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.
maxgiraldo 56 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI could still have a significant moat. ChatGPT occupies most consumers’ minds when they think about AI and has become a household name. Google won because search became a habit-forming product people grew accustomed to using. Bing was once effectively indistinguishable from Google Search, yet still failed to achieve mass adoption because users had already become accustomed to “Googling” things. The same could be said for people "ChatGPT-ing" things. If OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, they will maintain similar pricing rather than aggressively undercutting each other, allowing the market to resemble Home Depot and Lowe’s, or cloud computing, where AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure coexist as highly profitable competitors. Unfortunately, I doubt OpenAI or Anthropic will pursue this strategy, as both companies appear to be acting as though the race to AGI is winner-take-all even if the market may ultimately support several highly profitable competitors.
BatmansMom 35 minutes ago [-]
Difference is that it was free to google/bing search. Ai prompting costs money.
If I run out of tokens on ChatGPT of course I will try Claude. I never ran out of Google searches so no reason to try Bing
revolvingthrow 12 minutes ago [-]
> OpenAI could still have a significant moat. ChatGPT occupies most consumers’ minds when they think about AI and has become a household name.
ChatGPT is AI for the average non-techie the world over, but the average non-techie isn't eager to pay for it. The more progress that's made, the less incentive to pay - most people are happy with the total garbage spewed by google AI overview. They'd be happy with google's 30b MoE gemma, whose performance will likely be squeezed down to something that can run on a phone in 2-3 years. Why would they pay $20 a month?
It's why OpenAI is pushing a variety of things such as ads and offer a more polished ui/ux than the competition, I think. The models are already good enough for people who just want to know how much sugar to add to their cake or when's the next basketball match their team plays - it's OpenAI's game to lose those people, by annoying UX and whatnot. If they can make a few bucks off of every one of their non-paying users it'll stretch their runway immensely. Those users will never go to Antrophic or some cheap Chinese model, but they might defect to Google because a popup on Android / in Chrome told them to.
demibabs 8 minutes ago [-]
Mass adoption isn’t where the money is, though. It doesn’t matter if ChatGPT has 1 billion users if they won’t pay for it.
nkmnz 16 minutes ago [-]
Never in my life have I bought any of the household names when it comes to household equipments. Of course, I use the household names’ names when I speak about wipes, washing powder, glue, etc., but never ever would I pay the 2x to 5x premium. Same will be true for most people with regard to “intelligence”, as long as it’s suffices their needs. Thats the crucial part.
Cloud computing, on the other hand, has a massive lock-in. But more importantly, their ideosyncratic ways of doing things leads to tribalism. It’s so much harder to move running processes from one provider to another without interruption than just changing an API key or the URL for your chatbot.
nozzlegear 41 minutes ago [-]
> If OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, they will maintain similar pricing rather than aggressively undercutting each other, allowing the market to resemble Home Depot and Lowe’s, or cloud computing, where AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure coexist as highly profitable competitors.
Wouldn't that just be price fixing? If they arrive at their prices independently and they all happen to be similar, fine. But if they're all "smart" and coordinate so none of them undercuts the other, that's probably illegal.
tccole 23 minutes ago [-]
Illegal for sure but rarely enforced.
petercooper 42 minutes ago [-]
It reminds me conceptually of the idea of using a ST:TNG replicator to just give you another replicator of your own, or asking a stereotypical genie for "infinite wishes". The genie is indeed out of the bottle in many ways.
lerchmo 2 hours ago [-]
The internet created lots of monopolies with network effects and economies of scale.a low margin commoditized business that still attracted a trillion dollars of investment to get off the ground was not how I envisioned it happening either.
td-andrew 2 hours ago [-]
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
visarga 48 minutes ago [-]
Funny you mention Chinese Room and LLMs in the same response, I would say LLMs proved Searle wrong, agents now make cutting edge discoveries and meaningful problem solving. They not lookup tables though and you need to pay for inference, so the intuition of syntax doing the work of semantics without understanding was wrong.
mullen 1 hours ago [-]
> Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.
Personally, I came to this conclusion early this year. To acquire the data that AI Companies are using to train their models is low cost and once they have it, they can refine and store it. Creating the LLM takes a bit of money but it is not a serious blocker. Clearly, the Chinese companies can make AI so they will drive down costs. There is a need for good AI (Not just Great AI) and it is not cost prohibitive to make good AI (The same with specialized AI).
My prediction is that AI will spilt into two categories, Great AI (High Cost) and Good Enough AI (Low Cost). Which for the long run of AI and companies that use AI, this is good.
state_less 2 hours ago [-]
Even before LLMs, ML folks were already aware that you can use a model to teach another model. I doubt this is something AI companies put at the top of their investor materials, but it's been nice to see it play out.
