The frontier labs commonly trade spots at the top of the benchmarks with each new model release.
The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.
If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.
I got a new $20 Claude subscription to try the new Fable model. I gave it a single prompt, and it barely finished, using up my whole session quota (it was at ~95% when it finished) and 10% of my weekly quota.
For comparison, with the Kimi Code $40 subscription I can pretty much constantly run two/three agents in parallel for the whole week, and I never run out of quota. I can blindly throw it at anything and everything without worrying about hitting the limits. (And it's not exactly a cheap model to run -- it has 1 trillion parameters!)
Is Kimi as good as Claude? Of course not. But you don't need the absolute state-of-art for most things. If I don't have exceptionally difficult tasks it makes no sense to use it. Just throw Kimi at it, and even if it needs to run 2 or 3 times longer in the background I don't care, because I'm not running out of tokens there.
OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.
It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users.
I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
I think this is too simplistic. Codex is increasingly useful for business usage. I use it for both technical stuff and doing non technical things with my inbox, google drive, etc. It's pretty good for that. And it's pretty clear that business users are very much untapped potential at this point. They need proper agents with tunable guard rails and all the rest.
It seems very competent at coding tasks as well. I don't think Anthropic has a huge edge on that front. It's more of a neck and neck race with proponents in both camps. I ignore most benchmarks at this point; I don't think they have much relevance for normal users.
I think it's actually necessary for both to try out different approaches. Nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to the UX of these things.
They have the consumer market but want the enterprise market, because it's a lot more lucrative, so they're probably going to just keep chasing that even though there's no signs they'll stop losing to Anthropic. They don't need to do that much to keep the consumer market because of momentum.
Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.
Enterprise market is paying by token and using a lot of tokens. Consumer market is paying a subscription that they can't raise too high or they'll lose users to competition. Seems to me that the enterprise market scales a lot higher.
They cut prices and get more customers who are going to move to the next vendor that cuts prices even more or when they jack up the prices again.
I am not complaining, I like my investor subsidised tokens, I don't see what these companies see as their end goal when it's becoming more and more possible to run a competent LLM locally(even with today's RAM prices).
I am surprised that there is no Claude or ChatGPT machine that I could buy, I feel like they should be opening up that model, but I guess subscriptions look better on balance sheets.
Competition is lovely. And ironically, OpenAI will probably get and keep lots of enterprise customers like Microsoft^ that won’t accept anything less of ZDR.
Reality is Fable is x2 price increase against previous.
GPT5.5 is x2 price increase against previous. And after the last week reset, codex is hungry for your sub allowance.
Everybody can see that the massive raises are not matching the revenue, at all.
It's a surprising headline. Yes it does make sense to cut the price to gain market share, but it also make sense to keep it at a sustainable level, which seems to not have been reached yet.
Fable is twice the size of Opus from what I gathered. So I'm not sure if 2x price translates to 2x profits as well.
Not sure about GPT but it seems plausible they've also been increasing the model size with recent releases. (Progressively training a bigger model and easing into a profitable price range for that model scale?)
Amazon would absolutely take a loss on certain products in order to dominate the category, squeeze out competitors and then bring the price back up. It's one of the reasons they're so dominant in general now. Also one of the reasons why Amazon Basics has basically everything that exists and they're usually at or near the top of their respective categories -- third-party sellers simply can't compete.
I have 128 GB of unified memory (M4 Max) and the user experience with local inference is still pretty bad. I'm so glad something like llama.cpp exists so I don't have to wrangle Python (which I hate), but OpenCode is entirely disrespectful of the KV-cache so I had to switch to Pi (but Pi is going relatively well actually).
Even so, I can't really run at hundreds of tokens per second which is practically table stakes for my work. Even if I did manage to run that fast, the model would probably be completely braindead and stomp all over the task.
Wish I could afford an M5 Max but I've been between jobs for months without even a single interview. Sucks to be a developer these days.
To a certain extent, but not completely. OpenAI and Anthropic are taking losses on their entire offering—that is a huge difference. Amazon, for example, has pumped its profits back into R&D for decades. What AI companies are doing right now is running the Uber playbook on an epic scale. In the US, there isn't much competition, so they can maintain a duopoly. But look at what happened in China: Uber collapsed and pulled out.
Now, the entire world is facing competition from DeepSeek and Qwen at a fraction of the cost. According to a reliable Shenzhen source, they will halve their prices again by the end of this year using newer Huawei GPUs. The current 7nm chips are already bleeding OpenAI dry. By the end of this year, they will upgrade to 5nm, and by June of next year, 3nm. They don't even have to be better—just 95% as good at 1/20th of the price.
I don't see OpenAI and Anthropic surviving much outside of America; they are likely staring down Groupon’s fate. You can research it yourself: China has no issues with electricity because they have a massive power surplus. This is why OpenAI and Anthropic are so scared right now. They must IPO by 2027, because after that, they will suffer the exact same fate as Groupon.
I do love the DeepSeek models, they're so incredibly cheap and for functionality that nears Sonnet. Weeks of heavy usage still lands squarely under $10 for me.
Compare that with how I pay $200 a month for Claude and I'm still hitting the limits with any sort of sustained usage. They even have a special usage limit for Sonnet to prevent you from using too much of that either.
I'm super frustrated with how slow DeepSeek is though. And it's not nearly ready to be unsupervised for long periods of time like Claude is. Just this morning I left Fable 5 unsupervised for about eight hours straight. Single turn. DeepSeek often gets even much shorter turns wrong, so I wouldn't trust it with anywhere near that length of time alone. Not to mention it'd get so much less done because of how slow it is.
