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Considering that OpenAI subscription is $200 per month, and "Premium Plus" subscription that includes this thing is only $40 per month, does that mean instantan

Considering that OpenAI subscription is $200 per month, and "Premium Plus" subscription that includes this thing is only $40 per month, does that mean instantaneous "Elon factor" is now at least -$160 per month per user, or is it supposed to be added up to more than -$240 per month? How would the math change after factoring in that OpenAI isn't even covering entirety of opex with the sub anyway, and/or people finding associating their money and Twitter accounts to be weird, and/or this thing is supposedly running on a bigger cluster than that for OpenAI?

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Masa Son top ticks a market is somehow still news in 2025.
ben_w 2y ago
Given how fast-moving the field is, it's very difficult to confidently state how much inference costs. Perhaps he's under-charging, perhaps OpenAI is over-charging, one may be more optimised than the other, but new models come out and change everything in less time than is normally takes for actual costs to become public knowlege.
- visarga 2y ago
  Sometimes it's a matter of approach, some approach could be 5% better and 10x more expensive. So they will find the sweetspot, takes a few iterations.
- arjunaaqa 2y ago
  Yes, better to avoid annual subscriptions.
coder543 2y ago
No... sigmoid10 was comparing with o1 (not o1-pro), which is accessible for $20/mo, not $200/mo. So, the "Elon factor" in your math is +$20/user/month (2x) for barely any difference in performance (a hard sell), not -$160/user/month, and while we have no clear answer to whether either of them are making a profit at that price, it would be surprising if OpenAI Plus users were not profitable, given the reasonable rate limits OpenAI imposes on o1 access, and the fact that most Plus users probably aren't maxing out their rate limits anyways. o1-pro requires vastly more compute than o1 for each query, and OpenAI was providing effectively unlimited access to o1-pro to Pro users, with users who want tons of queries gravitating to that subscription. The combination of those factors is certainly why Sam Altman claimed they weren't making money on Pro users. lmarena has also become less and less useful over time for comparing frontier models as all frontier models are able to saturate the performance needed for the kind of casual questions typically asked there. For the harder questions, o1 (not even o1-pro) still appears to be tied for 1st place with several other models... which is yet another indication of just how saturated that benchmark is.
- layer8 2y ago
  “The impression overall I got here is that this is somewhere around o1-pro capability”. “Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month)”.
  - coder543 2y ago
    The comment I was replying to had replied to an lmarena benchmark link. Perhaps you think that person should have replied to someone else? And, if you want to finish the quote, Karpathy's opinion on this is subjective. He admits it isn't a "real" evaluation. "[...] though of course we need actual, real evaluations to look at." His own tests are better than nothing, but hardly definitive.
    - layer8 2y ago
      I understood numpad0 to continue the comparison to o1-pro, after sigmoid10 expressed the opinion that the comparison is warranted.
      - coder543 2y ago
        Yes, numpad0 did... but I was pointing out that this choice was illogical. The lmarena results they were replying to only supported a comparison against o1, since o1 effectively matches Grok 3 on the benchmark being replied to (with o1-pro nowhere to be found), and then they immediately leapt into a bunch of weird value-proposition math. As I said, perhaps you think they should have replied to someone else? Replying to an lmarena benchmark indicates that numpad0 was using that benchmark as part of the justification of their math. I also pointed out the limitations of lmarena as a benchmark for frontier models. I don't think anyone is arguing that ChatGPT Pro is a good value unless you absolutely need to bypass the rate limits all the time, and I cannot find a single indication that Premium+ has unlimited access to Grok 3. If Premium+ doesn't have unlimited rate limits, then it's definitely not comparable to ChatGPT Pro, and other than one subjective comment by Karpathy, we have no benchmarks that indicate that Grok 3 might be as good as o1-pro. You already get 99% of the value with just ChatGPT Plus compared to ChatGPT Pro for half the price of Premium+. numpad0 was effectively making a strawman argument by ignoring ChatGPT Plus here... it is very easy for anyone to beat up a strawman, so I am here to point out a bad argument when I see one.
srid 2y ago
Where do you see that Premium+ is $40 per month? The official source says "Starts at $22/month or $229/year on web", https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium This is pretty much what I paid a couple of months ago, as a Canadian.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  They just announced a price increased today. The link you posted has this info in a blue box at the top. Also visible here: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-bycountry https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-bycountry
  - srid 2y ago
    Interesting. In that table, I see $40 for US users. Yet the price remains $30 for Canadian users, despite their low dollar value.
    - AlchemistCamp 2y ago
      And it’s only £17 in the UK or €21 in the EU.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
colechristensen 2y ago
>Considering that OpenAI subscription is $200 per month This plan is 75 days old. I didn't know it existed until last week. OpenAI is starting to try to get a little more realistic revenue in, Grok is acquiring customers.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Masa Son top ticks a market is somehow still news in 2025.