That said, there are other moat factors like, a US company needing to use a US AI provider, sticky customers due to corporate onboarding friction, and others. Not nothing, but not as large a moat as some imagined.
eigenspace 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but 10 or 15 years ago, I would have thought that there'd be more to it than just a slight modification on the ideas behind a CNN to get this level of AI.
There were somewhat good reasons to think it needed more than just this data-driven ML approach.
state_less 1 hours ago [-]
There's something startling about how (relatively) simple these networks are and yet how powerful they are. The main ingredient the AI darlings are using is vast amounts of compute and data. I don't want to take away anything from what the researchers came up with, but I suspect even they are surprised at how capable some of these models have become.
chasd00 51 minutes ago [-]
early on there was a lot of talk about "emergent behaviors" in the models where they were good at things that were unexpected or did not align to the training data. IIRC doing arithmetic is one example from early on. I think this is where the AGI craze took off, the labs were throwing more and more data in the training to see what other behaviors would emerge. The thought was with enough data and enough parameters AGI would surface on its own.
Then i think tool use became a priority or at lest a sibling priority to more data/more params. Along with multiple specialized models communicating with each other which is sort of a special case of tool use. That pretty much brings us to today.
dlandis 1 hours ago [-]
Hmm, don't people think that if the frontier labs really put enough engineering effort into preventing distillation that they would be able to do that, or at least diminish it significantly? I'm sure there are variety of additional techniques they could use on top of what they already do, but I suspect it just hasn't been at the top of their priorities yet. Maybe that will change soon. Worst case they could add additional hurdles to account creation ("know your customer" type of thing).
miki123211 40 minutes ago [-]
The frontier labs have competing goals in mind. They want high growth (which means little friction for account creation), API access (because enterprise money is the best money to have), and distillation protection.
Besides, identity verification that actually works at scale is a much harder problem than identity verification which is good enough to satisfy your compliance people and regulators. Especially if the fraudsters have a major world government standing behind them, and if their aim is to be identified as a real customer, not one customer in particular.
shuckles 29 minutes ago [-]
In particular, harvesting identities for online fraud is an industrial market for various criminal organizations.
zarzavat 46 minutes ago [-]
Even if it were possible it wouldn't change the outcome. China is capable of training frontier models even without distillation. Distillation is only an accelerant.
The primary resource you need to train LLMs is money and China has plenty of that.
btown 53 minutes ago [-]
At the end of the day, while you can do your best to obfuscate your reasoning tokens, it's a losing battle to hide actual user-visible output tokens. The very nature of API offerings is that you can't do KYC on where that API's output is going - there's a rich secondary market that's not going away.
And with the sheer volume of data created from that, coupled with benign-seeming prompts like "plan out your reasoning in a document before implementing" that could never be patched without breaking existing customer workflows... there's more than enough for someone to distill on. Even if that only gets them to not-quite-frontier, if you're pushing the frontier every few months, they're only ever a few months behind you.
chrsw 56 minutes ago [-]
Only the Chinese authorities can stop Chinese labs from distilling from western labs. And they won’t do that, for obvious reasons.
taf2 1 hours ago [-]
i trained another AI on all my codex logs... it's pretty good actually
colingauvin 2 hours ago [-]
Where is the actual evidence of distillation? I keep seeing this repeated ad nauseam but I must have somehow missed the evidence.
I took GP as asking for evidence that the reduced-cost Sol is actually a distillation of the previous-cost Sol. AFAIK, providers distilling or quantising models and offering them as the same model have not been proven.
sebzim4500 1 hours ago [-]
I doubt he was claiming that. He's probably saying that the ability of Chinese companies to be able to distill frontier US models has put downwards pressure on the price of all models.
miki123211 36 minutes ago [-]
Alternatively, modern AI is good enough at optimizing its own kernels that it just keeps pushing costs down. Unlike the semi-decentralized inference provider community, OpenAI has both the talent and the compute to throw at the problem of making their models much more efficient to run.
GPU kernel optimization is just the kind of well-bounded problem with clear success criteria that AI loves.
colingauvin 60 minutes ago [-]
I'm saying that it is unclear that without distillation this wouldn't still be happening. There is a massive narrative that no one but OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can make a model without distilling. But there's basically no evidence of that.
Altman specifically has said in an interview that I listened to once that he envisions AI being as cheap as electricity.
rootusrootus 1 hours ago [-]
I hope it's a good bit cheaper than that, I pay close to $400/mo for electricity and I'm in no way interested in paying anything like that for AI.
shimman 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, he sure does lie about a variety of things! He doesn't have the name Scam Altman for nothing.
