OpenAI and Anthropic have very different customer bases and usage profiles. I'd estimate a significantly higher percentage of Anthropic's tokens are paid by the customer than OpenAI's. The ChatGPT free tier is magnitudes more popular than Claude's free tier, and Anthropic in all likelihood does a higher percentage of API business versus consumer business than OpenAI does.

In other words, its possible this story is correct and true for Anthropic, but not true for OpenAI.

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dcre 5 days ago | parent [-]

Good point, very possible that Altman is excluding free tier as a marketing cost even if it loses more than they make on paid customers. On the other hand they may be able to cut free tier costs a lot by having the model router send queries to gpt-5-mini where before they were going to 4o.

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jacurtis 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is very true. ChatGPT has a very generous free tier. I used to pay for it, but realized I was never really hitting the limits of what is needed to pay for it.

However, at the same time, I was using Claude much less, really preferring the answers from it most of the time, and constantly being hit with limits. So guess what I did. I cancelled my OpenAI subscription and moved to Anthropic. Not only do i get Claude Code, which OpenAI really has no serious competitor for.

I still use both models but never run into problems with OpenAI, so i see no reason to pay for it.

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DenisM 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Free tier provides a lot of training material. Every time you correct ChatGPT on its mistakes you’re giving them knowledge that’s not in any book or website.

Thats a moat, albeit one that is slow to build.

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dcre 5 days ago | parent [-]

That's interesting, though you have to imagine the data set is very low quality on average and distilling high quality training pairs out of it is very costly.

	▲	DenisM 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Hence exponential increase in model training costs. Also hallucinations in the long tail of knowledge.