6 ms·

The price feels outrageous, but I think the unsaid truth of this is that they think o1 is good enough to replace employees. For example, if it's really as good

The price feels outrageous, but I think the unsaid truth of this is that they think o1 is good enough to replace employees. For example, if it's really as good at coding as they say, I could see this being a point where some people decide that a team of 5 devs with o1 pro can do the work of 6 or 7 devs without o1 pro.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
And the fact that ordinary people sanction this by supporting OpenAI is outrageous.
greenthrow 2y ago
It is not good enough to replace workers of a skill level I would hire. But that won't stop people doing it.
uoaei 2y ago
That sounds very much like the first-order reaction they'd expect from upper and middle management. Artificially high prices can give the buyer the feeling that they're getting more than they really are, as a consequence of the sunk cost fallacy. You can't rule out that they want to dazzle with this impression even if eval metrics remain effectively the same.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
That'll work out nicely when you have 5 people learning nothing and just asking GPT to do everything and then you have a big terrible codebase that GPT can't effectively operate on, and a team that doesn't know how to do anything. Bullish
- disqard 2y ago
  I'm rooting for this to happen at scale. It'll be an object lesson in short-termism. (and provide some job security, perhaps)
  - vundercind 2y ago
    No lessons will be learned, but it’ll provide for some sweet, if unpleasant, contract gigs.
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago
  Sounds like a great market opportunity for consulting gigs to clean up the aftermath at medium size companies.
  - drpossum 2y ago
    This is how I have made my living for years, and that was before AI
- portaouflop 2y ago
  I think that would be a great outcome - more well paid work for everyone cleaning up the mess
hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
Unfortunately I'm seeing that in my company already. They are forcing AI tools down our throat and execs are vastly misinterpreting stats like '20% of our code is coming from AI'. What that means is the simple, boilerplate and repetitive stuff is being generated by LLM's, but anything complex or involving more than a singular simple problem LLM's often provide more problems than benefit. Effective dev's are using it to handle simple stuff and Execs are thinking 'the team can be reduced by x', when in reality you can get rid of at best your most junior and least trained people without loosing key abilities. Watching companies try to sell their AI's and "Agents" as having the ability to reason is also absurd but the non-technical managers and execs are eating it up...
hccb 2y ago
I am not so sure about "replace" atleast at my company we are always short staffed (mostly cause we cant find people fast enough given how long the whole interview cycle takes). It might actually free some people up to do more interviews.
- freedomben 2y ago
  That's a great point actually. Nearly everywhere (us included) is short-staffed (and by that I mean we don't have the bandwidth to build everything we want to build), so perhaps it's not a "reduce the team size" but rather a "reduce the level of deficit."
nine_k 2y ago
Suppose an employee costs a business, say, $10k/mo; it's 50 subscriptions. Can giving access to the AI to, say, 40 employees improve their performance enough to avoid the need of hiring another employee? This does not sound outlandish to me, at least in certain industries.
- griomnib 2y ago
  That’s the wrong question. The only question is “is this price reflective of 10x performance over the competition?”. The answer is almost definitely no.
  - numbsafari 2y ago
    If I’m understanding their own graphs correctly, it’s not even 10x their own next lowest pricing tier.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    It doesn't have to be 10x. Imagine you have two options: A) A $20/month service which provides you with $100/month of value. B) A $200/month service which provides you with $300/month of value. A nets you $80, but B nets you $100. So you should pick B.
  - acchow 2y ago
    Consider a $350k/year engineer. If Claude increases their productivity 5% ($17.5k/yr), but CGPT Pro adds 7% ($24.5k), that's an extra $7k in productivity, which more than makes up for the $2400 annual cost. 10x the price, but only 40% better, but still worth it.
tedsanders 2y ago
No, o1 is definitely not good enough to replace employees. The reason we're launching o1 pro is that we have a small slice of power users who want max usage and max intelligence, and this is just a way to supply that option without making them resort to annoying workarounds like buying 10 accounts and rotating through their rate limits. Really it's just an option for those who'd want it; definitely not trying to push a super expensive subscription onto anyone who wouldn't get value from it. (I work at OpenAI, but I am not involved in o1 pro)
- belter 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Yeah, to be fair, there exist employees (some of whom are managers) who could not be replaced and their absence would improve productivity. So the bar for “can this replace any employees at all?” is potentially so low that, technically, cat’ing from /dev/null can clear it, if you must have a computerized solution. Companies won’t be able to figure those cases out, though, because if they could they’d already have gotten rid of those folks and replaced them with nothing.
- kapilkale 2y ago
  I wish the second paragraph was the launch announcement
- MP_1729 2y ago
  My 3rd day intern still couldn't do a script o1-preview could do in less than 25 prompts. OBVIOUSLY a smart OAI employee wouldn't want the public to think they are already replacing high-level humans. And OBVIOUSLY OAI senior management will want to try to convince AI engineers that might have 2nd-guessings about their work that they aren't developing a replacement for human beings. But they are.
  - vander_elst 2y ago
drooby 2y ago
In a hypothetical world where this was integrated with code reviews, and minimized developer time (writing valid/useful comments), and minimized bugs by even a small percentage... $200/m is a no-brainer. The question is - how good is it really.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jasode 2y ago
>The price feels outrageous, I haven't used ChatGPT enough to judge what a "fair price" is but $200/month seems to be in the ballpark of other "software-tools-for-highly-paid-knowledge-workers" with premium pricing: - mathematicians: Wolfram Mathematica is $154/mo - attorneys: WestLaw legal research service is ~$200/month with common options added - engineers for printed circuit boards : Altium Designer is $355/month - CAD/CAM designers: Siemens NX base subscription is $615/month - financial traders : Bloomberg Terminal is ~$2100/month It will be interesting to see if OpenAI can maintain the $200/month pricing power like the sustainable examples above. The examples in other industries have sustained their premium prices even though there are cheaper less-featured alternatives (sometimes including open source). Indeed, they often increase their prices each year instead of discount them. One difference from them is that OpenAI has much more intense competition than those older businesses.
- shipp02 2y ago
  This is a really interesting take. I don't think individuals pay for these subscriptions though, it's usually an organizational license. They also come with extensive support, documentation and people have vast experience using them. They are also integrated into all other tools if the field very well. This makes them very entrenched. I am not sure OpenAI has any of those things. I also don't know what those things would entail for LLMs. Maybe they need to add modes that are good for certain tasks or integrate with tools that their users most commonly use like email, document processors.
itissid 2y ago
I think the key is to have a strong goal. If the developer knows what they want but can't quite get there, even if it gives the wrong answer you can catch it. The use the resulting code to improve your productivity. Last week when using jetpack compose(which is a react like framework). A cardinal sin in jetpack compose is to change a State variable in a composable based on non-user/UI action which the composable also mutates. This is easy enough to understand this for toy examples. But for more complex systems one can make this mistake. o1-preview made this mistake last week, and I caught it. On prompting it with the stacktrace it did not immediately catch it and recommended a solution that committed the same error. When I actually gave it the documentation on the issue it caught on and made the variable a userpreference instead. I used the userpreference code in my app instead of coding it by myself. It worked well.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