ModernMech 2 hours ago [-]
Lol, of course what he left out is this will happen by inflating the cost of electricity rather than driving down the cost of AI.
matkoniecz 1 hours ago [-]
Altman of *Open* AI? No idea why I would trust him without very convincing proof.
pseudony 2 hours ago [-]
He also wanted to do a non-profit.
He even raised money on that premise.
He is a pathological liar, so is Dario. Don’t rely on the benevolence or truthfulness of these people.
They will say whatever is beneficial to say in the moment.
2 hours ago [-]
Rover222 2 hours ago [-]
I think the only moat in the future will be the scale of hardware deployment. If one company is able to deploy an order of magnitude more silicon, they'll have a firm grip on a SOTA model and massive inference usage.
China or SpaceX seem like the 2 likely candidates in 5 years, but who knows.
GMoromisato 1 hours ago [-]
"Who knows" is the right answer, I think.
If (a) demand for AI continues to increase, and (b) SpaceX can get to ~$100/kg to orbit, then they will have a ridiculously deep moat. Probably more like 10 years, though.
But as you said, who knows.
t0mas88 1 hours ago [-]
They will have moat in the satellite launching business, which is not useful in the AI datacenter market.
You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg. With lots of solar power available, the option to easily access your hardware and far less radiation issues.
The datacenter in space story really only exists to make it possible for Musk to sell X to SpaceX and make more money from the IPO. That's all. There is no engineering reason.
cameronh90 41 minutes ago [-]
It's not an engineering bet.
Musk's bet is dysfunctional politics will make it impossible to build enough data centres and the energy needed to power them. There are many, many reasons that might be wrong. However, if the economics are even close to viable, they could start throwing up data centres quicker than anyone can build them terrestrially (at least in the democratic west).
chasd00 46 minutes ago [-]
> You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg
if you can't put them outside of Amarillo Texas without people throwing a fit then you can't put them anywhere. I mean freaking Pantex is there ffs!
Yeah, very hard to predict the future at this point. But the Starship + Terrafab combo will be this type of order-of-magnitude-moat IF it works out. Big if.
If it doesn't work out, I think China's exponential terrestrial energy deployment will eventually give them the lead, IF they can get enough chips. Another big if.
make3 2 hours ago [-]
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
eigenspace 2 hours ago [-]
I'd take a market crash over a monopoly in the hands of a ghoul like Altman.
The economy he and his ilk want to build is infinitely worse.
fidotron 2 hours ago [-]
In truth it crashes either way.
make3 2 hours ago [-]
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
eigenspace 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The popping of a bubble is usually just as irrational as its rise.
If investors start fleeing from senseless businesses in the AI sector, that does not mean that sensible businesses will be spared. These things follow herd mentality, and the primary drivers of the herd are greed and fear, not fundamentals or business logic.
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
America is pretty close to rhyming with nazi germany circa 1929.
aliasxneo 1 hours ago [-]
Ok, I'll bite. What's your rationale?
isatty 1 hours ago [-]
People who say stuff like that are unhinged chronically online trolls. Best not to feed them.
staticman2 2 hours ago [-]
This is funny because the stock Market has been ahistorically high. My portfolio went up over 20 percent in the last 12 months.
A major correction would be a bummer but we were never entitled to these abnormal gains in the first place.
rootusrootus 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah the last year has been astonishing, my portfolio is kicking ass. But I'm 10 years out from retirement and I am pretty confident a correction is coming; I hope the correction happens soon.
wasfgwp 2 hours ago [-]
It’s not as bad as dot.com of course since all purely AI companies are private and the ones on the market have pretty decent cash flow outside of AI. But the stock market pattern is not that dissimilar, the largest increases are usually just before the crash.
2 hours ago [-]
missedthecue 1 hours ago [-]
The market (s&p500) crashing 40% puts us at levels we haven't seen since 2024, well into the creation of LLMs. Probably a worthwhile trade if it was either/or!
ComputerGuru 2 hours ago [-]
It's a 20% discount on input and a 33% discount on output through at least November 21, 2026; the revised pricing schedule is now
So Sol is still 20x Luna, but much more appealing when compared to offerings from Anthropic and others.
CodingJeebus 48 minutes ago [-]
It feels like a slightly more palatable version of what Anthropic has been doing, with their constant "use your free tokens before they expire next week!" campaigns. But it's feeling more and more ominous now, like they've hit the top of the demand curve and need to pull back prices to continue growing.
blobbers 45 minutes ago [-]
The top comment on this thread was about AI models being easily distilled being a stroke of luck.
This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover. This fundamental to the progress of intelligence and understanding.
It should not be surprising that AI can be distilled. It's the logical method of training; I would hope that each frontier model is in fact not trained 'from scratch' each time.
