The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck.
10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly.
Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.
Who woulda thought that just having access to enough textual inputs and outputs and a vaugely similar transformer architecture would be enough to copy-cat rather useful intelligence.
It reminds me of the seo antics out there. The search results page is the engine, much like how distilling is the "intelligence" for your chinese room machine
well, a stroke of luck until the whole US stock market crashes & everyone's retirement funds get cut 40% I guess when people internalize this. it will have to happen sooner or later though I suppose
interestingly also, open weight models are also more effectively run in the cloud, so it creates a weird scenario where the frontier labs crash but the compute providers, not as much
Once they make a model better than Fable I’ll be switching to Codex. Their priorities in terms of consumers seem to be better. I do think Anthropic has some solid safety viewpoints, but I don’t necessarily think that either is entirely aligned yet with delivering exactly what humanity needs. Maybe the AI will help align the AI companies when it gets smart enough. That’s the real misalignment I’m concerned about.
I don't think these companies have humanity's needs in mind when they're developing these models. Although the last part of your comment struck me as a bit comical, I genuinely believe that an AI can have way more empathy than a corporation. Afterall, a mimicry of empathy is probably better than no empathy.
50% off at open router is also still applied so it comes out at $2 / $10 per 1M.
Feature request for Artificial Analysis, allow us to see these live prices on the pareto. It would amazing to also see what a 25,50,75,100 % utilised subscription costs compared to raw tokens.
There are no open source models, at least not useful ones (yet) [0]. Open weight is not the same as open source. The current "open weight" models are just opaque binary blobs you can run on your own computer instead of through a web API.
if you're picking AI models for long-term sustainability you're doing it wrong. There's really no point in locking in model choice for anything more than a month or two these days.
What about companies purchasing enterprise contracts? Most contracts are minimum 12 months. At a minimum, to secure enteprise requirements like zero-data retention, you'll need to lock into a single provider.
These price reductions are mostly targeted towards self-serve customers on individual or small team plans, where individual choice matters and the friction of changing models/providers is low.
The "until at least Nov 21st" thing presumably mainly affects teams that pin to GPT-5.6 Sol (maybe after extensive testing) such that they won't be switching to GPT-5.7 or GPT-6 or whatever new model is released between now and November.
Using codex every day, in spite of which, I hope some day providers will just start naming their offerings small/medium/large, a bit like we eventually started doing in software testing. Trying to remember what Sol is or why it's better than the other thing is more cognitive effort than I can muster at this point. And that's a sure sign of commoditisation in itself
Tinfoil hat time: They saw everyone referring to Mythos, and later Fable, as the new “good” models when Anthropic released those, distinguishable from the “regular” Claude (or other companies’ models) for everyone, and didn’t have that distinction for the GPT model family. That’s why the planetary names were introduced.
I think model naming has been atrocious in general, in part because newer "lite" models surpass the capabilities of previous "pro" models (case-in-point: Gemini Flash which now surpasses the capabilities of the latest Gemini Pro, with a newer Flash Lite vying somewhat unsuccessfully for the old Flash price/positioning), but gpt 5.6's Sol/Terra/Luna split is really not bad at all - probably easier to understand than Starbucks' cup sizing!
The problem becomes when you add in the adjustable reasoning efforts and you end up with {model, reasoning_effort} combinations that end up completely obviating particular model classes altogether for at least some percentage of queries; e.g. with GPT 5.6 the price/performance Pareto frontier is dominated by permutations of either Luna and Sol, with Terra nowhere to be seen (but then if you need "large model smells" that aren't captured by your benchmark you can't even rely on this, as a model like Luna simply isn't capable of encoding sufficient world knowledge in its weights to perform certain tasks at any reasoning level but you might be able to get away with Terra on low reasoning, but no one seems to be covering this for some reason).
The Chinese are coming after these greedy-ass frontier labs. Today Xiaomi unveiled it's own inference machine .... I bet it's gonna be cheaper than Nvidia DGX, shipped with open source models that anybody can have at home.
But can these really be trusted? There was just a HN post which proofed that you can train a model to behave completely different on a certain day. How do we now, that these models do not find a way to call home when they see interesting informations (probably irrelevant on a personal level, but corps, government and military might care).
I'm not sure I could characterize the frontier labs as greedy, given that they've been consistently losing gargantuan amounts of money.
The people who give them the money are greedy, and hopefully in for a rude awakening. Starting from Nvidia's vendor financing which has a very direct benefit to them, through to every company and oligarch investing into data centres in the hopes of being one of the ones left capitalizing on capturing the livelihoods of the majority of what remains of the "middle class".
It's either hopium or a truly horrific dystopia. Something's going to have to give.
These price drops are absolutely bonkers. Gotta love competition! Glad we didn't end up with a duopoly of openai and anthropic, we got a glimpse of what nightmare that would've been and it wasn't pretty
Which is not that great for people using less than 50% every week, because the next reset date moves forward too. In essence, it is redistributing compute from people who haven't used their quota much to those who have.
Though I think they gave a banked reset this time.
10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly.
Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.
Who woulda thought that just having access to enough textual inputs and outputs and a vaugely similar transformer architecture would be enough to copy-cat rather useful intelligence.
A major correction would be a bummer but we were never entitled to these abnormal gains in the first place.
The economy he and his ilk want to build is infinitely worse.
If investors start fleeing from senseless businesses in the AI sector, that does not mean that sensible businesses will be spared.
Feature request for Artificial Analysis, allow us to see these live prices on the pareto. It would amazing to also see what a 25,50,75,100 % utilised subscription costs compared to raw tokens.
There are no open source models, at least not useful ones (yet) [0]. Open weight is not the same as open source. The current "open weight" models are just opaque binary blobs you can run on your own computer instead of through a web API.
[0] https://allenai.org/
These price reductions are mostly targeted towards self-serve customers on individual or small team plans, where individual choice matters and the friction of changing models/providers is low.
Why is large better than medium to the average end user of ChatGPT though?
I don’t think there’s a way to name these things that will satisfy everyone.
My brain's initial conception of the concepts was earth-relative, so I mapped it as:
Sol = big, it's the sun Luna = medium, in-between sun and earth, space Terra = small, terrestrial
The problem becomes when you add in the adjustable reasoning efforts and you end up with {model, reasoning_effort} combinations that end up completely obviating particular model classes altogether for at least some percentage of queries; e.g. with GPT 5.6 the price/performance Pareto frontier is dominated by permutations of either Luna and Sol, with Terra nowhere to be seen (but then if you need "large model smells" that aren't captured by your benchmark you can't even rely on this, as a model like Luna simply isn't capable of encoding sufficient world knowledge in its weights to perform certain tasks at any reasoning level but you might be able to get away with Terra on low reasoning, but no one seems to be covering this for some reason).
The people who give them the money are greedy, and hopefully in for a rude awakening. Starting from Nvidia's vendor financing which has a very direct benefit to them, through to every company and oligarch investing into data centres in the hopes of being one of the ones left capitalizing on capturing the livelihoods of the majority of what remains of the "middle class".
It's either hopium or a truly horrific dystopia. Something's going to have to give.
If I stick with Luna, I can make it through the week.
Though I think they gave a banked reset this time.
they discovered a great way to destroy their own stickyness and make ppl build generic ai solutions.