up bad news about
| the outage with news about the price drop?
|
| This makes no sense. No way a global outage will get less
| coverage than the price drop.
|
| Also the earliest sign of price drop is this tweet 20 hrs ago
| (https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1932248668469445002), which
| is earlier than the earliest outage reports 13hrs ago on
| https://downdetector.com/status/openai/
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > No way a global outage will get less coverage than the
| price drop.
|
| Have you seen today's outage on any news outlet? I have
| not. Is there an HN thread?
| johanyc wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/06/10/chatgp
| t-o...
| biophysboy wrote:
| I don't know if this is OpenAI's intention, but the little
| message "you've reached your usage limit!" is actively
| disincentivizing me from subscribing. For my purposes, the free
| model is more than good enough; the difference before and after
| is negligible. I honestly wouldn't pay a dollar.
|
| That said, I'm absolutely willing to hear people out on "value-
| adds" I am missing out on; I'm not a knee-jerk hater (For
| context, I work with large, complex & private
| databases/platforms, so its not really possible for me to do
| anything but ask for scripting suggestions).
|
| Also, I am 100% expecting a sad day when I'll be forced to
| subscribe, unless I want to read dick pill ads shoehorned in to
| the answers (looking at you, YouTube). I do worry about getting
| dependent on this tool and watching it become enshittified.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > "you've reached your usage limit!"
|
| Just switch to a competitors free offering. There are enough to
| cycle through not to be hindered by limits. I wonder how much
| money I have cost those companies by now?
|
| How anyone believes there is any moat for anyone here is beyond
| me.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I expect the answer is <$1 as someone who shares a discord
| server with a friend where we egregiously ping the models
| wrsh07 wrote:
| o3 is so good it's worth paying for a minute (just for plus)
| just to see what it's like
|
| I've never used anything like it. I think new Claude is
| similarly capable
| lvl155 wrote:
| Google has been catching up. Funny how fast this space is
| evolving. Just a few months ago, it was all about DeepSeek.
| bitpush wrote:
| Many would say Google's Gemini models are SOTA, although Claude
| seems to be doing well with coding tasks.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Gemini has been better than Claude for me on a coding
| project. Claude kept telling me it update some code but the
| update wasn't in the output. Like, I had to re-prompt just
| for updated output 5 times in a row.
| jacob019 wrote:
| I break out Gemini 2.5 pro when Claude gets stuck, it's
| just so slow and verbose. Claude follows instructions
| better and seems to better understand it's role in agentic
| workflows. Gemini does something different with the
| context, it has a deeper understanding of the control flow
| and can uncover edge case bugs that Claude misses. o3 seems
| better at high level thinking and planning, questioning if
| it should it be done and whether the challenge actually
| matches the need. They're kind of like colleagues with
| unique strengths. o3 does well with a lot of things, I just
| haven't used it as much because of the cost. Will probably
| use it more now.
| johan914 wrote:
| I have been using Google's models the past couple months, and
| was surprised to see how sycophantic chatGPT is now. It's not
| just at the start or end of responses, it's interspaced within
| the markdown, with little substance. Asking it to change its
| style makes it overuse technical terms.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Deepseek was exciting because you could download their model.
| They are seemingly 3rd place and have been since Gemini 2.5.
| Squarex wrote:
| I would put them on the fourth after Google, OpenAI and
| Anthropic. Still the best open weight llm.
| ookdatnog wrote:
| If the competition boils down to who has access to the largest
| amount of high quality data, it's hard to see how anyone but
| Google could win in the end: through Google Books they have
| scans of tens of millions of books, and published books are the
| highest quality texts there are.
| itake wrote:
| I've been learning vietnamese. Unfortunately, a lot of social
| media (reddit, fb, etc) has a new generation of language. The
| younger generation uses so much abbreviations and acronyms,
| ChatGPT and Google Translate can't keep up.
|
| I think if you're goal is to have properly written langauge
| using older writing styles, then you're correct.
| ookdatnog wrote:
| I don't think it's simply a stylistic matter: it seems
| reasonable to assume that text in books tends to have
| higher information density, and contains longer and more
| complicated arguments (when compared to text obtained from
| social media posts, blogs, shorter articles, etc). If you
| want models that appear more intelligent, I think you need
| them to train on this kind of high-quality content.
|
| The fact that these tend to be written in an older writing
| style is to me incidental. You could rewrite all your
| college text books in contemporary social media slang and I
| would still consider them high-quality texts.
| malshe wrote:
| I have observed that DeepSeek hallucinates a lot more than
| others for the same task. Anyone else experienced it?
| lxgr wrote:
| Is there also a corresponding increase in weekly messages for
| ChatGPT Plus users with o3?
|
| In my experience, o4-mini and o4-mini-high are far behind o3 in
| utility, but since I'm rate-limited for the latter, I end up
| primarily using the former, which has kind of reinforced the
| perception that OpenAI's thinking models are behind the
| competition altogether.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| My usage has also reflected the pretty heavy rate limits on o3.
| I find o4-mini-high to be quite good, but I agree that I would
| much rather use o3. Hoping this means an increase in the
| limits.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Before: 50 messages per week Now: 100 messages per week
| lxgr wrote:
| That's already been the case for a few weeks though, right?
| and it's up from 50, whereas a price reduction by 80% would
| correspond to 5x the quota extrapolating linearly.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| Agreed 100% o3 is great but the rate limit window and the
| quota itself both render it almost useless for more than
| one off fixes.
|
| It's great with those, however!
| sunaookami wrote:
| 200 per week now:
| https://x.com/kevinweil/status/1932565467736027597
| coffeecoders wrote:
| Despite the popular take that LLMs have no moat and are burning
| cash, I find OpenAI's situation really promising.
|
| Just yesterday, they reported an annualized revenue run rate of
| 10B. Their last funding round in March valued them at 300B.
| Despite losing 5B last year, they are growing really fast - 30x
| revenue with over 500M active users.
|
| It reminds me a lot of Uber in its earlier years--fast growth,
| heavy investment, but edging closer to profitability.
| rgavuliak wrote:
| I don't think the no moat approach makes sense. In a world
| where more an more content and interaction is done with and via
| LLMs, the data of your users chatting with your LLM is a super
| valuable dataset.
| bitpush wrote:
| The problem is your costs also scale with revenue. Ideally you
| want to have control costs as you scale (the first you build is
| expensive, but as you make more your costs come down).
|
| For OpenAI, the more people use the product, the same you spend
| on compute unless they can supplement it with another ways of
| generating revenue.
|
| I dont unfortunately think OpenAI will be able to hit sustained
| profitability (see Netflix for another example)
| Legend2440 wrote:
| >(see Netflix for another example)
|
| Netflix has been profitable for over a decade though? They
| reported $8.7 billion in profit in 2024.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| They increased prices and are not selling a pure commodity
| tho
| aizk wrote:
| > sustained profitability (see Netflix for another example)
|
| What? Netflix is incredibly profitable.