And the fact that ordinary people sanction this by supporting OpenAI is outrageous.

greenthrow 2y ago

It is not good enough to replace workers of a skill level I would hire. But that won't stop people doing it.

uoaei 2y ago

That sounds very much like the first-order reaction they'd expect from upper and middle management. Artificially high prices can give the buyer the feeling that they're getting more than they really are, as a consequence of the sunk cost fallacy. You can't rule out that they want to dazzle with this impression even if eval metrics remain effectively the same.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

That'll work out nicely when you have 5 people learning nothing and just asking GPT to do everything and then you have a big terrible codebase that GPT can't effectively operate on, and a team that doesn't know how to do anything. Bullish

disqard 2y ago
I'm rooting for this to happen at scale. It'll be an object lesson in short-termism. (and provide some job security, perhaps)
- vundercind 2y ago
  No lessons will be learned, but it’ll provide for some sweet, if unpleasant, contract gigs.
DoingIsLearning 2y ago
Sounds like a great market opportunity for consulting gigs to clean up the aftermath at medium size companies.
- drpossum 2y ago
  This is how I have made my living for years, and that was before AI
portaouflop 2y ago
I think that would be a great outcome - more well paid work for everyone cleaning up the mess

hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago

Unfortunately I'm seeing that in my company already. They are forcing AI tools down our throat and execs are vastly misinterpreting stats like '20% of our code is coming from AI'. What that means is the simple, boilerplate and repetitive stuff is being generated by LLM's, but anything complex or involving more than a singular simple problem LLM's often provide more problems than benefit. Effective dev's are using it to handle simple stuff and Execs are thinking 'the team can be reduced by x', when in reality you can get rid of at best your most junior and least trained people without loosing key abilities. Watching companies try to sell their AI's and "Agents" as having the ability to reason is also absurd but the non-technical managers and execs are eating it up...

hccb 2y ago

I am not so sure about "replace" atleast at my company we are always short staffed (mostly cause we cant find people fast enough given how long the whole interview cycle takes). It might actually free some people up to do more interviews.

