Serious question: what is the secret to getting Codex to write decent code? I am on Windows. Maybe that is the issue, but I can't seem to get Codex to function anywhere near the level that I was previously able to get with even Claude Sonnet. Does Codex just not work well with Windows yet?

I see exactly opposite . Chinese models fails under any complex scenarios, while us labs raise the price , that's a sign of confidence.

Both can be true. They can be charging what the market will bear, and still be charging less than their costs of running it.

> I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs -- including the research and training that has gone into those models

We know roughly how much these companies spend and what their revenues are. Based on that, they'd have to more than double revenue (without spending more money) just to stay even, and that's not good enough given how deep in the hole they are.

> OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth?

Both are true. I mean, I'd be willing to spend a bit more than I do now, but not more than double, and neither are most companies. The company I work for is currently investigating how to reduce LLM spend, not looking to spend more.

> OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth?

Both. They are charging the most they can get away with and that amount is still heavily subsidized by VC capital.

We pay by token at work. I just finished one session with Opus that was 4000 dollars. In about three days.

Now that 200USD subscription starts to feel cheap...

> I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs.

There are huge numbers of users (myself included) that do have an exact idea of what inference costs on open models. Because we can buy tokens from 3rd parties that have no motivation to subsidize our use. That's to say, there's a fair marketplace[1] and we're hanging out there.

If you want to say "I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs on these proprietary/closed models", then I could agree with that.

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/rankings#leaderboard

We have a firm grasp on actual inference costs from the various open weights model providers on OpenRouter. They don't have the money to subsidize inference and it's quite a competitive market, so the prices are representative of the costs.

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Anthropic and OpenAI won't be around in 1-2 decades if this is their long term plan. People are not going to revert, but go elsewhere. China is proving that it can be done cheaper.

> Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Even if subscriptions are locally profitable (i. e., the cost of the subscription covers the cost of inference), they're still subsidized because they don't cover training and running the company; otherwise, these companies would be profitable.

"Nothing is subsidized" is a wild take. They might be making money on some users, perhaps even most users, but certainly not all. Also, "subsidized" doesn't just mean on compute.

That's interesting. Do you have anything to back that claim up?

"Nothing is subsidized"

So they are profitable?

I think you are mismatching accounting terms.

You can't say the 'subscriptions' are profitable without accounting for the cost of making the model that is the source of the subscription.

They are heavily subsidized by the shareholders. Investing, running at a loss, with hope of some future profitability.

Just a personal anecdote but I have not hit any more thresholds or limits since switching to the MAX plan and so far, it's been worth it. But I do wonder how long even this will last...

I have the $100 plan and had almost never run out of credits until I started using the ultracode / workstreams feature w/Opus 4.8..at which point I managed to blow the full 6 hour allocation in like 20 minutes, or so. In fairness, it did some amazing things with the extracted information, but it also strongly suggested that I'd need the $200 subscription *plus* a budget for extra usage.

Yes, correct, they both have the same capabilities, however it felt like codex was pushing me harder to use my local desktop in an annoying way, while claude code was happy to spin up a bunch of dev containers for me in the cloud.

"War department" is the older name, not "Defense department".

Also, is it really a defense department when you're starting wars of aggression every 15 years or so?

The openrouter provider flakiness with deepseek was infuriating, but I’m happy in hindsight because direct deepseek has been very pleasant. Shocked by how low spend is.

Sure, modern American corporations care more about hoarding wealth rather than helping build up US society. Once neoliberalism became the mainstay economic position of the US income inequality has skyrocketed, healthcare costs have increased, childcare is more expensive than university, housing has become both unaffordable + unobtainable. By simply existing costs have increased while life becomes unstable.

Why aren't corporations doing more to help workers with childcare? Why aren't they doing more profit sharing with workers? Why aren't they encouraging unions or sectorial bargaining? Why isn't the government mandating any of this?

Americans very rarely benefit when US corporations do well. That needs to change. No one benefits if Meta continues making billions in profit every quarter while society suffers from isolation, depression, suicide, and scams from their services. Americans don't benefit if health insurance companies are making massive profits while they can't afford deductibles.

Our society has been setup to simply extract wealth in all facets of life. That's a sick society and it needs to change.

I'm not saying China does this better, in fact China has some of the worse worker rights out of all the industrialized countries; but at least American consumers would benefit from cheaper higher quality Chinese goods. The world would likely benefit too if America got off the cold war hype train that did nothing to benefit humanity outside of those making weapon systems.