| bitpush wrote:
| Probably a bad example from my part, but also because of
| increasing the costs and offering a tier with ads. I was
| mostly talking about the Netflix as it was originally
| concieved. "Give access to unlimited content at a flat
| fee", which didnt scale pretty well.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what they offer today?
| tptacek wrote:
| All costs are not equal. There is a classic pattern of
| dogfights for winner-take-most product categories where the
| long term winner does the best job of _acquiring customers_
| at the expense of things like "engineering to reduce costs".
| I have no idea how the AI space is going to shake out, but if
| I had to pick between OpenAI's mindshare in the broadest
| possible cohort of users vs. best/most efficient model, I'd
| pick the customers.
|
| Obviously, lots of nerds on HN have preferences for Gemini
| and Claude, and having used all three I completely get why
| that is. But we should remember we're not representative of
| the whole addressable market. There were probably nerds on
| like ancient dial-up bulletin boards explaining why Betamax
| was going to win, too.
| awongh wrote:
| We don't even know yet if the model is the product though,
| and if OpenAI is the company that will make _the_ AI
| product /model, (chat that keeps expanding into other
| functionalities and capabilities) or will it be 10,000
| companies using the OpenAI models. (well, it's probably
| both, but in what proportion of revenue)
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, but it might not even matter if all the
| competitors are in the ballpark of the final
| product/market fit and OpenAI holds a commanding lead in
| customer acquisition.
|
| Again: I don't know. I've got no predictions. I'm just
| saying that the logic where OpenAI is outcompeted on
| models themselves and thus automatically lose does not
| hold automatically.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Unlike Uber or whatsapp, there's no network effect. Don't
| think this is a winner takes all market, there was an
| article where we had this discussion earlier. Players who
| get a small market share are immediately profitable
| proportional to the market share (given a minimum size is
| exceeded.)
| Magmalgebra wrote:
| Anyone concerned about cost should remember that those costs
| are dropping exponenentially.
|
| Similarly, nearly all AI products but especially OpenAI are
| heavily _under_ monetized. OpenAI is an excellent personal
| shopper - the ad revenue that could be generated from that
| rivals Facebook or Google.
| smelendez wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if they try, but ironically if GPT
| is a good personal shopper, it might make it harder to
| monetize with ads because people will trust the bot's
| organic responses more than the ads.
|
| You could override its suggestions with paid ones, or nerf
| the bot's shopping abilities so it doesn't overshadow the
| sponsors, but that will destroy trust in the product in a
| very competitive industry.
|
| You could put user-targeted ads on the site not necessarily
| related to the current query, like ads you would see on
| Facebook, but if the bot is really such a good personal
| shopper, people are literally at a ChatGPT prompt when they
| see the ads and will use it to comparison shop.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Alternative: let users reduce their monthly bill by
| accepting a sponsored answer with a dedicated button in
| the UI
|
| (with many potential variants)
| simonw wrote:
| "... as you make more your costs come down"
|
| I'd say dropping the price of o3 by 80% due to "engineers
| optimizing inferencing" is a strong sign that they're doing
| exactly that.
| asadotzler wrote:
| You trust their PR statements?
| TZubiri wrote:
| It's not a PR statement, it's a change in price.
| Literally putting money where the mouth is.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Or they are trying to gobble up market share because
| Anthropic has been much better than OpenAI
| petesergeant wrote:
| Providers are exceptionally easy to switch. There's no
| moat for enterprise-level usage. There's no "market
| share" to gobble up because I can change a line in my
| config, run the eval suite, and switch immediately to
| another provider.
|
| This is marginally less true for embedding models and
| things you've fine-tuned, but only marginally.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| o3 probably used to have a HUGE profit margin on
| inference, so I'd say it's unclear how much optimo was
| done;
| programjames wrote:
| I find it pretty plausible they got an 80% speedup just
| by making optimized kernels for everything. Even when
| GPUs say they're being 100% utilized, there are so many
| improvements to be made, like:
|
| - Carefully interleaving shared memory loading with
| computation, and the whole kernel with global memory
| loading.
|
| - Warp shuffling for softmax.
|
| - Avoiding memory access conflicts in matrix
| multiplication.
|
| I'm sure the guys at ClosedAI have many more
| optimizations they've implemented ;). They're probably
| eventually going to design their own chips or use
| photonic chips for lower energy costs, but there's still
| a lot of gains to be made in the software.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| yes I agree that it is very plausible. But it's just
| unclear whether it is more of a business decision or a
| real downstream effect of engineering optimizations
| (which I assume are happening everyday at OA)
| simonw wrote:
| Seems more likely to me then them deciding to take a
| sizable loss on inference by dropping prices by 80% for
| no reason.
|
| Optimizing serving isn't unlikely: all of the big AI
| vendors keep finding new efficiencies, it's been an
| ongoing trend over the past two years.
| bitpush wrote:
| This is my sense as well. You dont drop 80% on a random
| Tuesday based on scale, you do it with an explicit goal
| to get market share at the expense of $$.
| lossolo wrote:
| > "engineers optimizing inferencing"
|
| They finally implemented DeepSeek open source methods for
| fast inference?
| marsten wrote:
| You raise a good point that this isn't a low marginal cost
| business like software, telecom, or (most of) the web.
| Efficiency will be a big advantage for companies that can
| achieve it, in part because it will let them scale to new AI
| use cases.
|
| With the race to get new models out the door, I doubt any of
| these companies have done much to optimize cost so far.
| Google is a partial exception - they began developing the TPU
| ten years ago and the rest of their infrastructure has been
| optimized over the years to serve computationally expensive
| products (search, gmail, youtube, etc.).
| ACCount36 wrote:
| The bulk of AI costs are NOT in inference. They're in R&D and
| frontier training runs.
|
| The more inference customers OpenAI has, the easier it is for
| them to reach profitability.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I mean sure, it's very promising if OpenAI's future is your
| only metric. It gets notably darker if you look at the broader
| picture of ChatGPT (and company)'s impact on our society.
|
| * We have people uploading tons of zero-effort slop pieces to
| all manner of online storefronts, and making people less likely
| to buy overall because they assume everything is AI now
|
| * We have an uncomfortable community of, to be blunt, actual
| cultists emerging around ChatGPT, doing all kinds of shit from
| annoying their friends and family all the way up to divorcing
| their spouses
|
| * Education is struggling in all kinds of ways due to students
| using (and abusing) the tech, with already strained
| administrations struggling to figure out how to navigate it
|
| Like yeah if your only metric is OpenAI's particular line going
| up, it's looking alright. And much like Uber, it's success
| seems to be corrosive to the society in which it operates. Is
| this supposed to be good news?
| arealaccount wrote:
| Dying for a reference on the cult stuff, a quick search
| didn't provide anything interesting.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Scroll through the ChatGPT subreddit right now and tell me
| there isn't a TON of people in there who are legitimately
| unwell. Reads like the back page notes of a dystopian
| novel.