Also, did you use an LLM to correct your grammar after you posted? Lol
Increasingly it looks like it will end with a bubble bursting. LLMs and AI will survive, like the internet survived the dotcom bubble. But OpenAI and Anthropic could just be today's AOL and Yahoo.
I hope it will also crash hardware pricing so it becomes economically feasible to run your own local model. Currently I don’t like where we are heading with the sabotaging models because its “too dangerous”
However, I think actually that while it won't give the results expected (AI agents run the company, build all features, etc.), it will nevertheless become a developer tool like IDEs, something "you have to have".
It's here to stay but probably with more realistic expectations than some CEO/CTO are pushing for (agents for everything, nobody writes 1 LOC, self healing systems, etc).
So the market expectations will be probably resized, but these tools are here to stay. Be it for cybersecurity (from CVEs to cyber warfare) alone, that's already worth all the money they are throwing a it.
Economies of scale, optimization of models, hardware, energy infrastructure, data center construction and operation, etc. Stuff is currently relatively inefficient and there's lots of room for optimization. All the usual stuff.
We run monthly. It seems like every few months there's a reason to swap in/out of a particular vendor. Specifically I use all 3 pro then either chat or claude will have a 5x max depending if they're the good thing to be using during that those 3 months.
The timing of these price cut discussions says to me OpenAI has no imminent release that will be edging out Mythos/Fable.
If so the question becomes when can they do so, or is this possibly a turning point where Anthropic keeps the crown to themselves for the foreseeable future.
I got a new $20 Claude subscription to try the new Fable model. I gave it a single prompt, and it barely finished, using up my whole session quota (it was at ~95% when it finished) and 10% of my weekly quota.
For comparison, with the Kimi Code $40 subscription I can pretty much constantly run two/three agents in parallel for the whole week, and I never run out of quota. I can blindly throw it at anything and everything without worrying about hitting the limits. (And it's not exactly a cheap model to run -- it has 1 trillion parameters!)
Is Kimi as good as Claude? Of course not. But you don't need the absolute state-of-art for most things. If I don't have exceptionally difficult tasks it makes no sense to use it. Just throw Kimi at it, and even if it needs to run 2 or 3 times longer in the background I don't care, because I'm not running out of tokens there.
I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
It seems very competent at coding tasks as well. I don't think Anthropic has a huge edge on that front. It's more of a neck and neck race with proponents in both camps. I ignore most benchmarks at this point; I don't think they have much relevance for normal users.
I think it's actually necessary for both to try out different approaches. Nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to the UX of these things.
Also, I don’t about others, but I personally strongly dislike OpenAI’s leadership’s hypocrisy. I find them losing the race highly satisfying.
I am not complaining, I like my investor subsidised tokens, I don't see what these companies see as their end goal when it's becoming more and more possible to run a competent LLM locally(even with today's RAM prices).
I am surprised that there is no Claude or ChatGPT machine that I could buy, I feel like they should be opening up that model, but I guess subscriptions look better on balance sheets.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/report/947575/microsoft-claude-fabl...
Reality is Fable is x2 price increase against previous.
GPT5.5 is x2 price increase against previous. And after the last week reset, codex is hungry for your sub allowance.
Everybody can see that the massive raises are not matching the revenue, at all.
It's a surprising headline. Yes it does make sense to cut the price to gain market share, but it also make sense to keep it at a sustainable level, which seems to not have been reached yet.
Not sure about GPT but it seems plausible they've also been increasing the model size with recent releases. (Progressively training a bigger model and easing into a profitable price range for that model scale?)
So if you're asking about time, then amazon stopped a lot faster. OpenAI is 40 quarters old.
If you are asking about money, then amazon... also stopped a lot faster. OpenAI is losing money comparable to amazon's lifetime losses every quarter.
OpenAI and Anthropic's moat is filling with cement faster than they can dig.
Even so, I can't really run at hundreds of tokens per second which is practically table stakes for my work. Even if I did manage to run that fast, the model would probably be completely braindead and stomp all over the task.
Wish I could afford an M5 Max but I've been between jobs for months without even a single interview. Sucks to be a developer these days.
Compare that with how I pay $200 a month for Claude and I'm still hitting the limits with any sort of sustained usage. They even have a special usage limit for Sonnet to prevent you from using too much of that either.
I'm super frustrated with how slow DeepSeek is though. And it's not nearly ready to be unsupervised for long periods of time like Claude is. Just this morning I left Fable 5 unsupervised for about eight hours straight. Single turn. DeepSeek often gets even much shorter turns wrong, so I wouldn't trust it with anywhere near that length of time alone. Not to mention it'd get so much less done because of how slow it is.
Also, did you use an LLM to correct your grammar after you posted? Lol
However, Amazon was not racking debt the way these companies are. Both their behavior and financials were miles apart from these ai companies.
However, I think actually that while it won't give the results expected (AI agents run the company, build all features, etc.), it will nevertheless become a developer tool like IDEs, something "you have to have".
It's here to stay but probably with more realistic expectations than some CEO/CTO are pushing for (agents for everything, nobody writes 1 LOC, self healing systems, etc).
So the market expectations will be probably resized, but these tools are here to stay. Be it for cybersecurity (from CVEs to cyber warfare) alone, that's already worth all the money they are throwing a it.
These moves will only accelerate it.
Think about where any of them will be in 20 years
On device AI?
Claude actually works - unless OpenAI can do that it would make no difference if it was free.
It works unbelievably well actually - it’s truly amazing.
More than happy to watch them lose the global consumer market while they compete with Palantir for DoD contracts.