freedomben 2y ago
That's a great point actually. Nearly everywhere (us included) is short-staffed (and by that I mean we don't have the bandwidth to build everything we want to build), so perhaps it's not a "reduce the team size" but rather a "reduce the level of deficit."

nine_k 2y ago

Suppose an employee costs a business, say, $10k/mo; it's 50 subscriptions. Can giving access to the AI to, say, 40 employees improve their performance enough to avoid the need of hiring another employee? This does not sound outlandish to me, at least in certain industries.

griomnib 2y ago
That’s the wrong question. The only question is “is this price reflective of 10x performance over the competition?”. The answer is almost definitely no.
- numbsafari 2y ago
  If I’m understanding their own graphs correctly, it’s not even 10x their own next lowest pricing tier.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  It doesn't have to be 10x. Imagine you have two options: A) A $20/month service which provides you with $100/month of value. B) A $200/month service which provides you with $300/month of value. A nets you $80, but B nets you $100. So you should pick B.
- acchow 2y ago
  Consider a $350k/year engineer. If Claude increases their productivity 5% ($17.5k/yr), but CGPT Pro adds 7% ($24.5k), that's an extra $7k in productivity, which more than makes up for the $2400 annual cost. 10x the price, but only 40% better, but still worth it.

tedsanders 2y ago

No, o1 is definitely not good enough to replace employees. The reason we're launching o1 pro is that we have a small slice of power users who want max usage and max intelligence, and this is just a way to supply that option without making them resort to annoying workarounds like buying 10 accounts and rotating through their rate limits. Really it's just an option for those who'd want it; definitely not trying to push a super expensive subscription onto anyone who wouldn't get value from it. (I work at OpenAI, but I am not involved in o1 pro)

belter 2y ago
[flagged]
- vundercind 2y ago
  Yeah, to be fair, there exist employees (some of whom are managers) who could not be replaced and their absence would improve productivity. So the bar for “can this replace any employees at all?” is potentially so low that, technically, cat’ing from /dev/null can clear it, if you must have a computerized solution. Companies won’t be able to figure those cases out, though, because if they could they’d already have gotten rid of those folks and replaced them with nothing.
kapilkale 2y ago
I wish the second paragraph was the launch announcement
MP_1729 2y ago
My 3rd day intern still couldn't do a script o1-preview could do in less than 25 prompts. OBVIOUSLY a smart OAI employee wouldn't want the public to think they are already replacing high-level humans. And OBVIOUSLY OAI senior management will want to try to convince AI engineers that might have 2nd-guessings about their work that they aren't developing a replacement for human beings. But they are.
- vander_elst 2y ago

drooby 2y ago

In a hypothetical world where this was integrated with code reviews, and minimized developer time (writing valid/useful comments), and minimized bugs by even a small percentage... $200/m is a no-brainer. The question is - how good is it really.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jasode 2y ago

>The price feels outrageous, I haven't used ChatGPT enough to judge what a "fair price" is but $200/month seems to be in the ballpark of other "software-tools-for-highly-paid-knowledge-workers" with premium pricing: - mathematicians: Wolfram Mathematica is $154/mo - attorneys: WestLaw legal research service is ~$200/month with common options added - engineers for printed circuit boards : Altium Designer is $355/month - CAD/CAM designers: Siemens NX base subscription is $615/month - financial traders : Bloomberg Terminal is ~$2100/month It will be interesting to see if OpenAI can maintain the $200/month pricing power like the sustainable examples above. The examples in other industries have sustained their premium prices even though there are cheaper less-featured alternatives (sometimes including open source). Indeed, they often increase their prices each year instead of discount them. One difference from them is that OpenAI has much more intense competition than those older businesses.

shipp02 2y ago
This is a really interesting take. I don't think individuals pay for these subscriptions though, it's usually an organizational license. They also come with extensive support, documentation and people have vast experience using them. They are also integrated into all other tools if the field very well. This makes them very entrenched. I am not sure OpenAI has any of those things. I also don't know what those things would entail for LLMs. Maybe they need to add modes that are good for certain tasks or integrate with tools that their users most commonly use like email, document processors.

itissid 2y ago

I think the key is to have a strong goal. If the developer knows what they want but can't quite get there, even if it gives the wrong answer you can catch it. The use the resulting code to improve your productivity. Last week when using jetpack compose(which is a react like framework). A cardinal sin in jetpack compose is to change a State variable in a composable based on non-user/UI action which the composable also mutates. This is easy enough to understand this for toy examples. But for more complex systems one can make this mistake. o1-preview made this mistake last week, and I caught it. On prompting it with the stacktrace it did not immediately catch it and recommended a solution that committed the same error. When I actually gave it the documentation on the issue it caught on and made the variable a userpreference instead. I used the userpreference code in my app instead of coding it by myself. It worked well.