Their existing embedding offerings were ridiculously expensive and underpowered compared to free, open source models that you could run locally on your laptop.

Their existing embedding offerings were ridiculously expensive and underpowered compared to free, open source models that you could run locally on your laptop. E.g. https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v... outperformed their best model, can run locally for free, and uses a smaller vector space. Strictly dominates. For a full write-up on how bad it was, see https://medium.com/@nils_reimers/openai-gpt-3-text-embeddings-really-a-new-state-of-the-art-in-dense-text-embeddings-6571fe3ec9d9 https://medium.com/@nils_reimers/openai-gpt-3-text-embedding... OpenAI is still lagging behind, but not as much, with this new offering.