We should expect future frontier models are simply distilled versions trained by specialist models, the same way humans learn from a series of professors, papers and canonical books on each different subject material. Models like this can be trained incrementally, or a so called Mixture of Experts (MoE).
ninjahawk1 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rootusrootus 1 hours ago [-]
It feels like 5.6-Sol is already fairly close to Fable, and in some ways exceeds it. Just the other day I had Fable draw up a solution for me, and then I fed it into 5.6-Sol and said how does this look ... it found an oversight and told me about it, and when I then fed that observation back into Claude it acknowledged the miss.
I've noticed also that 5.6-Sol is more concise with output than Fable (and let's not talk about Opus, which is even more wordy).
rsyring 53 minutes ago [-]
It's common for different models to find holes in another's work. There are various good reasons for that.
FWIW, we use ChatGPT for our primary model and use Claude to do the reviews. This works better than ChatGPT doing it's own review even with a clean session/context.
WinstonSmith84 39 minutes ago [-]
Agree, but the point is not because Fable is better than Sol, it's because it's .. different .. it just looks at the problem through a different angle.
Culonavirus 23 minutes ago [-]
Same here. Grok Build 4.6 for me, given how cheap Grok is and how Sol is supposed to be "the" SOTA, it finds a surprising amount of bugs. Most of which Sol agrees with needs to be fixed or improved.
I've done this tens of times between these two models and it works great in my experience. Sol initial back and forth with me. Commit. Let Grok review. Sol fix. Only then do I start reading the code.
alternatex 2 hours ago [-]
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.
s3p 2 hours ago [-]
It's a funny comparison. Comparing the empathy of some software to the empathy of a company. It's like saying my car was more empathetic than my school. How can those two objects even be compared is what i am wondering
pixl97 1 hours ago [-]
We live in an odd time where 'software' (well neural networks) can be far more empathetic than summed product of a corporation.
Company empathy does exist, just look at how easy or hard it is to reach a company when you have a problem. How do they try to solve it for you? Is it a brick wall, for example Google when you have a problem. People quite often like dealing with small businesses because they can reach a singular human and have them as an interface to the problems they face now and in the future.
Agentic loops and the models underneath them can have a simulacra of empathy too. Not every model just blindly agrees with users, and some have a much better depth in picking up context clues that the user on the other end is having a hard time. Businesses just typically aren't running more expensive and fragile systems like that though.
IshKebab 1 hours ago [-]
Well, companies and AI are both entities that can make decisions and take actions that involve humans. Those might be empathetic or they might not. So of course you can compare their levels of empathy. I don't really understand why you think that you wouldn't be able to.
For example, health insurance providers are renowned for not being empathetic. Charities are the opposite. Sometimes companies even build it into their identity, e.g. Cards Against Humanity.
As for AI, I haven't seen a strong difference in empathy but it's definitely true that the big AI companies at least try to make their models moral and empathetic. Even if it mostly ends up just being annoying.
ttul 1 hours ago [-]
Fable 5 is just straight up a larger model - I'm guessing at this, but there is plenty of evidence online from people far more plugged in than I am. OpenAI is pursuing a strategy that yields greater operating margins and penetration of their model to developers. Fable's high cost makes it so premium that Anthropic has to reserve it for only the richest customers and corporate users. That's not a winning formula long term.
I believe the reason we have not seen a Fable-level model from OpenAI yet is because doing so would box them in on costs just as harshly as it has boxed in Anthropic. They are letting Anthropic make this mistake.
zarzavat 24 minutes ago [-]
Fable is indeed larger than Sol. OpenAI is developing Astra which will be more of a Fable-sized model.
If you can train a larger model then you can distill smaller models from it. You don't need to necessarily serve the larger model publicly. Distillation is much more effective when you have unrestricted access to the original model.
sleepgummies 2 hours ago [-]
You are basically saying you will switch from one evil to another because the other seems less evil for now.
It's funny how people make these alignment comments while ignoring how misaligned the leadership at these companies are right form the get go and they just play mental gymnastics to deflect those facts when confronted with them.
wasfgwp 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think anyone said anything about either being less evil? Just having more consumer oriented products..
sleepgummies 2 hours ago [-]
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sandle 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely loving this price war, long live open source models.
petcat 2 hours ago [-]
> long live open source models
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.
This viewpoint doesn't make any sense to me. The weights + inference code are the "source code" for AI. I literally don't know what else you are demanding for the "open source" label.
kingstnap 47 minutes ago [-]
If you think of LLMs as programs. The weights and inference code are very much a binary.
While the training code and data are the true source. Since if you want to robustly modify the LLM that's actually what you need.
But since "compilation" (training) is extremely compute intensive this isn't something accessible to anyone without an entire datacenter.
