I felt like it was getting somewhere and then it pivoted to the stupid graph thing, which I can't seem to escape. Anyway, I think it'll be really interesting to see how this settles out over the next few weeks, and how that'll contrast to what the 24-hour response has been.

My own very naive and underinformed sense: OpenAI doesn't have other revenue paths to fall back on like Google does. The GPT5 strategy really makes sense to me if I look at this as a market share strategy. They want to scale out like crazy, in a way that is affordable to them. If it's that cheap, then they must have put a ton of work in to some scaling effort that the other vendors just don't care about as much, whether due to loss-leader economics or VC funding. It really makes me wonder if OpenAI is sitting on something much better that also just happens to be much, much more expensive.

Overall, I'm weirdly impressed because if that was really their move here, it's a slight evidence point that shows that somewhere down in their guts, they do really seem to care about their original mission. For people other than power users, this might actually be a big step forward.

I agree that they don't have other revenue paths and think that's a big issue for them. I disagree that this means they care about their original mission though; I think they're struggling to replicate their original insane step function model improvements and other players have caught up.

If you liked the general analysis of OpenAI and the AI space, you may appreciate https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/tech-things-gemini-... Or https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/tech-things-gpt-pro...

Which focus much more on macro analysis and less on memes