| arandomhuman wrote:
| I think this is less caused by ChatGPT/LLMs and more of a
| phenomenon in social media circles where people flock to
| "the thing" and have poor social skills and mental health
| generally speaking.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises, which
| references the more famous
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-
| spi... but is a newer article.
| xz0r wrote:
| The article links to a forum post which kind of explains
| how engagement is maximised
| https://community.openai.com/t/uncovering-the-intent-
| behind-...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Poetic, but I don't think that really explains
| _anything_.
| xz0r wrote:
| Ever thought about how there's a magnetic quality to
| mirrors that keeps us looking? I see GPT in a similar
| light, it functions as a mirror, reflecting aspects of
| our reality.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| In addition to what the parent commenter was likely
| referring to, there are also the Zizians:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
| SlowTao wrote:
| Yes but in a typical western business sense they are merely
| optimizing for user engadgement and profits. What happens to
| society a decade from now because of all the slop being
| produced, that is not their concern. Facebook is just about
| connecting friends right, totally wont become a series of
| information moats and bubbles controlled by the algorithms...
|
| A great communicator on the risks of AI being to heavily
| intergrated into society is Zak Stein. As someone who works
| in education, they are see first hand how people are becoming
| dependent on this stuff rather than any kind of self
| improvement. The people who are just handing over all their
| thinking to the machine. It is very bizarre and I am seeing
| it in my personal experience a lot more over the last few
| months.
| BugheadTorpeda6 wrote:
| I absolutely agree. I find it abhorrent.
| seydor wrote:
| their moat is leaky because llm prices will be dropping forever
| and the only viable model will be a free model. Eventually
| everyone will catch up.
|
| Plus there is the thing that "thinking models" can't really
| solve complex tasks / aren't really as good as they are
| believed to be .
| Zaheer wrote:
| I would wager most of their revenue is from the subscriptions
| - both consumer and business. That pricing is detached from
| the API pricing. The heavy emphasis on applications more
| recently is because they realize this as well.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| As an anecdote they have first mover advantage on me. I pay
| monthly but mostly because it's good enough and I can't be
| bothered to try a bunch out and switch. But if the dust settles
| and prices drop i would be motivated to switch. How much that
| matters maybe depends if their revenue comes from app users or
| API plans. And first mover only works once. Now they maybe
| coasting on name recognition, but otherwise new users maybe
| load balanced among all the options.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The moat is increasingly becoming having access to billions
| needed to finance the infrastructure needed to serve billions.
| That's why Google is still in the game. They have that and they
| are very good at massive scale and have some cost advantages
| there.
|
| OpenAI is very good at this as well because of their brand
| name. For many people ChatGPT is all they know. That's the one
| that's in the news. That's the one everybody keeps talking
| about. They have many millions of paying users at this point.
|
| This is a non trivial moat. If you can only be successful by
| not serving most of the market for cost reasons, then you can't
| be successful. It's how Google has been able to guard its
| search empire for a quarter century. It's easy to match what
| they do algorithmically. But then growing from a niche search
| engine that has maybe a few tens of thousands of users (e.g.
| Kagi) to Google scale serving essentially most of this planet
| (minus some fire walled countries like Russia and China), is a
| bit of a journey.
|
| So Google rolling out search integration is a big deal. It
| means they are readying themselves for that scale and will have
| billions of users exposed to this soon.
|
| > Their last funding round in March valued them at 300B.
| Despite losing 5B last year, they are growing really fast
|
| Yes, they are valued based on world+dog needing agentic AIs and
| subscribing to the extent of tens or hundreds of dollars/month.
| It's going to outstrip revenue things like MS Office in its
| prime.
|
| 5B loss is peanuts compared to that. If they weren't burning
| that, their ambition level would be too low.
|
| Uber now has a substantial portion of the month. They have
| about 3-4 billion revenue per month. A lot of cost obviously.
| But they managed 10B profit last year. And they are not done
| growing yet. They were overvalued at some point and then they
| crashed, but they are still there and it's a pretty healthy
| business at this point and that reflects in their stock price.
| It's basically valued higher now than at the time of the
| Softbank investment pre-IPO. Of course a lot of stuff needed to
| be sorted out for that to happen.
| unraveller wrote:
| I have no moat and I must make these GPUs scream.
| blueblisters wrote:
| This is the best model out there, priced level or lesser than
| Claude and Gemini
|
| They're not letting the competition breathe
| Davidzheng wrote:
| Gemini is close (if not better) so it just makes sense no?
| o3-pro might be ahead of pack tho
| blueblisters wrote:
| o3 does better especially if you use the api (not ChatGPT)
| dorianjp wrote:
| appreciate this, the faster we get to cheap commoditization,
| the better
| seydor wrote:
| when the race to the bottom reaches the bottom, the foundation
| model companies will be bought by ... energy companies. You 'll
| be paying for AI with your electricity bill
| paxys wrote:
| It'll be the opposite. Large tech companies are already running
| their own power plants.
| andyferris wrote:
| Yes - it's common in traditional industries too. In my home
| town the aluminum refinery bought the power station to
| improve reliability (I should add - through upgrades not
| screwing over the rest of the power users).
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Anthropic will need to follow suit with Opus soon. It is simply
| too expensive for anything by an order of magnitude.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Have they ever decreased the price in the past? I don't
| remember.
| madebywelch wrote:
| They could drop the price 100% and I still wouldn't use it, so
| long as they're retaining my data.
| simonw wrote:
| Sounds like you want their Zero Data Retention plan:
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data#zero-data-...
|
| (It's "contact us" pricing, so I have no idea how much that
| would set you back. I'm guessing it's not cheap.)
| scudsworth wrote:
| it doesn't seem like this would supercede a court order
| tech234a wrote:
| Actually it does according to
| https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/
| otterley wrote:
| The court order doesn't require OpenAI to modify their
| software. ZDR is implemented through a separate API with
| separate endpoints that never retained data in the first
| place.
| sschueller wrote:
| Has anyone noticed that OpenAI has become "lazy"? When I ask
| questions now it will not give me a complete file or fix. Instead
| it tells me what I should do and I need to ask a second or third
| time to just do the thing I asked.
|
| I don't see this happening with for example deepseek.
|
| Is it possible they are saving on resources by having it answer
| that way?
| tedsanders wrote:
| Yeah, our models are sometimes too lazy. It's not intentional,
| and future models will be less lazy.
|
| When I worked at Netflix I sometimes heard the same speculation
| about intentionally bad recommendations, which people theorized
| would lower streaming and increase profit margins. It made even
| less sense there as streaming costs are usually less than a
| penny. In reality, it's just hard to make perfect products!
|
| (I work at OpenAI.)
| ukblewis wrote:
| Please be careful about the alternative. I've seen o3 doing
| excessive tool calls and research for relatively simple
| problems.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| After the last few weeks, where o3 seems desperate to do
| tool searches or re-crunch a bad gen even though I only
| asked a question about it, I assumed that the policy is to
| burn through credits at the fastest possible rate. With
| this price change, I don't know what's happening now...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Are they actually profitable? A policy to burn through
| credits only makes sense if they're making a profit on
| each token - otherwise it would be counterproductive.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yep, it defaults to doing a web search even when that
| doesn't make sense.