Anyway semantics aside having the binary is still infinitely better than dealing with an api as far as privacy and control go.
chasd00 37 minutes ago [-]
> I literally don't know what else you are demanding for the "open source" label.
you need to "literally" go read the definition of open source software or even ask an LLM to define it for you. Weights + inference code are not the source code they're more like the compiled binary. Making modifications to the behavior of a model with additional training is like writing a mod for minecraft. Sure, you can change things but it doesn't make it open source.
Calling these models "open source" is an old trap that software companies use to use. Free to download but then, once you're fully comitted, the trap snaps shut and you must pay up to continue.
keketi 48 minutes ago [-]
> I literally don't know what else you are demanding for the "open source" label
Training data and code.
drusepth 36 minutes ago [-]
Can you explain what's missing for the "open source" label that open-weight models like DeepSeek/Quen/GLM/etc don't release?
Is it just the supplementary data/code for how they were trained, not just the final product?
petcat 28 seconds ago [-]
The open weight model providers don't provide the training data or the build tooling. You cannot reproduce the model yourself, or even really know what the model contains. They don't even provide high-level catalogues/descriptions of the training data. An improvement would be something like "trained on the entire WWW up to Aug 1 2026". Or "trained on a Wikipedia archive + Anna's Archive". They don't provide any of this stuff.
I don't mind open-weight models, but they are not open source. It's like bringing home a dog from the rescue and just hoping that it doesn't have a history of biting kids in the face. You just can't know, because you don't know the full history. You can try to add new training (fine tune) to tell it not to bite kids, but that's it.
wasfgwp 2 hours ago [-]
Nemotron Super is sort of open source in the sense that Nvidia provides almost everything you need to replicate it from scratch. Of course it’s performance is not exactly stellar but it could be a good starting point for other research teams.
BoredomIsFun 2 hours ago [-]
Nemotron is okay. Better than Olmo.
Matumio 2 hours ago [-]
There is also https://apertus-ai.org/ but yeah, "not useful yet" if you were looking to replace your coding agent. Very useful if you are doing LLM research.
prometheus1992 51 minutes ago [-]
I really like molmo 2
sleepgummies 2 hours ago [-]
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AM1010101 2 hours ago [-]
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.
The price difference to Deepseek models (deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp) is still significant while the performance difference is not.
AmazingTurtle 42 minutes ago [-]
But I'm fine paying +50% more for +5% increased performance because it will pay off.
m4rtink 36 minutes ago [-]
Let the race to the bottom - and beyond - begin!
simonw 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rootusrootus 1 hours ago [-]
Good timing. I'm not too happy having to pay MAX pricing to even access Fable, and I've had a couple situations where Fable missed things and GPT 5.6-Sol caught it. My needs are modest and I can get by on a $20 OpenAI subscription, so the odds are starting to look increasingly like I'm going to drop Anthropic altogether.
prtmnth 2 hours ago [-]
Through OpenRouter you can get Sol for $2 input / $10 output which makes it a really attractive choice amongst frontier models.
indigodaddy 1 hours ago [-]
Wonder if that makes it cheaper than using on the sub (ignoring reset shenanigans)
lxgr 35 minutes ago [-]
I'd be very surprised if that were the case, unless they have severely devalued how much "100% usage" is worth – which, as I understand, they could at any point, given that they don't publicly specify how many tokens (or at least "credits" [1]) are included in each plan per month.
It really reminds me of pay-to-win games at this point: Two currencies (credits, tokens), both with a floating, intransparent exchange rate between each other and real money, random airdrops...
What good does a temporary price reduction do for production workloads? I'm not even running evals on something that is not long-term sustainable.
notatoad 2 hours ago [-]
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.
35 minutes ago [-]
markerz 2 hours ago [-]
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.
notatoad 2 hours ago [-]
if you've got an enterprise contract, doesn't that include pricing? a temporary discount on the base API rate probably isn't super relevant to that.
markerz 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly my and top commenter's point. "Temporary price reduction" and "production workloads" are two different worlds.
I'm against the idea that "there's really no point in locking in model choice for anything more than a month or two these days". At a minimum, enterprises are going to lock in a provider for a year due to enterprise contracts, which restricts their model choices. You sign for Anthropic, but now OpenAI models are "better". Or, you signed for AWS Bedrock: Oh no, you don't have access to deepseek-v4 because they're behind.
bluebands 2 hours ago [-]
enterprises usually
a. just get chatgpt/claude enterprise, or
b. just pay the aws bedrock or azure bill
neither of these entail model lock-in
eddythompson80 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have guarantees that the price of the model you’re using in production today won’t increase in the future?
badatnames 2 hours ago [-]
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
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
Sun, Earth, Moon — it’s basically L/M/S like you want but a little less boring.
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.
mastercheif 2 hours ago [-]
The naming schema actually tripped me up for a week or so.
