They must really be feeling the commoditization pressure. I'm not sure what the way out of this is, ChatGPT and Claude are still good products, but they are not necessarily premium products anymore.
I expect a few things to happen in the next year:
1) Exclusive MCP server deals/API integrations
2) Significant switch to B2B marketing, even moreso than we've seen before, with API interfaces being paid and chat-client interfaces becoming more and more free, perhaps just with limits more on integrations or data visualization/analysis
3) US restrictions on B2B contracts with non-US hosted models that do any sort of contracting with the government
Obviously there's a bunch of stuff I'm not foreseeing. But it really does feel like the bottom of the market is collapsing into free. I assume OpenAI and Anthropic think their next generation of models will restore their halo tier status and that the cash burn is justified to just get there, but this has to really mess up IPO plans.
redox99 44 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure I agree
1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual users. It would hallucinate non stop.
2) When $100 and $200 per month plans launched, they were received as outrageous even here. Nowadays they are pretty common among power users.
colingauvin 40 minutes ago [-]
>1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual users. It would hallucinate non stop.
This is kind of what I'm saying though. Bottom has fallen out, differentiation is just can you be much more premium than the competition. Currently that remains unanswered.
EDIT: I'm basing this off the assumption that for chat, premium is not a point of differentiation at all. For coding/analysis, it is.
ilaksh 46 minutes ago [-]
> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We’re introducing updates to ChatGPT that improve everyday conversations while expanding access for Free users.
This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud.
Which I think is a fair interpretation of the term. They are general purpose intelligence in that you can get help from them about almost anything. They are not like narrow single purpose AI models.
I don't think we need that term to mean "can completely emulate a human" or "can do every task any human on earth can do as well as them".
It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike powers many times greater than human.
kkoncevicius 26 minutes ago [-]
If we could show the current models to someone like Alan Turing, I am sure he would conclude that we have AGI.
kubb 25 minutes ago [-]
> This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud.
Well, the models are smart enough to point out why this is wrong.
heaney-555 40 minutes ago [-]
Giving free ChatGPT users access to reasoning (the 'Think' toggle) will have a broader impact on the world than every new paid model and coding agent combined.
daemonologist 7 minutes ago [-]
Going from 5.5 Instant (which was noticeably bad) to 5.6 Luna is a big jump as well. OpenAI is probably the most prominent among the generaly public - an advantage in some respects but they're giving away a lot of free inference and thus have to use a pretty small model to do it.
It's described as "points to the latest Instant model currently used in ChatGPT" - so presumably that's "GPT-5.6 Instant" in the app.
firasd 10 minutes ago [-]
There’s no 5.6 instant I think — 5.6 Luna is gonna be the new instant tier model
firasd 1 hours ago [-]
I think it’s a misread to think the default ChatGPT model switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is available to free users with rate limits).
So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier
And 5.x instant models were never much to write home about anyway so the default ChatGPT free model hasn’t been particularly distinctive since 4o
ElijahLynn 1 hours ago [-]
I can't wait to never see a reasoning button ever again. Why do I have to reason about what reasoning level to use?
redox99 42 minutes ago [-]
Because the model can't read your mind and know if you want a quick answer, or an hour long deep dive.
Jtarii 31 minutes ago [-]
Then it should just ask the user what they want if its unclear from the context.
Sammi 6 seconds ago [-]
That's what the reasoning slider is for!
2sk21 14 minutes ago [-]
Exactly! I posted much the same comment in another thread and there were lots of huffy complaints that amounted to "you're prompting it wrong"
skybrian 53 minutes ago [-]
Some people want quick results. Some people want it to keep searching for a new math proof overnight without giving up, and they have money to burn.
It seems like giving it a time limit or a budget in dollars would be clearer, though?