|
| Example, I asked it to write something. And then I asked it
| to give me that blob of text in markdown format. So
| everything it needed was already in the conversation. That
| took a whole minute of doing web searches and what not.
|
| I actually dislike using o3 for this reason. I keep the
| default to 4o. But sometimes I forget to switch back and it
| goes off boiling the oceans to answer a simple question.
| It's a bit too trigger happy with that. In general all this
| version and model soup is impossible to figure out for non
| technical users. And I noticed 4o is now sometimes starting
| to do the same. I guess, too many users never use the model
| drop down.
| TZubiri wrote:
| but maybe you are saying that because you are a CIA plant
| that's trying to make the product bad because of complex
| reasons.
|
| _takes tinfoil hat off_
|
| Oh, nvm, that makes sense.
| thimabi wrote:
| Can you share what are the main challenges OpenAI has been
| facing in terms of increasing access to top-tier and non-lazy
| models?
| anshumankmr wrote:
| That was a problem in GPT 4 Turbo as well...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| IMO its just that the models are very nondeterministic, and
| people get very different kinds of responses from it. I met
| a number of people who tried it when it first came out and
| it was just useless so they stopped trying it, other people
| (including me) got gobsmacking great responses and it felt
| like AGI was around the corner, but after enough coin flips
| your luck runs out and you get some lazy responses. Some
| people have more luck than others and wonder why everyone
| around them says it's trash.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| GPT4-Turbo had some major "laziness" problems, like
| really major ones. I posted about this a year back.https:
| //news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985596#39987726
|
| I am not saying they haven't improved the laziness
| problem, but it does happen anecdotally. I even got
| similar sort of "lazy" responses for something I am
| building with gemini-2.5-flash.
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| I think it's good. The model will probably make some mistake
| at first. Not doing the whole thing and just telling the user
| the direction it's going in gives us a chance to correct its
| mistakes.
| TillE wrote:
| Had a fun experience the other day asking "make a graph of [X]
| vs [Y]" (some chemistry calculations), and the response was
| blah blah blah explain explain "let me know if you want a graph
| of this!" Yeah ok thanks for offering.
| csomar wrote:
| I don't think that's laziness but maybe agent tuning.
| polskibus wrote:
| Is this a reaction to Apple paper showing that reasoning models
| don't really reason?
| anothermathbozo wrote:
| Why would that be?
| dragandj wrote:
| If these kids could read, they would be very upset.
| nikcub wrote:
| fyi the price drop has been updated in Cursor:
|
| https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1932484008816050492
| BeetleB wrote:
| Why does OpenAI require me to verify my "organization" (which
| requires my state issued ID) to use o3?
| bearjaws wrote:
| Prevent Deepseek R2 being trained on it
| piskov wrote:
| If only there were people with multiple passports or, I don't
| know, Kyrgyzstan.
|
| How exactly will passport check prevent any training?
|
| At most this will block API access to your average Ivan, not
| a state actor
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yeah, I just don't see myself using o3 when I have
| Gemini-2.5 Pro. I don't recall if Google Cloud verified my
| ID in the past, though. Still, no need to let yet another
| organization have my data if I'm not getting something
| _better_ in return.
| jjani wrote:
| > I don't recall if Google Cloud verified my ID in the
| past, though
|
| It generally does not. No idea if there are edge cases
| where it does, but that's definitely not the norm for the
| average user.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I'm an average Ivan, and I got access.
| yyhhsj0521 wrote:
| It's most likely for regulation compliance, instead of a
| sincere attempt to block anyone from training on them.
| valleyer wrote:
| Don't bother anyway. There are lots of cases of people trying
| and failing to go through the process, and there is no way to
| try a second time.
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/session-expired-verify-organi...
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/callback-from-persona-id-chec...
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/verification-issue-on-second-...
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/verification-not-working-and-...
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/organization-verfication-fail...
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/help-organization-could-not-b...
|
| https://community.openai.com/t/to-verify-an-organization-acc...
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yikes! Indeed, I won't bother.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| o3 is very much needed in VSCode GitHub CoPilot for
| Ask/Edit/Agent modes. It is sorely missing there.
| janstice wrote:
| Sure is - and o3 is missing from the OpenAI models that Azure
| is serving, which I suspect isn't a coincidence - if OpenAI has
| some secret sauce that lets them undercut resellers this might
| shake up agreements for a bit.
| alliao wrote:
| it used to take decades of erosion to make google search a hot
| mess, now that everything's happening in light speed, we get days
| for AI models to decay to the point of hot mess again..
| godelski wrote:
| For those wondering Yesterday:
| Today ------------- ------------- Price
| Price Input: Input: $10.00 / 1M
| tokens $2.00 / 1M tokens Cached input:
| Cached input: $2.50 / 1M tokens $0.50 / 1M tokens
| Output: Output: $40.00 / 1M tokens
| $8.00 / 1M tokens
|
| https://archive.is/20250610154009/https://openai.com/api/pri...
|
| https://openai.com/api/pricing/
| JojoFatsani wrote:
| O3 is really good. I haven't had the same results with o4
| unfortunately
| muzani wrote:
| It's one of the most unfortunate naming conventions
| vessenes wrote:
| Wait, you have access to o4? All I see is o4-mini, a distill of
| o4. I would not expect that to beat o3/o3-pro.
| 34679 wrote:
| I'd like to offer a cautionary tale that involves my experience
| after seeing this post.
|
| First, I tried enabling o3 via OpenRouter since I have credits
| with them already. I was met with the following:
|
| "OpenAI requires bringing your own API key to use o3 over the
| API. Set up here: https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations"
|
| So I decided I would buy some API credits with my OpenAI account.
| I ponied up $20 and started Aider with my new API key set and o3
| as the model. I get the following after sending a request:
|
| "litellm.NotFoundError: OpenAIException - Your organization must
| be verified to use the model `o3`. Please go to:
| https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/general and
| click on Verify Organization. If you just verified, it can take
| up to 15 minutes for access to propagate."
|
| At that point, the frustration was beginning to creep in. I
| returned to OpenAI and clicked on "Verify Organization". It turns
| out, "Verify Organization" actually means "Verify Personal
| Identity With Third Party" because I was given the following:
|
| "To verify this organization, you'll need to complete an identity
| check using our partner Persona."
|
| _Sigh_ I click "Start ID Check" and it opens a new tab for
| their "partner" Persona. The initial fine print says:
|
| "By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI's
| vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to
| process your biometric information to verify your identity,
| identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona's
| platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI's
| privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no
| more than 1 year."
|
| OK, so now, we've gone from "I guess I'll give OpenAI a few bucks
| for API access" to "I need to verify my organization" to "There's
| no way in hell I'm agreeing to provide biometric data to a 3rd
| party I've never heard of that's a 'partner' of the largest AI
| company and Worldcoin founder. How do I get my $20 back?"