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
inexcf 1 hours ago [-]
Pretty weird when the moon is as much between earth and sun as the earth is between the moon and the sun.
kgwgk 48 minutes ago [-]
And when it’s in between we cannot even see it (unless it’s exactly in line).
ModernMech 29 minutes ago [-]
It tripped me up because I was going by distance. I thought Terra was the base model and Luna was the mid model because it’s further away.
msdz 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ComputerGuru 2 hours ago [-]
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).
s3p 2 hours ago [-]
Yes but with gemini specifically they said that pro was still in training. And the comparison isn't really atrocious unless Gemini 3.5 Pro is worse than Gemini 3.5 flash
trizoza 37 minutes ago [-]
If it's on sale, it can't be that good.
throwaway2027 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is a move to get people off the subscription and move to API. The weekly usage is still awful altough it seems they're trying to fix it but I'm not hopeful.
1 hours ago [-]
ArvidSu 46 minutes ago [-]
Why do you think they want less people subscribing?
Alifatisk 2 hours ago [-]
Bummer, this does not affect the weekly usage on Codex through Subscription.
VulgarExigency 36 minutes ago [-]
Maybe it's because I don't use it in Codex, but I don't like working with Sol. It CONSTANTLY omits things it shouldn't, and is always dispatching sub-agents to do what I tell it to do, that don't have all the necessary context, and so they go on and do the research that was already done by the top-level agent. It's maddening.
I tried it again today because of the discount, it told me it couldn't run acceptance tests because a .env file did not exist, and when I showed it the damn file it went "ah, it's there now". I think it was the first time I've ever had an agent try to gaslight me.
stillpointlab 29 minutes ago [-]
I'd give it some more time. My first interactions with Sol were not good. It cut a dangerous corner and I had to call it out.
But I continued to work with it and found that it was mostly my own style of interacting that needed to change. In a way it is similar to a new co-worker, they have their own personality and ways of working. Once I figured that out I have been able to get very good work out of Sol.
Sol seems to work better when you are clear, precise, direct and unambiguous. The model seems annoyed if things aren't spelled out. Not micro-managing, it seems to have a high bar for specific intent.
When I get Fable to write out specs for Sol, I tell Fable that Sol is a nit-picking literalist that is exceptional at instruction following. So far this description has lead Fable to generate specs that Sol implements at a high quality.
xfax 2 hours ago [-]
Your move, Anthropic
NietTim 2 hours ago [-]
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
yomismoaqui 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks to both China & capitalism
kylepomykala 1 hours ago [-]
Very exciting - if only anthropic would do the same.
Culonavirus 28 minutes ago [-]
Ed is gonna have a field day with this lol.
kosolam 1 hours ago [-]
Does it mean that subscriptions get more tokens? I’m testing it now for coding instead of claude and it’s very important to understand if I get more due to the price reduction.
completely offtopic but how are you always there with a valid dupe link?
wahnfrieden 2 hours ago [-]
Not for subscribers though
calumcl 22 minutes ago [-]
Subscribers were already getting subsidised compute and value compared to the 20-200$ fee, peak cakeism to want more considering the alternative would likely be consumption based pricing for individuals so you "benefit" from OpenAI giving up some of their markup (and heavy users end up SOL).
ok123456 2 hours ago [-]
Subscribers already get random rolling resets.
TuxSH 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sejje 50 minutes ago [-]
Do they take them back? Codex a few weeks ago said I had 2 resets. I didn't use any, and now it doesn't say that.
ModernMech 27 minutes ago [-]
They do in fact expire.
skybrian 2 hours ago [-]
How do you know? I see a “weekly usage limit” bar in my ChatGPT settings, but I’m pretty fuzzy about what makes it go down.
If I stick with Luna, I can make it through the week.
Kye 2 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT Work and Codex use that. Normal chat has a different, unspecified limit.
skybrian 4 minutes ago [-]
Yep. I'm actually using ChatGPT integration via exe.dev to write code. It uses my subscription through an API and runs down the usage limit in a similar way.
The part I don't understand is how usage is "charged" against this limit.
ex1fm3ta 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bogzz 2 hours ago [-]
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.
wonnage 2 hours ago [-]
The company may be losing money but the people are getting enormously rich and cashing out religiously
_ink_ 2 hours ago [-]
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).
Yiin 2 hours ago [-]
Above average levels of paranoia here, but one way you can prevent that is by not connecting the machine in question to the internet.
wonnage 2 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT already notifies the authorities if it thinks you’re doing something illegal. Fable downgrades itself if it thinks you’re doing something even vaguely suspicious.
chasd00 25 minutes ago [-]
> ChatGPT already notifies the authorities if it thinks you’re doing something illegal.
aside from the obvious IP theft problem, it's probably most dangerous for Chinese users outside China to use the Chinese models.
dominotw 2 hours ago [-]
then what happens?
they discovered a great way to destroy their own stickyness and make ppl build generic ai solutions.