Or, keep searching until I come back to the computer and ask about progress.
pllbnk 45 minutes ago [-]
The _Intelligence_ part of AGI should be able to guide the user through that without all the knobs.
minimaxir 37 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI tried auto-routing with the initial GPT-5 release and it was immediately clear why that was a bad idea.
vanuatu 38 minutes ago [-]
intelligence is not omniscience though
awakeasleep 52 minutes ago [-]
Because your incentives are opposed to the provider’s incentives
timpera 54 minutes ago [-]
I think it's nice to be able to make the model reason for dozens of minutes when you want to go deep on a topic, even if the router thinks it's an easy question.
tosh 1 hours ago [-]
free unlimited luna is a pretty badass move
luna is very good
timpera 41 minutes ago [-]
Any improvement to the ChatGPT free plan is really nice. It's easy to forget that most people have never used a SOTA model, and only think of their experience with GPT-4o or Google Search's AI Overviews when asked about AI.
skybrian 1 hours ago [-]
It's also pretty cheap if you're paying for it (for coding). But I don't quite trust it for anything complicated, so I often use Terra.
redox99 29 minutes ago [-]
Terra is awful and not cheap enough to make up for it. I'd suggest using luna or sol.
causal 56 minutes ago [-]
I guess I should give it another shot because I had pretty bad experience with Luna when it first came out. Stuff Sonnet knew better.
msq22 41 minutes ago [-]
Were free users subject to some limits? I've never run into any limits.
timpera 38 minutes ago [-]
It used to be 10 messages every 5 hours using GPT-5, then unlimited 4o-mini. More recently, it went down to ~5 messages per day on 5.5 Instant, then unlimited on 5.5 mini.
kingstnap 1 hours ago [-]
Its always fun to try to read between the lines here to speculate why they are doing this.
Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.
They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter backlash in the US due to AI grievances.
Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for marketing.
I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the real capabilities of these models.
deanc 56 minutes ago [-]
It's also going to be more training data for them.
ToValueFunfetti 51 minutes ago [-]
Is this new behavior from them? I haven't looked at their free chat offering in a minute, but I thought they always had them close behind paid tier, often with essentially equal products that made it weird for them to sell the paid tier for chat.
mkozlows 48 minutes ago [-]
No, free tier was total garbage with GPT-5.
kingstnap 37 minutes ago [-]
You can't even pick 5.6 luna on the chat app with a paid subscription. It just gives you sol (or use older models) with what seems like basically as much usage as you want. And sol is considerably smarter than luna.
All of this is of pretty minor importance though. You can't read as many tokens as a subcription can produce so more chat is not the value add nor super important.
I mean there are literally so many providers for free chat if you are willing to use several seperate apps.
The real value in these subs is using codex cli, much like the real point of anthropic subs is using claude code. Because agentic work actually does require a lot of tokens.
simianwords 35 minutes ago [-]
> Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.
Definitely this. The recent 80% discount was a reaction to Deepseek's update so that they still position near the frontier. My theory: Luna has always had a much higher efficiency. You do know that the model didn't get faster after the discount?
simianwords 34 minutes ago [-]
Does 5.6 Sol finally have an "instant" form? Is that the change?
29 minutes ago [-]
redox99 29 minutes ago [-]
Yes
ignoramous 1 hours ago [-]
Every week, 1 billion people turn to ChatGPT for everything from quick questions and web searches to planning, research, advice, and complex decisions.
Guess, Google's AI Mode is chipping away at their consumers (I know I haven't used Chat in a long, long while for 'quick questions and web searches' after OpenAI did away with "think" which I always use). The money-minting office & coding market Anthropic has cornered is hyper-competitive at both the frontier & low-cost ends. OpenAI is reactive [0] and seems right up against it, despite the strength of its excellent models.
[0] Won't put it past OpenAI (and/or Google) to open weight larger models!
skybrian 1 hours ago [-]
$20/month also gives you API access for coding, in any coding agent. I keep hitting the weekly limit but it's a good deal while it lasts.
drivebyhooting 55 minutes ago [-]
Google’s AI has been very glitchy for me lately. I used to reserve chatGPT for serious work and Gemini for daily personalized unimportant things. But now I switched completely to ChatGPT and resigned myself to their memories/personalization.
porridgeraisin 57 minutes ago [-]
Did they do away with think? I think now you have to do it with /think
porridgeraisin 55 minutes ago [-]
I dont pay for a chatgpt subscription, but sometimes I did use the web app for throwaway questions. GPT 5.5 Instant or whatever it was that they had was absolutely horrendous. Never answered a question straight and was pedantic in a way even a redditor wouldn't be. So I dropped it and just opened my paid coding agent for everything. Grok.com is quite good now with grok 4.5 though and I find myself using that often. Hopefully luna will be similar.
aniceperson 42 minutes ago [-]
a m-dash in the title? whoa things are degrading fast
jauntywundrkind 1 hours ago [-]
At first I thought the Sol updates was perhaps trying to help with some complaints of Sol burning through tokens, complaints that have prompted some new data points on https://codex-resets.com/ .
