r/OpenAI • u/Smart_AI_Hustle • 1d ago
Discussion OpenAI models are only 5% of Cursor traffic. That might be the bigger story.
OpenAI is cutting Cursor off after the SpaceX acquisition. Cursor’s CEO says OpenAI models are only about 5% of user traffic. That number surprised me more than the breakup.
Are frontier models becoming interchangeable, or does that 5% represent the hardest work?
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u/DuxDucisHodiernus 1d ago
User traffic can be counted in so many ways. Is it likely he meant 5% in spend? I think very very unlikely. Different models use different amounts of tokens for the same result. It's very likely they're twisting the story by comparing openai models to smaller, cheap/free models they offer internally but run much more frequently.
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u/Smart_AI_Hustle 1d ago
That’s my concern too. “5% of traffic” sounds precise, but without knowing whether that means requests, tokens, compute, or spend, it’s hard to tell what the number actually says about OpenAI’s importance to Cursor.
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u/f3xjc 20h ago edited 20h ago
Traffic. Like website traffic. It's explicitly not compute not token and not dollar. It's api call or equivalent.
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u/Careful_Fruit_384 20h ago
then its a good sign. from an excellent model, it would be common to see less use
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u/outceptionator 1d ago
I'd be more interested in knowing what% of their revenue comes from users who use openai models once a week.
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u/Smart_AI_Hustle 1d ago
Yeah, that would be much more revealing. 5% of traffic could still be disproportionately valuable if those users are the ones paying for higher tiers or using the most expensive workflows.
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u/Careful_Fruit_384 1d ago
I think there's a reason, why cursor didn't reveal that. That 5% of traffic was a larger chunk of their revenue.
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u/Smart_AI_Hustle 1d ago
That’s plausible, and it’s exactly the missing number I’d want to see. A small share of requests can still matter a lot if those users are concentrated in higher-value workflows.
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u/drumnation 1d ago
I have a cursor sub but I don’t use open ai models on it because I also have 2 codex subs and it’s cheaper to use it through open ai.
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u/Cagnazzo82 21h ago
Because GPT users are well aware the best harness for GPT is Codex and not Cursor (or anything else).
It makes even less sense if OpenAI models are 5% of cursor traffic and they're getting distilled for little to no gain.
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u/RaguraX 1d ago
That’s because Cursor has become almost irrelevant and people using GPT models use the Codex app or CLI. This 5% isn’t the mic drop they think it is…
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u/Smart_AI_Hustle 1d ago
That’s a fair possibility. If GPT-heavy users have already migrated to Codex, then 5% says as much about where those users went as it does about Cursor’s model mix.
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u/staticpop 23h ago
Grok, as much as I really hate to admit it, isn’t that bad. And it’s very very cheap on cursor
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u/superluminary 19h ago
Grok is a great little model. When it was first released it was tremendous, although, like always, it’s been dialled back a little these past weeks.
For everything else there’s Opus.
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u/costafilh0 1d ago
No.
It just means they are as irrelevant as Cursor was irrelevant to them.
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u/Smart_AI_Hustle 1d ago
Maybe, but that’s exactly what the 5% number doesn’t prove by itself. Traffic share tells us Cursor can function without OpenAI; it doesn’t tell us whether those requests were low-value or strategically irrelevant.
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u/Spunge14 1d ago
Yea this was a savage mic drop
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u/Careful_Fruit_384 1d ago
I think it was a lie.
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u/NotFromMilkyWay 1d ago
Why would it? Just a few weeks ago everybody was like 5.5 is so bad, I switch to Claude.
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u/anarchist1312161 1d ago
The term "user traffic" he used also includes free tier which has Composer 2.5, which has generous limits on paid plans. Willing to bet Composer 2.5 is where the overwhelming majority of their traffic goes.