Rendered at 17:58:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
If I run out of tokens on ChatGPT of course I will try Claude. I never ran out of Google searches so no reason to try Bing
ChatGPT is AI for the average non-techie the world over, but the average non-techie isn't eager to pay for it. The more progress that's made, the less incentive to pay - most people are happy with the total garbage spewed by google AI overview. They'd be happy with google's 30b MoE gemma, whose performance will likely be squeezed down to something that can run on a phone in 2-3 years. Why would they pay $20 a month?
It's why OpenAI is pushing a variety of things such as ads and offer a more polished ui/ux than the competition, I think. The models are already good enough for people who just want to know how much sugar to add to their cake or when's the next basketball match their team plays - it's OpenAI's game to lose those people, by annoying UX and whatnot. If they can make a few bucks off of every one of their non-paying users it'll stretch their runway immensely. Those users will never go to Antrophic or some cheap Chinese model, but they might defect to Google because a popup on Android / in Chrome told them to.
Wouldn't that just be price fixing? If they arrive at their prices independently and they all happen to be similar, fine. But if they're all "smart" and coordinate so none of them undercuts the other, that's probably illegal.
Personally, I came to this conclusion early this year. To acquire the data that AI Companies are using to train their models is low cost and once they have it, they can refine and store it. Creating the LLM takes a bit of money but it is not a serious blocker. Clearly, the Chinese companies can make AI so they will drive down costs. There is a need for good AI (Not just Great AI) and it is not cost prohibitive to make good AI (The same with specialized AI).
My prediction is that AI will spilt into two categories, Great AI (High Cost) and Good Enough AI (Low Cost). Which for the long run of AI and companies that use AI, this is good.
That said, there are other moat factors like, a US company needing to use a US AI provider, sticky customers due to corporate onboarding friction, and others. Not nothing, but not as large a moat as some imagined.
There were somewhat good reasons to think it needed more than just this data-driven ML approach.
Then i think tool use became a priority or at lest a sibling priority to more data/more params. Along with multiple specialized models communicating with each other which is sort of a special case of tool use. That pretty much brings us to today.
Besides, identity verification that actually works at scale is a much harder problem than identity verification which is good enough to satisfy your compliance people and regulators. Especially if the fraudsters have a major world government standing behind them, and if their aim is to be identified as a real customer, not one customer in particular.
The primary resource you need to train LLMs is money and China has plenty of that.
And with the sheer volume of data created from that, coupled with benign-seeming prompts like "plan out your reasoning in a document before implementing" that could never be patched without breaking existing customer workflows... there's more than enough for someone to distill on. Even if that only gets them to not-quite-frontier, if you're pushing the frontier every few months, they're only ever a few months behind you.
Here is a project that guides you through it if you want to prove to yourself that it works https://github.com/arcee-ai/DistillKit
GPU kernel optimization is just the kind of well-bounded problem with clear success criteria that AI loves.
It's also how providers build their smaller models out of their larger ones; they publicly talk about the process.
Make sure to stay updated!
He even raised money on that premise.
He is a pathological liar, so is Dario. Don’t rely on the benevolence or truthfulness of these people.
They will say whatever is beneficial to say in the moment.
China or SpaceX seem like the 2 likely candidates in 5 years, but who knows.
If (a) demand for AI continues to increase, and (b) SpaceX can get to ~$100/kg to orbit, then they will have a ridiculously deep moat. Probably more like 10 years, though.
But as you said, who knows.
You can put AI chips in datacenters in the desert for far less than $100/kg. With lots of solar power available, the option to easily access your hardware and far less radiation issues.
The datacenter in space story really only exists to make it possible for Musk to sell X to SpaceX and make more money from the IPO. That's all. There is no engineering reason.
Musk's bet is dysfunctional politics will make it impossible to build enough data centres and the energy needed to power them. There are many, many reasons that might be wrong. However, if the economics are even close to viable, they could start throwing up data centres quicker than anyone can build them terrestrially (at least in the democratic west).
if you can't put them outside of Amarillo Texas without people throwing a fit then you can't put them anywhere. I mean freaking Pantex is there ffs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex
If it doesn't work out, I think China's exponential terrestrial energy deployment will eventually give them the lead, IF they can get enough chips. Another big if.
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. These things follow herd mentality, and the primary drivers of the herd are greed and fear, not fundamentals or business logic.
A major correction would be a bummer but we were never entitled to these abnormal gains in the first place.
This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover. This fundamental to the progress of intelligence and understanding.
