You're right about them not wanting to give away requests for free, but in fact they don't rely on OpenAI directly - thanks to the agreement Microsoft has with

You're right about them not wanting to give away requests for free, but in fact they don't rely on OpenAI directly - thanks to the agreement Microsoft has with OpenAI they get model weights for all OpenAI models before OpenAI "achieves AGI", and Microsoft hosts all of these on their own Azure cloud [1]. Oh, and as a counterpoint, o3 mini is completely free and relatively unlimited (I don't know, probably there are actual usage limits) in Microsoft Copilot in chat. See the original announcement [2] and in the tweet [3] they mention that they "updated it" to o3 mini (high) [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/overview https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/o... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/2025/02/25/announcing-free-unlimited-access-to-think-deeper-and-voice/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/2025/... [3] https://x.com/yusuf_i_mehdi/status/1897783236354515420 https://x.com/yusuf_i_mehdi/status/1897783236354515420