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.