It should not be surprising that AI can be distilled. It's the logical method of training; I would hope that each frontier model is in fact not trained 'from scratch' each time.
We should expect future frontier models are simply distilled versions trained by specialist models, the same way humans learn from a series of professors, papers and canonical books on each different subject material. Models like this can be trained incrementally, or a so called Mixture of Experts (MoE).
I've noticed also that 5.6-Sol is more concise with output than Fable (and let's not talk about Opus, which is even more wordy).
FWIW, we use ChatGPT for our primary model and use Claude to do the reviews. This works better than ChatGPT doing it's own review even with a clean session/context.
I've done this tens of times between these two models and it works great in my experience. Sol initial back and forth with me. Commit. Let Grok review. Sol fix. Only then do I start reading the code.
Company empathy does exist, just look at how easy or hard it is to reach a company when you have a problem. How do they try to solve it for you? Is it a brick wall, for example Google when you have a problem. People quite often like dealing with small businesses because they can reach a singular human and have them as an interface to the problems they face now and in the future.
Agentic loops and the models underneath them can have a simulacra of empathy too. Not every model just blindly agrees with users, and some have a much better depth in picking up context clues that the user on the other end is having a hard time. Businesses just typically aren't running more expensive and fragile systems like that though.
For example, health insurance providers are renowned for not being empathetic. Charities are the opposite. Sometimes companies even build it into their identity, e.g. Cards Against Humanity.
As for AI, I haven't seen a strong difference in empathy but it's definitely true that the big AI companies at least try to make their models moral and empathetic. Even if it mostly ends up just being annoying.
I believe the reason we have not seen a Fable-level model from OpenAI yet is because doing so would box them in on costs just as harshly as it has boxed in Anthropic. They are letting Anthropic make this mistake.
If you can train a larger model then you can distill smaller models from it. You don't need to necessarily serve the larger model publicly. Distillation is much more effective when you have unrestricted access to the original model.
It's funny how people make these alignment comments while ignoring how misaligned the leadership at these companies are right form the get go and they just play mental gymnastics to deflect those facts when confronted with them.
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/
While the training code and data are the true source. Since if you want to robustly modify the LLM that's actually what you need.
But since "compilation" (training) is extremely compute intensive this isn't something accessible to anyone without an entire datacenter.
Anyway semantics aside having the binary is still infinitely better than dealing with an api as far as privacy and control go.
you need to "literally" go read the definition of open source software or even ask an LLM to define it for you. Weights + inference code are not the source code they're more like the compiled binary. Making modifications to the behavior of a model with additional training is like writing a mod for minecraft. Sure, you can change things but it doesn't make it open source.
Calling these models "open source" is an old trap that software companies use to use. Free to download but then, once you're fully comitted, the trap snaps shut and you must pay up to continue.
Training data and code.
Is it just the supplementary data/code for how they were trained, not just the final product?
I don't mind open-weight models, but they are not open source. It's like bringing home a dog from the rescue and just hoping that it doesn't have a history of biting kids in the face. You just can't know, because you don't know the full history. You can try to add new training (fine tune) to tell it not to bite kids, but that's it.
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.
It really reminds me of pay-to-win games at this point: Two currencies (credits, tokens), both with a floating, intransparent exchange rate between each other and real money, random airdrops...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12642688-using-credits-f...
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.
I'm against the idea that "there's really no point in locking in model choice for anything more than a month or two these days". At a minimum, enterprises are going to lock in a provider for a year due to enterprise contracts, which restricts their model choices. You sign for Anthropic, but now OpenAI models are "better". Or, you signed for AWS Bedrock: Oh no, you don't have access to deepseek-v4 because they're behind.
neither of these entail model lock-in
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).
I tried it again today because of the discount, it told me it couldn't run acceptance tests because a .env file did not exist, and when I showed it the damn file it went "ah, it's there now". I think it was the first time I've ever had an agent try to gaslight me.
But I continued to work with it and found that it was mostly my own style of interacting that needed to change. In a way it is similar to a new co-worker, they have their own personality and ways of working. Once I figured that out I have been able to get very good work out of Sol.
Sol seems to work better when you are clear, precise, direct and unambiguous. The model seems annoyed if things aren't spelled out. Not micro-managing, it seems to have a high bar for specific intent.
When I get Fable to write out specs for Sol, I tell Fable that Sol is a nit-picking literalist that is exceptional at instruction following. So far this description has lead Fable to generate specs that Sol implements at a high quality.
Though I think they gave a banked reset this time.
If I stick with Luna, I can make it through the week.
The part I don't understand is how usage is "charged" against this limit.
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.
aside from the obvious IP theft problem, it's probably most dangerous for Chinese users outside China to use the Chinese models.
they discovered a great way to destroy their own stickyness and make ppl build generic ai solutions.