| nateburke wrote:
| I don't recall Persona being in the mix last year when I signed
| up. Interesting development.
| gwhr wrote:
| I think it was a recent thing [1], but I thought they were
| only considering it
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/13/access-to-future-ai-
| models...
| conradev wrote:
| I was more excited by the process, like, there exists a model
| out there so powerful it requires KYC
|
| which, after using it, fair! It found a zero day
| __float wrote:
| I think they're probably more concerned about fake accounts
| and people finding ways to get free stuff.
| abeindoria wrote:
| What free stuff? It requires a paid API.
| DrammBA wrote:
| With no intention to tarnish your pure world view, paid
| services with low registration requirements are ideal for
| account laundering and subscription fraud with stolen
| credit cards
| conradev wrote:
| I actually think they're worried about foreign actors using
| it for...
|
| - generating synthetic data to train their own models
|
| - hacking and exploitation research
|
| etc
| gscott wrote:
| China is training their AI models using ChatGPT. They want
| to stop or slow that down.
| olalonde wrote:
| Why? It seems counterproductive given OpenAI's mission
| statement: "We are building safe and beneficial AGI, but
| will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids
| others to achieve this outcome."
| stavros wrote:
| Because OpenAI's actual mission statement is "money, and
| lots of it".
| conradev wrote:
| Yeah. I think they need money to deliver AGI
| hiatus wrote:
| > which, after using it, fair! It found a zero day
|
| Source?
| sothatsit wrote:
| Recently, Sean Heelan wrote a post "How I used o3 to find
| CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux
| kernel's SMB implementation". It might be what they are
| referring to.
|
| Link: https://sean.heelan.io/2025/05/22/how-i-used-o3-to-
| find-cve-...
| conradev wrote:
| Yep, that's the one!
| AstroBen wrote:
| KYC requirement + OpenAI preserving all logs in the same week?
| mycall wrote:
| I think KYC has been beaten by AI agents according to
| RepliBench [0] as obtaining compute requires KYC which has a
| high success rate in the graphic.
|
| [0] https://www.aisi.gov.uk/work/replibench-measuring-
| autonomous...
| infecto wrote:
| KYC has been around for a few months I believe. Whenever they
| released some of the additional thought logs you had to be
| verified.
| jjani wrote:
| OpenAI introduced this with the public availability of o3, so
| no.
|
| It's also the only LLM provider which has this.
|
| What OpenAI has that the others don't is SamA's insatiable
| thirst for everyone's biometric data.
| 34679 wrote:
| Follow-up. I pasted the above into ChatGPT because I genuinely
| wanted to know how to get my 20 bucks back. That request is in
| and they say I'll get a response in 2-3 days. I then asked it
| "What are the potential risks of agreeing to their terms?"
| Here's the response:
|
| Agreeing to Persona's terms, especially for biometric identity
| verification, involves both privacy and long-term data security
| risks. Here's a clear breakdown of the main risks you should be
| aware of: 1. Biometric Data Collection
|
| Risk: Biometric identifiers (like facial recognition,
| voiceprints, etc.) are extremely sensitive and irreplaceable if
| compromised. What they collect: Persona may
| collect a selfie, video, and metadata, and extract biometric
| templates from those for facial comparison and liveness
| detection. If leaked or abused: Unlike passwords,
| you can't change your face. A future data breach or misuse
| could lead to permanent identity compromise. 2. Data
| Storage & Retention
|
| Risk: Persona says biometric data is kept for up to one year,
| but: You're relying on their internal
| policies, not a legal guarantee. There's no
| technical detail on how securely it's stored or whether it's
| encrypted at rest. Worst-case scenario: Poorly
| secured biometric templates could be stolen, reused, or matched
| against other data sets by bad actors or governments. 3.
| Third-Party Sharing and Surveillance Risks
|
| Risk: Your biometric and ID data may be shared with
| subprocessors (partners/vendors) that you haven't explicitly
| vetted. Persona may transfer your data to
| cloud providers (like AWS, GCP), verification specialists, or
| fraud prevention services. Depending on
| jurisdiction, data could be subject to subpoenas, surveillance
| laws, or government backdoors (especially in the U.S.).
| 4. Consent Ambiguity & Future Use
|
| Risk: The fine print often includes vague consent for "quality
| assurance", "model improvement", or "fraud detection".
| This opens the door to retraining algorithms on your biometric
| data--even if anonymized, that's still a use of your body as
| data. Their privacy policy may evolve, and new
| uses of your data could be added later unless you opt out
| (which may not always be possible).
|
| Should You Agree?
|
| Only if: You absolutely need the service that
| requires this verification. You're aware of the
| privacy tradeoff and are okay with it. You trust
| that Persona and its partners won't misuse your biometric data
| --even a year down the line.
|
| If you're uneasy about this, you're not alone. Many developers
| and privacy advocates refuse to verify with biometrics for non-
| critical services, and companies like OpenAI are increasingly
| facing criticism for requiring this.
| stevage wrote:
| Huh, I never considered using ChatGPT to read terms of
| serivce for me. Nice idea.
| leetrout wrote:
| I actually contacted the California AG to get a refund from
| another AI company after they failed to refund me.
|
| The AG office followed up and I got my refund. Worth my time to
| file because we should stop letting companies get away with
| this stuff where they show up with more requirements after
| paying.
|
| Separately they also do not need my phone number after having
| my name, address and credit card.
|
| Has anyone got info on why they are taking everyone's phone
| number?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| (having no insider info:) Because it can be used as a primary
| key ID across aggregated marketing databases including your
| voting history / party affiliation, income levels,
| personality and risk profiles etc etc etc. If a company wants
| to, and your data hygiene hasn't been tip top, your phone
| number is a pointer to a ton of intimate if not confidential
| data. Twitter was fined $150 million for asking for phone
| numbers under pretense of "protecting your account" or
| whatever but they actually used it for ad targeting.
|
| >> Wednesday's 9th Circuit decision grew out of revelations
| that between 2013 and 2019, X mistakenly incorporated users'
| email addresses and phone numbers into an ad platform that
| allows companies to use their own marketing lists to target
| ads on the social platform.
|
| >> In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission fined X $150 million
| over the privacy gaffe.
|
| >> That same year, Washington resident Glen Morgan brought a
| class-action complaint against the company. He alleged that
| the ad-targeting glitch violated a Washington law prohibiting
| anyone from using "fraudulent, deceptive, or false means" to
| obtain telephone records of state residents.
|
| >> X urged Dimke to dismiss Morgan's complaint for several
| reasons. Among other arguments, the company argued merely
| obtaining a user's phone number from him or her doesn't
| violate the state pretexting law, which refers to telephone
| "records."
|
| >> "If the legislature meant for 'telephone record' to
| include something as basic as the user's own number, it
| surely would have said as much," X argued in a written
| motion.