But seeing the graphic with the visual weather report: that makes me think that is not the goal at all. :)
laweijfmvo 1 hours ago [-]
What a bizarre example of a more direct answer. Any human would simply say “No, it doesn’t rain here in summer.”
Even after identifying the 0% chance of rain, it still drags the conversation on and on and on
taikahessu 59 minutes ago [-]
Would you like to know more? Seriously though, of course, it's tuned for maximum engagement, not maximum efficiency. I wonder how long this engagement dopamine circus can last... too long apparently.
Rendered at 20:35:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I expect a few things to happen in the next year:
1) Exclusive MCP server deals/API integrations
2) Significant switch to B2B marketing, even moreso than we've seen before, with API interfaces being paid and chat-client interfaces becoming more and more free, perhaps just with limits more on integrations or data visualization/analysis
3) US restrictions on B2B contracts with non-US hosted models that do any sort of contracting with the government
Obviously there's a bunch of stuff I'm not foreseeing. But it really does feel like the bottom of the market is collapsing into free. I assume OpenAI and Anthropic think their next generation of models will restore their halo tier status and that the cash burn is justified to just get there, but this has to really mess up IPO plans.
1) Back then, even as a free user you'd be able to use the strongest model (even if with tight limits). Now, you need to pay to use Sol, and you need to pay to use Opus or Fable. It does seem fairly premium in that sense. Idk about 5.6 Luna, but the previous Instant was really bad, even for very casual users. It would hallucinate non stop.
2) When $100 and $200 per month plans launched, they were received as outrageous even here. Nowadays they are pretty common among power users.
This is kind of what I'm saying though. Bottom has fallen out, differentiation is just can you be much more premium than the competition. Currently that remains unanswered.
EDIT: I'm basing this off the assumption that for chat, premium is not a point of differentiation at all. For coding/analysis, it is.
This clearly implies that they believe ChatGPT models are AGI and are now willing to say it out loud.
Which I think is a fair interpretation of the term. They are general purpose intelligence in that you can get help from them about almost anything. They are not like narrow single purpose AI models.
I don't think we need that term to mean "can completely emulate a human" or "can do every task any human on earth can do as well as them".
It also needs to be differentiated from ASI with godlike powers many times greater than human.
Well, the models are smart enough to point out why this is wrong.
(This is a subtle nudge at anyone from OpenAI who reads this to make sure they get updated.)
OpenAI have a model called "chat-latest" - I wonder if that's running this new model yet: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/chat-latest
It's described as "points to the latest Instant model currently used in ChatGPT" - so presumably that's "GPT-5.6 Instant" in the app.
So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier
And 5.x instant models were never much to write home about anyway so the default ChatGPT free model hasn’t been particularly distinctive since 4o
It seems like giving it a time limit or a budget in dollars would be clearer, though?
Or, keep searching until I come back to the computer and ask about progress.
luna is very good
Maybe Luna efficiency gain was actually significant enough that putting all the free users and giving them super generous limits makes sense.
They might be doing this to improve the messaging of AI among causal users since right now there is a huge amount of datacenter backlash in the US due to AI grievances.
Maybe they have too much excess capacity or they really want to juice token numbers and market share on their dashboards for marketing.
I also wonder if being given access to an actually a decent model like luna with actual thinking budget instead of brainless "instant" modes will start to make causal users understand the real capabilities of these models.
All of this is of pretty minor importance though. You can't read as many tokens as a subcription can produce so more chat is not the value add nor super important.
I mean there are literally so many providers for free chat if you are willing to use several seperate apps.
The real value in these subs is using codex cli, much like the real point of anthropic subs is using claude code. Because agentic work actually does require a lot of tokens.
Definitely this. The recent 80% discount was a reaction to Deepseek's update so that they still position near the frontier. My theory: Luna has always had a much higher efficiency. You do know that the model didn't get faster after the discount?
[0] Won't put it past OpenAI (and/or Google) to open weight larger models!
But seeing the graphic with the visual weather report: that makes me think that is not the goal at all. :)
Even after identifying the 0% chance of rain, it still drags the conversation on and on and on