ben_w 2y ago

Given how fast-moving the field is, it's very difficult to confidently state how much inference costs. Perhaps he's under-charging, perhaps OpenAI is over-charging, one may be more optimised than the other, but new models come out and change everything in less time than is normally takes for actual costs to become public knowlege.

visarga 2y ago
Sometimes it's a matter of approach, some approach could be 5% better and 10x more expensive. So they will find the sweetspot, takes a few iterations.
arjunaaqa 2y ago
Yes, better to avoid annual subscriptions.

coder543 2y ago

No... sigmoid10 was comparing with o1 (not o1-pro), which is accessible for $20/mo, not $200/mo. So, the "Elon factor" in your math is +$20/user/month (2x) for barely any difference in performance (a hard sell), not -$160/user/month, and while we have no clear answer to whether either of them are making a profit at that price, it would be surprising if OpenAI Plus users were not profitable, given the reasonable rate limits OpenAI imposes on o1 access, and the fact that most Plus users probably aren't maxing out their rate limits anyways. o1-pro requires vastly more compute than o1 for each query, and OpenAI was providing effectively unlimited access to o1-pro to Pro users, with users who want tons of queries gravitating to that subscription. The combination of those factors is certainly why Sam Altman claimed they weren't making money on Pro users. lmarena has also become less and less useful over time for comparing frontier models as all frontier models are able to saturate the performance needed for the kind of casual questions typically asked there. For the harder questions, o1 (not even o1-pro) still appears to be tied for 1st place with several other models... which is yet another indication of just how saturated that benchmark is.

layer8 2y ago
“The impression overall I got here is that this is somewhere around o1-pro capability”. “Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month)”.
- coder543 2y ago
  The comment I was replying to had replied to an lmarena benchmark link. Perhaps you think that person should have replied to someone else? And, if you want to finish the quote, Karpathy's opinion on this is subjective. He admits it isn't a "real" evaluation. "[...] though of course we need actual, real evaluations to look at." His own tests are better than nothing, but hardly definitive.
  - layer8 2y ago
    I understood numpad0 to continue the comparison to o1-pro, after sigmoid10 expressed the opinion that the comparison is warranted.
    - coder543 2y ago
      Yes, numpad0 did... but I was pointing out that this choice was illogical. The lmarena results they were replying to only supported a comparison against o1, since o1 effectively matches Grok 3 on the benchmark being replied to (with o1-pro nowhere to be found), and then they immediately leapt into a bunch of weird value-proposition math. As I said, perhaps you think they should have replied to someone else? Replying to an lmarena benchmark indicates that numpad0 was using that benchmark as part of the justification of their math. I also pointed out the limitations of lmarena as a benchmark for frontier models. I don't think anyone is arguing that ChatGPT Pro is a good value unless you absolutely need to bypass the rate limits all the time, and I cannot find a single indication that Premium+ has unlimited access to Grok 3. If Premium+ doesn't have unlimited rate limits, then it's definitely not comparable to ChatGPT Pro, and other than one subjective comment by Karpathy, we have no benchmarks that indicate that Grok 3 might be as good as o1-pro. You already get 99% of the value with just ChatGPT Plus compared to ChatGPT Pro for half the price of Premium+. numpad0 was effectively making a strawman argument by ignoring ChatGPT Plus here... it is very easy for anyone to beat up a strawman, so I am here to point out a bad argument when I see one.

srid 2y ago

Where do you see that Premium+ is $40 per month? The official source says "Starts at $22/month or $229/year on web", https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium This is pretty much what I paid a couple of months ago, as a Canadian.

nickthegreek 2y ago
They just announced a price increased today. The link you posted has this info in a blue box at the top. Also visible here: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-bycountry https://help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-bycountry
- srid 2y ago
  Interesting. In that table, I see $40 for US users. Yet the price remains $30 for Canadian users, despite their low dollar value.
  - AlchemistCamp 2y ago
    And it’s only £17 in the UK or €21 in the EU.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

colechristensen 2y ago

>Considering that OpenAI subscription is $200 per month This plan is 75 days old. I didn't know it existed until last week. OpenAI is starting to try to get a little more realistic revenue in, Grok is acquiring customers.