|
| https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/405501/None
| azinman2 wrote:
| OpenAI doesn't (currently) sell ads. I really cannot see a
| world where they're wanting to sell ads to their API users
| only? It's not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
|
| To me the obvious example is fraud/abuse protection.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| They don't need to. It's totally sufficient that they can
| correlate your chat history with your identity. That
| makes other identifiers more valuable, if they can
| extract your interests
| brookst wrote:
| It's a good conspiracy theory, but of course it's scoped
| to only ChatGPT users who are also developers and using
| specifically the o3 model via API. So if it is a
| conspiracy, it's a fairly non-ambitious one.
| cmenge wrote:
| The typical use case of an API is not that you personally
| use it. I have hundreds of clients all go through my API
| key, and in most cases they themselves are companies who
| have n clients.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > It's not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
|
| I'm pretty sure you do. Claude too. The only chatbot
| company I've made an account with is Mistral specifically
| because a phone number was not a registration
| requirement.
| ax0ar wrote:
| They also require it now.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The fact they don't sell ads doesn't mean they are not in
| the business of selling users data to third parties.
|
| Also Netflix wasn't initially selling ads and there you
| have after increasing the price of their plans
| drastically in the last few years the ad supported
| subscription is probably the #1 plans because most people
| aren't willing to shed 15 to 25usd/EUR every month to
| watch content that is already littered with ads.
| fsmv wrote:
| If you sell ads you're actually incentivised not to sell
| data because then your competitors would be able to reach
| your users without paying you
| ethbr1 wrote:
| You're incentivized not to sell _targeting_ data, but you
| 're _very_ incentivized to collect and maintain as much
| of it as you can, and then offer access using it as a
| service.
|
| So, at the end of your day, company X has an overdetailed
| profile of you, rather than each advertiser. (And also,
| at least in the US, can repackage and sell that data into
| various products if it chooses)
| KomoD wrote:
| > It's not like you need a phone number to use ChatGPT.
|
| When I signed up I had to do exactly that.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| They may not sell ads.
|
| They may still buy data from ad companies and store
| credit cards, etc.
|
| Many of them link users based on phone number.
| azinman2 wrote:
| But to do what with api users? Most api users won't be
| individuals...
| KomoD wrote:
| I bet there's way more individuals than companies that
| use the API
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| You're thinking ads are to advertise products. Ads are to
| modify behavior to make you more likely to buy products.
|
| ChatGPT has the capacity to modify behavior more subtly
| than any advertising ever devised. Aggregating knowledge
| on the person on the other end of the line is key in
| knowing how to nudge them toward the target behavior.
| (Note this target behavior may be how to vote in an
| election, or how to feel about various hot topics.)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Aggregating knowledge on the person on the other end
| of the line is key in knowing how to nudge them toward
| the target behavior._
|
| It also, as Google learned, enables you to increase your
| revenue per placement. Advertisers will pay more for
| placement with their desired audience.
| codedokode wrote:
| Obvious goal is to know the identity of users.
| sgarland wrote:
| Tangential: please do not use a phone number as a PK. Aside
| from the nightmare of normalizing them, there is zero
| guarantee that someone will keep the same number.
| ponector wrote:
| Even better: phone numbers are redistributed after some
| time of inactivity.
| pembrook wrote:
| Source: have dealt with fraud at scale before.
|
| Phone number is the only way to reliably stop MOST abuse on a
| freemium product that doesn't require payment/identity
| verification upfront. You can easily block VOIP numbers and
| ensure the person connected to this number is paying for an
| actual phone plan, which cuts down dramatically on bogus
| accounts.
|
| Hence why even Facebook requires a unique, non-VOIP phone
| number to create an account these days.
|
| I'm sure this comment will get downvoted in favor of some
| other conspiratorial "because they're going to secretly sell
| my data!" tinfoil post (this is HN of course). But my
| explanation is the actual reason.
|
| I would love if I could just use email to signup for free
| accounts everywhere still, but it's just too easily gamed at
| scale.
| LexGray wrote:
| On the flip side it makes a company seem sparklingly inept
| when they use VOIP as a method to filter valid users. I
| haven't done business with companies like Netflix or Uber
| because I don't feel like paying AT&T a cut for identity
| verification. There are plenty of other methods like
| digital licenses which are both more secure and with better
| privacy protections.
| pembrook wrote:
| I wish we could all agree on a better way of auth -- but
| unfortunately this is all we have. Asking normal people
| to do anything outside of phone number or email (or
| 'login with [other account based on phone number or
| email]' for auth is basically impossible.
| exceptione wrote:
| Maybe they should look into a non-freemium business model.
| But that won't happen because they want to have as much
| personal data as possible.
|
| - Parent talks about a paid product. If they wants to burn
| tokens, they are going to pay for it.
|
| - Those phone requirements do not stop professional
| abusers, organized crime nor state sponsored groups. Case
| in point: twitter is overrun by bots, scammers and foreign
| info-ops swarms.
|
| - Phone requirements might hinder non-professional abusers
| at best, but we are sidestepping the issue if those
| corporations deserve that much trust to compel regular
| users to sell themselves. Maybe the business model just
| sucks.
| pembrook wrote:
| I don't like requiring phone numbers either, but saying
| OpenAI shouldn't do freemium model for hottest tech
| product of this century (AI) is a fundamental
| misunderstanding of how humans and the world works.
|
| Also, if they don't do freemium they're getting way more
| valuable information about you than just a phone number.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| What part of this thread relates to freemium? Use of the
| API requires tokens that are paid for. General use of the
| AI via the web interface does not require a phone number.
|
| Only requiring the phone number for API users feels
| needlessly invasive and is not explained by a vague
| "countering fraud and abuse" for a paid product...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I'm sure this comment will get downvoted in favor of some
| other conspiratorial "because they're going to secretly
| sell my data!" tinfoil post (this is HN of course). But my
| explanation is the actual reason.
|
| Your explanation is inconsistent with the link in these
| comments showing Twitter getting fined for doing the
| opposite.
|
| > Hence why even Facebook requires a unique, non-VOIP phone
| number to create an account these days.
|
| Facebook is the company _most_ known for disingenuous
| tracking schemes. They just got caught with their app
| running a service on localhost to provide tracking IDs to
| random shady third party websites.
|
| > You can easily block VOIP numbers and ensure the person
| connected to this number is paying for an actual phone
| plan, which cuts down dramatically on bogus accounts.
|
| There isn't any such thing as a "VOIP number", all phone
| numbers are phone numbers. There are only some profiteers
| claiming they can tell you that in exchange for money.
| Between MVNOs, small carriers, forwarding services, number
| portability, data inaccuracy and foreign users, those
| databases are practically random number generators with
| massive false positive rates.
|
| Meanwhile major carriers are more than happy to give phone
| numbers in their ranges to spammers in bulk, to the point
| that this is now acting as a profit center for the spammers
| and allowing them to expand their spamming operations
| because they can get a large number of phone numbers those
| services claim aren't "VOIP numbers", use them for spamming
| the services they want to spam, and then sell cheap or ad-
| supported SMS service at a profit to other spammers or
| privacy-conscious people who want to sign up for a service
| they haven't used that number at yet.
