OpenAI's Grifting Uncovered and More
Let's go to war OpenAI. Partner with Andurii, Palantir and let's see what AI risks you incarnate.
OpenAI’s incarnation as a product company now means that they think it’s a good tactic to release new features and products at a nearly constant rate, given their cringe 12 Days of ‘ship-mas’ campaign.
Unfortunately this seems like an errant attempt to distract us from the fact that they are increasing prices, the new $200 Subscription being 10x that of the usual ChatGPT Plus. Apparently being a professional and using the best models, is fairly expensive. Contrary to previous statements of Generative AI democratizing access to AI. That’s not how OpenAI wants to operate any longer.
The new ChatGPT Pro package gives unlimited access to the latest models, including the reasoning models o1 and o1 mini, as well as the enhanced GPT-4o. We could see premium subscriptions as high as $2000, as we noted back in September. Also the $20 subscription is likely to increase as OpenAI is desperate to increase revenue.
OpenAI, that has been a controversial brand since ChatGPT went viral about 18 months ago, and is now releasing yet another controversial product called Sora. The AI video-generation model works similarly to OpenAI’s image-generation AI tool, DALL-E: A user types out a desired scene, and Sora will return a high-definition video clip.
Sora can also generate video clips inspired by still images and extend existing videos or fill in missing frames, however the world has already caught up to its capabilities, just as Anthropic has made headway and overtaken OpenAI in models and in human preference around Claude. Or how Perplexity is a better research product than Search within ChatGPT for white collar professionals.
Two years after releasing ChatGPT, OpenAI isn’t what it used to be. Full access to OpenAI’s o1 model isn’t especially appealing either. Meanwhile Sora will be integrated into existing ChatGPT accounts such as Plus and Pro. I’m more excited in terms of my own workflows for Reddit’s AI-powered Q&A search engine called Reddit Answers.
The American “Cloud chosen” duopoly of Generative AI winners is pretty simple, one for the B2C crowd and one for the B2B Enterprise AI crowd. Microsoft and Amazon have essentially made OpenAI and Anthropic the only real legit LLM companies via their radical investments in the Billions. Their path to profitability slices American customers down the middle.
The Bifurcation of the API vs. Subscription Revenue in Gen AI
Anthropic makes most of its revenue from the API and Enterprise AI customers.
OpenAI makes the vast majority of its revenue from consumer ChatGPT subscriptions.
OpenAI being the more consumer driven company, needs to conduct communications and marketing that’s a bit more on the grifting side of over-promising and under delivering. Their current o1 campaign that’s frankly very lack-lustre, reflects this.
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