| SheinH wrote:
| The discussion wasn't about freemium products though.
| Someone mentioned that they paid 20 bucks for OpenAI's API
| already and then they were asked for more verification.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Thank you for this comment... a relative of mine spent a ton
| of money on an AI product that never came a license he cannot
| use. I told him to contact his states AG just in case.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| This is in part "abuse prevention"[1] and in part _marketing_.
| Making customers feel like they 're signing up to access state
| secrets makes the models seem more "special". Sama is well
| known to use these SV marketing tricks, like invite-only
| access, waiting lists, etc to psychologically manipulate users
| into thinking they're begging for entry to an exclusive club
| instead of just swiping a credit card to access an API.
|
| Google tried this with Google Plus and Google Wave, failed
| spectacularly, and have ironically stopped with this idiotic
| "marketing by blocking potential users". I can access Gemini
| Pro 2.5 without providing a blood sample or signing parchment
| in triplicate.
|
| [1] Not really though, because a significant percentage of
| OpenAI's revenue is from spammers and bulk-generation of SOE-
| optimised garbage. Those are valued customers!
| paulcole wrote:
| HN Don't Hate Marketing Challenge
|
| Difficulty: Impossible
| miki123211 wrote:
| Gemini doesn't give you reasoning via API though, at least as
| far as I'm aware.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Works for me?
|
| Maybe you're thinking of deep research mode which is web UI
| only for now.
| jjani wrote:
| If by reasoning you mean showing CoT, Gemini and OA are the
| same in this regard - neither provides it, not through the
| UI nor through the API. The "summaries" both provide have
| zero value and should be treated as non-existent.
|
| Anthropic exposes reasoning, which has become a big reason
| to use them for reasoning tasks over the other two despite
| their pricing. Rather ironic when the other two have been
| pushing reasoning much harder.
| finebalance wrote:
| Google exposes their reasoning. You can use their new
| gemini python sdk to get thought traces.
| jjani wrote:
| Google does not expose their reasoning any more. They
| give "thought summaries" which provide effectively zero
| value. [1][2]
|
| [1] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-
| api/docs/thinking#summaries [2]
| https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/massive-regression-
| detailed-...
| charliebwrites wrote:
| Doesn't Sam Altman own a crypto currency company [1] that
| specifically collects biometric data to identify people?
|
| Seems familiar...
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/what...
| jjani wrote:
| GP did mention this :)
|
| > I've never heard of that's a 'partner' of the largest AI
| company and Worldcoin founder
| 93po wrote:
| the core tech and premise doesnt collect biometric data, but
| biometric data is collected for _training_ purposes with
| consent and compensation. There is endless misinformation
| (willfully and ignorantly) around worldcoin but it is not, at
| its core, a biometric collection company
| malfist wrote:
| Collecting biometrics for training purposes is still
| collecting biometrics.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| this reminds me of how broadcom maintains the "free" tier of
| vmware.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Can you explain? Is it not actually free?
| coderatlarge wrote:
| there are so many non-functional websites and signups
| required to get to the end of the rainbow that any sane
| person quits well before getting to any freely distributed
| software, if, in fact, there still is some.
| 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote:
| This feels eerily similar to a post I've read a within the last
| month. Either I'm having a deja vu, it's a coincidence that the
| same exact story is mentioned or theres something else going on
| bgwalter wrote:
| What should be going on? A regular Google search for "openai
| persona verify organization" shows withpersona.com in the
| second search result.
| 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV wrote:
| Yeah ok guess I misremembered it a bit but I was curious
| too and found the previous one I've thought of:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43795406
| Barbing wrote:
| Good eye! In this case, complaints are numerous. See a
| web search for:
|
| openai persona verification site:community[.]openai[.]com
|
| e.g. a thread with 36 posts beginning Apr 13:
|
| "OpenAI Non-Announcement: Requiring identity card
| verification for access to new API models and
| capabilities"
|
| But always good to be on look out for shenanigans :)
| Retric wrote:
| This is OpenAI's fairly dystopian process, so the exact same
| thing happens to lots of people.
| verisimi wrote:
| It's a concerted attempt to de-anonymise the internet.
| Corporate entities are jostling for position as id
| authorities.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| This is just the process for OpenAI. It's the same process I
| went through as well.
| bratao wrote:
| You are even luck to be able to verify. Mine give me an error
| about "Session expired" for months!! Support do not reply.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Oh I also recently got locked out of my linkedin account until
| I supply data to Persona.
|
| (So I'm remaining locked out of my linkedin account.)
| fakedang wrote:
| As someone not in the US, I do a straight nope out whenever I
| see a Persona request. I advise everyone else to do the same.
| Afaik, it's used by LinkedIn and Doordash too.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I also am using OpenRouter because OpenAI isn't a great fit for
| me. I also stopped using OpenAI because they expire your API
| credits even if you don't use them. Yeah, it's only $10, but
| I'm not spending another dime with them.
| cedws wrote:
| After how long do they expire?
| zeograd wrote:
| IIRC, 1 year
| 0xdeafbeef wrote:
| Same for anthropic
| bonki wrote:
| I wonder if they do this everywhere, in certain jurisdictions
| this is illegal.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| That is so sleezy.
| johnnyyyy wrote:
| then you shouldn't use OpenRouter. ToS: 4.2 Credit
| Expiration; Auto Recharge OpenRouter reserves the right to
| expire unused credits three hundred sixty-five (365) days
| after purchase
| numlocked wrote:
| Hi - I'm the COO of OpenRouter. In practice we don't expire
| the credits, but _have_ to reserve the right to, or else we
| have a uncapped liability literally forever. Can 't operate
| that way :) Everyone who issues credits on a platform has to
| have some way of expiring them. It's not a profit center for
| us, or part of our P&L; just a protection we have to have.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| If you're worried about the unlimited liability, how about
| you refund the credits instead of expiring them?
| diggan wrote:
| Seems like a weird question to ask OpenRouter _Inc_ , a
| for-profit company.
|
| Really a shame OpenAI left their non-profit (and open)
| roots, could have been something different but nope, the
| machine ate them whole.
| azemetre wrote:
| Why is it a bad thing to ask for a company to do right by
| their paid customers? This type of policy absolutely
| causes the company to lose more business in the future
| because it shows customers that they don't care about
| customers.
|
| I never heard of OpenRouter prior to this thread, but
| will now never use them and advocate they never be used
| either.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| A fair refund policy is not in conflict with a company
| being for-profit. I (and it seems many others) would be
| much less inclined to buy credits from a company that
| will expire them if I don't use it, and more inclined to
| buy credits from a service that will refund them if I end
| up not using it. Once I've bought them I'm more likely to
| use them. And in addition to reducing that purchasing
| friction and gaining market share, they can get the time-
| value of the money between when I bought the credits and
| when they eventually refund them.
|
| Enlightened self-interest is when you realize that you
| win by being good to your customers, instead of treating
| customer service like a zero-sum game.
| kfrane wrote:
| From my experience with billing systems it is usually not
| possible to refund a transaction after 6 or 12 months.
| gotimo wrote:
| even _possible_ with a some of them, but even in that
| case they 're usually not "refunding" as much as they're
| just "making a new transaction for the same anount the
| other way" which does the same at the surface until
| reversals, voids or rejections happen and it all becomes
| a mess.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Why only 365 days? Would be way fairer and still ok for you
| (if it's such a big issue) to expire them after 5 years.
| otterley wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what makes you different from a retailer
| or restaurant that has the same problem?
| csomar wrote:
| > How do I get my $20 back?
|
| Contact support and ask for a refund. Then a charge back.
| cess11 wrote:
| I suspect their data collection might not be legal in the EU.
|
| https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-policy
|
| To me it looks like an extremely aggressive data pump.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| There are stories about e.g. Hetzner requiring all sorts of
| data from people who want to open/verify accounts so perhaps
| not. Might just be an anti "money laundering" thing.
| Especially if the credit card company ends up refunding
| everything..
| 7bit wrote:
| What stories? Can you back up that claim with some sources
| please?
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/search?q=id
| 7bit wrote:
| That's not a source and it is not my responsibility to
| backup the claims you made. That is yours. If you don't
| have any sources, and admit to just saying things that
| are not probable, I can also live with that.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| What's the source on OpenAI doing the same? How is it
| anymore legitimate in anyway?
|
| Which kind of would make the entire "discussion" moot and
| pointless
| wut42 wrote:
| Hetzner is famously notorious for this, but not enough
| for publications to pick up this. So by your definitions,
| YEARS of people talking about their experiences with this
| is nothing?
| zuppy wrote:
| Infomaniak did request my personal id or passport for
| creating a company account. I'm not going to provide any
| extra source for you, this is what happened to me, you
| can either believe it or not.
| askl wrote:
| Crazy, I already gave up registering for chatgpt because they
| asked for my phone number. I'm not giving that to any random
| startup.
| gloosx wrote:
| >ID Check
|
| Just send them a random passport photo from the Internet,
| what's the deal? Probably they are just vibe-verifying the
| photo with "Is it legit passport?" prompt anyways.
| sneak wrote:
| It requires video and an app. They are collecting facial
| biometrics.
| gloosx wrote:
| App? So you cannot verify without a mobile phone?
| sneak wrote:
| You can't sign up in the first place without a mobile
| phone number. They require a phone number and block VoIP
| services.
| gloosx wrote:
| Real mobile phone number to receive a code is 10C/. Maybe
| a bit more, but certainly not more than a dollar.
| _joel wrote:
| I think modern face verification has moved on, it's been
| video in all my encounters.
| gloosx wrote:
| still no real human is involved, as they mention their
| verification is automated and prohabilistic -- which is
| especially funny to hear in context of verification. Im
| pretty sure even a kid can go around it, e.g. on the video
| showing a photo of a person holding his passport which you
| can find online.
| tethys wrote:
| No. You have to turn your head, and stuff. Also, even if
| this would work, they allow only one verification per
| person per 90 days.
| gloosx wrote:
| >one verification per person per 90 days.
|
| this is absurd, how do they define "person"? On the
| internet I can be another person from another country in
| a minute, another minute I will be a different person
| from a different country.
| _joel wrote:
| No, that's not how it works.
| gloosx wrote:
| So your saying it's not just feeding your video to the AI
| model and blindly trusting it's outcome? Any evidence how
| it works then?
| sneak wrote:
| Yeah, same. I am a paying API customer but I am not doing
| biometric KYC to talk to a bot.
| baq wrote:
| Meanwhile the FSB and Mossad happily generate fake identities
| on demand.
| romanovcode wrote:
| The whole point of identity verification is for the same
| Mossad to gather your complete profile and everything else
| they can from OpenAI.
|
| Since Mossad and CIA is essentially one organization they
| already do it, 100%.
| belter wrote:
| With all this plus the saving of all chats they can't operate
| on the EU. But they do ....
| verisimi wrote:
| > OK, so now, we've gone from "I guess I'll give OpenAI a few
| bucks for API access" to "I need to verify my organization" to
| "There's no way in hell I'm agreeing to provide biometric data
| to a 3rd party I've never heard of that's a 'partner' of the
| largest AI company and Worldcoin founder. How do I get my $20
| back?"
|
| This should be illegal. How many are going to do the same as
| you, but then think that the effort/time/hassle they would
| waste to try to get their money back would not be worth it? At
| which point you've effectively donated money to a corp that
| implements anti-consumer anti-patterns.
| righthand wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me why I'll never touch these LLM
| services.
| shmoogy wrote:
| I was excited about trying o3 for my apps but I'm not doing
| this validation.. thanks for the heads up.
| predkambrij wrote:
| Interesting, it works for me through openrouter, without
| configured openai integration. Although, I have openai account
| and did verification with openai before. Conspiricy theory
| would say that they are exchanging PII so openrouter knows who
| am I :)
| exceptione wrote:
| Welcome to tech dystopia.
|
| _Hello Human Resource, we have all your data, please upload
| your bio-metric identity, as well as your personal thoughts._
|
| _Building the next phase of a corporate totalitarian state,
| thank you for your cooperation._
| _345 wrote:
| o3 is really powerful. I understand it tbh. They don't want
| scammers and abusers easily accessing it
| stevev wrote:
| It was only a matter of time considering Deepseek R1's recent
| release. OpenAI's competitor is an open-source product that
| offers similar quality at a tenth of the cost. Now they're just
| trying to prevent customers from leaving.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Only at HN can the reaction to an 80% price drop be a wall of
| criticism.
| alternatex wrote:
| "80% price drop" is just a title. The wall of criticism is for
| the fine-print.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The wall of criticism is all wild speculation, not fine
| print.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Meanwhile Apple: Liquid Glass
| boyka wrote:
| 80%? So this is either same Trump style "art of the deal" with
| setting unreasonable pricing in the first place or desperately
| needing customers?
| mythz wrote:
| 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?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| 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.
| jsnider3 wrote:
| Very few customers pick the model based on cost, for many
| ChatGPT is the only one they know of.
| hu3 wrote:
| > 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.
| jsnider3 wrote:
| > 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.
| monster_truck wrote:
| Curious that the number of usages for plus users remained the
| same. I don't think they're actually doing anything material to
| lower the cost by a meaningful amount. It's just margin they've
| always had, and they cut it because magistral is pretty
| incredible for being completely free
| maxcomperatore wrote:
| groq is better
| jsnider3 wrote:
| No.
| ucha wrote:
| Can we know for sure that the price drop is accompanied by a
| change in the model such as quantization?
|
| On twitter, some people say that some models perform better at
| night when there is a less demand which allows them to serve a
| non-quantized model.
|
| Since the models are only available through API and there is no
| test to check which version of the model is served, it's hard to
| know what we're buying...
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